PseudorealityPrevails

Surrealized: WWI Poetry Archive as immersive experience

Today I visited the WWI Poetry Digital Archive, in Second LIfe [SLURL].  The archive is hosted at the University of Oxford, but has been repurposed in Second Life with an encampment and trenches, featuring audio files of the poems, vintage photographs, scans of the poet's compositions in handwriting (including cross-outs and revisions), sentinels, and oral history about various aspects of trench warfare.  

Upon arrival you are given the option to be a nurse or a WWI soldier, I picked nurse.  After spending some time with the encampment and several poems, including one by Siegfried Sassoon, I proceeded to the trenches, where the transition from real to surreal, in history accomplished by simply walking or driving a few miles towards disaster, is here enabled by a personal balloon, which allows you an aerial view while the general perspective is explained.  The soundscape is impressive, distant shots and cries grow louder, you can see explosions, and as you land: rats scurry.

I spent a fair amount of time near Wilfred Owens' Dulce et decorum est which, combined with a soldier's reminiscences of his first experience with mustard gas, grounded the horror of the new technologies of death.  As I listened, around me swirled green mist in which words from both reality and poem mixed in a miasma of literalized metaphor.  Which, to many accounts, WWI was.

Entrenched, over the top, no man's land; an enhanced sense of irony, a suspicion of sentimentality, and an overrun of euphemism - in many ways, this conflict wrote the world we live in.  This installation well worth a visit, and just in time for Veteran's Day.

Second Life SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Frideswide/2

Oxford University site: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/

Yoko Ono's painting in light

Yoko Ono has created an installation of light, a skyscraper that is virtual in real life and real in Second Life. Called the Imagine Peace Tower, the grand opening is today in Reykjavik, Iceland (URL), and on this island in SL: Image Peace Tower Island (SLURL).  Opening event approximately 6:30pm EST, Friday, October 9, 2009. Happy Birthday, John.

Me and Mrs. Winds

Well we couldn't get into the Virtual Storytelling interactive venture.  I know, sounds promising!  But we can't tell you what it was, b/c we got trapped in a box.  You know, those invisible boxes with the courier-font duct tape.  Anyway, we decided to go back to Siri's place and hang out. It's all good!

Chillaxin' at the beach house:

 

Ara riding Hattie, Siri on porch:

Siri's hobo tag!

In the sekret skybox library:

Cave Animals

I visited the caves at Virtual Lascaux.  The textures are gorgeous and the cave is interestingly maze-like, using torches to hint at the direction.  It represented the chaotic, overlapping nature of the drawings well, but one thing it left out was the material imperfection. 

In the real caves, the artists used the imperfections in the rock surfaces to hint at the bodies of animals - a bulge might become a shoulder, a gash might be an antler, or even color variations might be used to suggest modeling and features.

In the virtual caves, it was not that I thought the virtual rocks were not bumpy enough.  It was more a question of what would imperfection be in this environment, and how could an artist use it to better effect?  I suspect the answer probably has nothing to do with virtual rocks.