PseudorealityPrevails

AC/DC/Excel

AC/DC have created a music video completely using Excel spreadsheets. And it's actually good! Must be seen to be appreciated: link to video on YouTube

Avatar Romance

My iGoogle movie is up!  Called Avatar Romance, it's about a virtual triangle involving two avatars and Facebook.  It's a dynamic theme on iGoogle, the banner image changes every hour to the next episode in the story; there are 12 episodes.

To add the theme, click here.

It was created as a new media piece, and ideally should be viewed on iGoogle over the course of a day.  But it's also a comic strip for a less tech-intensive version. The comic is here: www.peggynelson.com/avatar.

The Man in the Mirror Suit

I'm going to be casting a critical eye on the current state of machinema for this fall's OtherZine.  My initial motivation was to evaluate the process, it's DIY filmmaking taken to the next level.  Building a world is necessarily more open-ended, and involves more in terms of people and culture, than just building a set. 

As of a few months ago, the machinema I'd seen was only adequate or conventional, in terms of line quality (which has to be simple because complex line patterns would not stream well), shot composition, and of course narrative.  Short films everywhere, especially animations, are susceptible to the one-liner syndrome, where there is a big build-up to the single, often gothic, point.  Or on the other extreme, they are pretty and ambient with no narrative arc whatever.  I have no huge reason to suspect this has changed, although I'll be looking.

But what interests me more is the process.  Building a world for itself, not for the express purpose of making a film, and then eventually making a film within that world, seems to be not only about individual or group expression, but about this strange impulse we have to copy everything.  Our art so often involves duplicating aspects of our world: novels, realistic painting, photography, film, virtual worlds, video games.   But what if we could extend it even further, what then?  What if we could duplicate the world so perfectly that experiencing the latest artwork felt like - actually being there?  Would this be worth it?  Because, you know, we are already actually there.  What is the impulse for these ever more elaborate copies?  What do we get out of them? And where might they be leading?

Ghost in the Machinema

Two recent entries of note, both Shakespeare.  One, scenes from Act I of Hamlet, with photomapped avatars in the Second Life Globe Theater.  This performance was supposed to be experienced in-world, which I missed, but will catch the next one when they're finished voice-casting and animating Act II.  The machinema was a screen capture uploaded to the companion website, edited of course with the requisite film tropes of cuts, pans, and zooms, although it could have used more of those.  Most of it was left straight on, as if the novelty of avatars acting was enough to watch through the very solid and very rectilinear fourth wall. 

The Uncanny Valley was much in evidence with these extended close-ups.   The eyes - much too big for the faces, almost to the sides of the head like killdeer, probably in an attempt to recognize the eyetracking fact that we look at anthropomorphic images the most, and within them faces, and within faces, eyes.  But these eyes did not move or emote, so the effect was oddly taxidermic.  And the movement - the other elements were completely stationary while the mouths moved.  The hair, other body muscles, fabric, and other elements - like the mouths were poking through a hole in one of those panels at the carnival with a painted strongman and bearded lady on the other side of the wood.

The other entry was a montage of scenes from Macbeth on a screen in a banquet hall hosted by NYU.  I think this was a straight-to-machinema production, but not sure.  In any event, in this production in-world editing tools were not only used, but exposed to the video capture, so that the HUDs and arrows and other interface elements were seen in use by the Macbeth characters to manipulate objects and their environment in general (turning it upside down, other transformations).  As if Peter Sellars was forcing Siegfried and Brunnhilde to work the ropes and pulleys of stagecraft while belting out arias, slaying dragons and falling in love.  Exposing the mechanics at the same time as performing the performance alternately undermines and enhances the suspension of disbelief, setting up an oscillation of projection states in the viewer, which they need to navigate as best they can.  This Brechtian focus is, I think, effective, as it gives viewers something else to look at and do and think about other than the fact that the avatars look almost realistic, but not quite.

The Being and Becoming of Second Life

Second Life is not what it might become, not yet.  Right now, like all new media and new forms, it is drawing heavily from previous forms, some very recent, some much older.  It draws from the chat rooms and fan communities of the early Net.  It draws from film, and video games.  It draws from the pre-Enclosure experience of "the commons," where a natural park-like area was left in the middle of the town or village, owned by no one, maintained in common, where everyone could graze their cattle, wander about, and meet others in unscripted and spontaneous ways.

But SL is not yet greater than the sum of these parts; right now it is actually smaller. Its art and social forms are derivative, as is natural at first.  It is a less compelling film experience than film, a less compelling game experience than the current sophisticated video games, a less compelling social experience than hanging out in RL, less compelling than the actual experience of Burning Man (the communal creative chaos of which inspired it), and, even less compelling than text-based chatting like IM, which contains pauses and non-visual components that allow for composition and narrative shaping to a much greater degree than 3D meetings, which offer "too much information" to make good stories.

Where virtual worlds might be going is not yet determined, but it will not be determined by interaction on their most superficial top level, inhabiting the world as an avatar, nor on their next level down, building and scripting using the in-world tools.

The new meaning of virtual worlds will be determined by something much deeper, by a creativity constructed by and embedded in its application code and hardware composition.  The visual and social forms that will appear on top of those layers will have the potential to be new in interesting ways, because the theory and structure that underlie them will be new in interesting ways.  At that point the graphics may still be simplistic and the interaction laggy, and the form may take awhile to catch up and elaborate on the structure, but it will be going in a new direction and inhabiting a new conceptual landscape, and so will we.  That is the potential of this new media, and that is what will be worth experiencing.