Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0810211900320.5855@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Second Life Installation Phenomenology (please post)
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:01:15 -0400 (EDT)
Second Life Installation Phenomenology The Second Life show at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 continues to change; since it's complex and interactive, it makes sense for you to visit it. The images and videos I put up almost daily can present one or another new (static or dynamic) topographic feature, but only in an isolated and framed configuration; one doesn't get a sense of the roil or negotiated pathways of the spaces which are always under construction. At one point symmetries dominated, as well as moire patterns related to early cinema; at another, flat black areas created a problematic of depth that remained unresolved. At times a machine-structure (gears, wheels, cams) appeared out of partial assemblages; at best, these were metaphors, doing nothing in the virtual or the real. In the exhibition, objects tend to ignore one another unless given physical weight; few objects have that, since those that do tend to tumble out of the exhibition, 'out of world,' ending up in lost-and-found inventories. Now the symmetries have corroded by 'foreign' non-repetitive textures that indicate movement trajectories (it's easy to follow the movement of a flat black square for example) and block moire effects. It's as if the symmet- rical properties of objects and assemblages are falling apart. Almost every object moves vertically; some are aligned, some are harmonic, some appear independent. It's easy to fall vertically at this point, from sky objects to the exhibition hall surface, and from ground surface to the underwater environment beneath the hall. Teleport labels may or may not take you somewhere; you might end up where you started or even more en- tangled on a different level. The environment as a whole appears as shaky as the economy, and there's a parallel with bandwidth and prim quantity issues. I build and don't know who sees what; I find my own computers locked up on occasion. At this point I want to start radically modifying the installation; again I urge you to visit while it retains a semblance of its current state. As objects are given weight, they'll fall and reorganize the surface; they may well pile up without falling out of world, at least temporarily; they may provide new surfaces and cavities to negotiate. It's almost impossible to document the dynamics of this; things fall too fast for cameras to follow. When I sleep at night, spaces open up; I'm torn and brought close to death in nightmare after nightmare, some of which are set in apparently real environments that slough off into the virtual. A train begins here, the tracks connect there, leading to dilapidated and jumbled architecture. Or arousal which disseminates in the midst of prims sharp enough to slice through site and sound. From Dhananjaya: "'Rasa is that which is made enjoyable by the behaviour of the characters that gives enjoyment because the object of the drama is not to enjoy the behaviour of the characters since that belongs to the past.' (Otherwise, says the author, the specta- tor might as well himself fall into love with the heroine." And again: "The spectators enjoy at the site of characters like Arjuna and others what they themselves feel inside just as children enjoy, playing with clay elephants, the fervour that is within themselves." (From Adya Rangacharya, Drama in Sanskrit Literature, Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1968.) Enjoyment is not enjoyment in the sense of pleasure, but inhabiting a diegetic cons- tructed through a series of coded interfaces. In the Second Life instal- lation, the strange remains strange, but one learns to negotiate complex trajectories among levels, prims, sounds, spaces, worlds; soon rasa (flavor among other meanings) emerges as one's eyes are one's avatar's eyes and one becomes comfortable with hir body. There are no identifica- tions in the Second Life show, only corners, plateaus, and circulations that permit discourse, that one might conceivably inhabit. All of these spaces, like capital, are rickety; Second Life is governed by exchange, not use value and things constantly threaten to fall apart. The only certainty is an absence of breakage and death; what is attached for the most part remains attached, no matter how far it falls, no matter how sharp and difficult, impossible, the landing. Death in Second Life is never death, but literally a passing-away; an avatar disappears more or less permanently and one might assume that something has occurred in real life parallel to this - illness or death or disinterest or bankruptcy - one never knows. The spaces in exhibition are malleable, not liquid, not liquid architec- ture so much as capable of distortion and linkage at a distance: things may well move in synchronization, even over a fairly large distance, as if Bell's theorem suddenly appeared in the large and abstract. When the space - the normative space of Second Life - fills up, it transforms the avatar within it. Boundaries are no longer fixed or even apparent. I imagine a Kristevan chora, part-objects and pre-linguistics driving the show, as if the birth of language were imminent and immanent. The birth never occurs; the chora remains at the state of the laugh or scream or orgasm or even free-fall. One is stripped down, and the images, such as they are, textur- ing the prims are often sexualized - penises, breasts, rings, faces in pain or ecstasy, posed mannequins of fossilized desire and dance. One senses an alien choreography behind everything, the world inverted in Plato's cave from virtual shadows to the watching and participating body on the damp floor. The alien is ourselves of course and the aliens are our self, chora to chiasm. Rasa is the taste of this, the taste or flavor of the enlightened audience which means the knowledgeable audience, who have already migrated past the strangeness of the exhibition towards an inhering organic that passes for flesh and tissue. I think of the space as avatar body, as avatar hirself, as chora, as womb, as phallus, as adverb. I think of rocketing through the space as the dissipation of vectors without origin and destination; one lands in the midst of circulation and circles hirself. But all of this takes time on the part of the visitor, as does the reading of signs, even the writing and writhing of signs in sky and water and within the earth itself. One has to enter the space, ascend and descend, allow oneself to be caught up in the multiplicity of worlds, even the smoke of catastrophe and catastrophic industrialization, the destruction of families, speech and phenomena which are always already in a state of withdrawal. The world comes and goes without saying; we pass away as it passes by, and even a minute after our death we no longer hear a voice, see the sun, read the next day's market.