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/

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?

The Red Men

In The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua, a British company that creates custom avatars for the wealthy decides to create a custom town to study perfect marketing opportunities.  By interviewing the citizens of a real town in depth, and uploading all the data into the virtual world, the company hopes to virtualize not only the people themselves, but their behavior in large, complex and fluid social groupings.  Once the virtual town goes online, metrics gathered there will so closely mirror consumer interactions in the real world, that the data generated can be used to better sell: widgets, ideas, subscriptions, statis.

In the book, the project collapses in part due to the difficulty of interviewing and surveilling the citizens; it is too labor- and psychologically-intensive.  In RL, of course, we now do this better.  We outsource the data gathering to the objects of study themselves, and have them upload all their information themselves.  Facebook, Threadless, Second Life - all assign the content generation to the end user, which saves time and increases accuracy.  Plus, they want to: it's fun to make yourself Almost Famous for 15 minutes.

This is not necessarily a dystopian tendency, although it could be.  Outsourcing to the end user can be a bloodless way of describing a democratic approach to creativity, enabled by technology.  But it can also lead to a creative cul de sac where every action and hope is measured and met by someone selling you something somewhere.

Coke or Pepsi?

The bulk of this conference focuses on pre-built and pre-scripted virtual worlds.  The illusion of choice is presented by quantity; here are 19 different shirts for your avatar, here is a game where you collect virtual pets, here is a puzzle with 11 branching pathways. 

But not only is customization not true creativity, it actively diverts it, in the same way that junk food fills you up but provides no nutrients.  A type of choice is involved in selecting skin tones and hairstyles from a menu, but as a closed system it is not creative at all.  It is also perfect for the commodification of those impulses, as finite systems have closely defined elements that can be (and are) packaged and sold.  This environment of faux choice is further compounded by the fact that we live in a culture of commodification anyway, from objects to ideas, and so we're familiar with that context and easily fall into the usual behavior patterns. 

This qualitative difference, between customization and creativity, is where the tech can really be used for good or evil.

Inventory Folder

Contents of apartment:

Air mattress
Card table
Computer
Self

At some point I will have to take everything out of Inventory (in RL, my storage unit) and rez it in-world.  As soon as I decide on a world.  Which hasn't happened yet.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi? Ou vive le monde?

Philip Rosedale has announced that he's stepping down as CEO of Linden Labs, although staying on as Chairman of the Board. Wagner James Au of New World Notes has described it as the end of the "Burning Man" era for Second Life. Linden Labs is at a crossroads where growth and stability might be more important than creativity to the continuation of the Second Life experiment.

BMan and SL are both places where you, with others, create your own reality. And although there are certainly people who could thrive in (either) environment who have not been to either "there" yet, it is also the case that not everyone wants to do that.

I think it makes perfect sense to hand the LL reins over if the race is now about growth and stability and other business tropes - let someone who is excited about those goals achieve them. But SL is not going to continue becoming a new Possibility Space by focusing on increasing subscribers and profit margins. I am glad that PR is going to stay on in some capacity, but hopefully he, or someone, won't lose sight of the creative kernel at the center of the expanding multiverse from which the new and the different emerge.

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.