Everybody Dance Now!

In my Technology, Self, and Society class, we have been doing experiments with being in class in person and meeting in Second Life. One day, a student was sitting in class but her avatar was dancing in our class space in Second Life. As she stopped her avatar dancing, she muttered, "If I could dance in class, I would!"

I started thinking about this and haven't stopped. Why not dance in class? What would be the differences between dancing in SL and dancing in our classroom? (We are musicians and artists, remember, so this is not as strange to us as it might be to others!) So we have been. Twice now, half the class has been only in SL and the other half in the classroom, with me and one other person in both the virtual and physical class spaces. And we have been dancing! I am going to invite my students to talk about that experience first, and then I will chime in. But in the meantime, consider getting up . . . . putting on some music . . . . and dance!

Machinima!!

Yes, I have not been posting, but look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRI5JCGhafU

What Is Second Life? New machinima by L1

Watch on youtube here.

Burning Life

The blog has suffered with my return to teaching, and some of my attention has been focused over at my Technology, Self, & Society course blog. I have also been pretty busy, with the Burning Life festival. Here is the slurl to the theme camp joyously and wackily built by Maya Paris and myself, Fembot EggBounce & Pangirl Fries.

My part of it is called "From the Frying Pan into the Fire," which sums up my SL experience! Actually, it is about a character I created called Pangirl, who is kind of a golem maybe created by Lucille Ball or Lucy Ricardo.

That is the Pangirl avatar, which my friend Uzzu made for me out of my Pangirl sculpture, so people can wear it and BE Pangirl.

Here is the story:

A moonlit night on the playa in 1959: a tall-red-headed woman with bright blue eyes raced through the desert in her big shiny car. Suddenly, a frying pan glinting in the moonlight on an abandoned campsite caught her eye, even through her tears of fury, and she screeched to a stop, dust obscuring the car's tail fins.

She flicked her cigarette into the ashes, flames jumped. She picked up the pan, and dropped if fast--somehow it was hot! What she didn't see was the little piece of the pan that chipped off, nestled into the flame and the ash, started to change as she walked away.

Thus was Pangirl created, glinting in the playa moonlight. She staggered out of the embers, made her way to a town, then a city. She tried so hard to fit in, to play nicely in the domestic constraints of American culture in which she found herself, but her fire nature, or maybe her iron nature came out, and she could not. She tried to have it all, to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, ever, let him forget he's a man, but instead she grabbed her rolling pin and purse, burned the house down, and lit out for the playa again, back to whence she came. There she stayed alone for a long time, growing ever bigger and harder, until one day a space ship hovered, and the Fembots joined her. She had a lot to tell them.


*****

Inspired in part by finishing my book on media history and I Love Lucy, and in part by my desire for Maya Paris's Fembots to have a friend when they landed on the playa, I created Pangirl. In the late fifties, Lucille Ball and her real-life husband were portraying a happy couple in their hit television show while all hell broke loose behind the scenes. I imagine the gap between reality and illusion, always an intriguing theme, must have been hard to bear. Maybe she even wanted to burn some stuff down.

It made me wonder what kind of golem, a magical Yiddish folklore creature made of clay, might have arisen out of women's experiences of the gaps between how the media portrays their lives and how they experience them, whether they are involved in the kind of large-scale public charade Ball was, or just their own. On the one hand, I think a lot has changed in fifty years, but then I look around at the images of women in Second Life and then I wonder. Maya created her Fembots because she didn't see images of female robots that she could relate to, and perhaps together our installation calls attention to how we choose to image ourselves and others in here. Oh, and out there, too.

---

There is machinima that plays on the television screens at the installation, which is not meant as a standalone piece, but to be seen at the installation. Nevertheless, I will post it here.

The way I made this one is kind of interesting, because I improvised with the Freud chatbot at The Theorists Project (slurl) as well as having some scripted lines that I shot there. I shot some of Poid Mahovlich's fires at two of my favorite beach sims, Monkey Cove and Knowhere, and intercut those with the "session" with Dr. Freud.

What I Learned in Second Life, So Far

SABBATICAL FINAL EXAM

Part One: I learned . . .

I learned how to do a lot of things, including how to make machinima (a slow process, and like any kind of filmmaking, one that is never fully mastered), to build the objects I wanted to build in a virtual world (and how to find the ones I could not build myself), to get to know people in a different way than I had previously, to make my own particular kind of virtual art based on an evolving criteria of what I think is distinctive about virtual art, how to find other like-minded and also incredibly different-minded people, and to amuse myself and others seemingly endlessly. I tried a lot of things as ways of being or thinking through the virtual world, like taking metaphors seriously, or following coincidence and synchronicity to see where it led me, with mixed results. Oh, and I learned how to make a whole array of new social faux pas in the new country of the virtual world, without ever really learning how not to repeat them.

I learned that I really liked meeting the people I had met first in Second Life in the actual world, and that even when there were big differences between their avatars and their physical embodiments, I still enjoyed interacting with them more in the virtual world after meeting them in person. Even when the gender didn’t match up, I could still see or hear the person in the avatar, and “toggle,” my term for moving between the virtual and actual image in my mind’s eye, sometimes so fast as to blur the two. I met some of the people I am closest to in SL in person, but not all of them, and some I have “met” through telepresence on Skype or google video chat, in addition to the phone and voice chat. All these forms of communication, connection, interaction, and ways of knowing are incredibly interesting to me, and I look forward to extending these explorations with my students. I am very curious about interacting with people who I know first in the actual world as avatars; I do some of that, but maybe they are too close to me to be good experiments, or often they are with me in the same room, and we can just talk to each other instead of being together only in the virtual space. I also learned about myself that I do not ever really take the avatar as only an avatar, a virtual presence, but always think of the person on the other side of the computer, and make all kinds of assumptions about them, and sometimes those assumptions are way, way off. Botgirl finally taught me that one.

I also learned something I already knew, but maybe had forgotten a little, and really is the take-home lesson of my sabbatical: that in order to be creative, one has to be open and receptive, even vulnerable, make mistakes, explore and experiment. I could see this most clearly in the inworld art I made, particularly in the installation I did for SL6B, the 6^th birthday celebration of Second Life. I was in way over my head, and luckily have friends who helped me. I was able to learn enough new skills to make something that expressed the ideas and images I imagined, and even imagery I hadn’t quite imagined, but made as I worked on the sculptures, experimenting with shape, movement, color, line, space. As I explored SL, especially going to the places suggested by Bettina Tizzy in her Not Possible in Real Life blog or inworld group notices/notecards, the creativity, innovation, and wild unleashing of the human spirit in Second Life never stopped amazing me or inspiring me. I feel incredibly lucky to have made friends with whom to trade ideas and collaborate, with whom finding our ways in the virtual world as artists, thinkers, designers, and builders is serious play, of the best kind.

Part Two

Here are some conclusions I have reached.

1) Everyone is in Second Life for their own reasons, and there is no point in generalizing. That said, I will! In a way, SL reminds me of the Peace and Justice Center I was involved in when I was a graduate student in Bloomington, Indiana, because people came to it for a lot of different reasons, and often found other ones for staying around. I do think that, as I have suggested with the fourth aspect of virtual subjectivity I formulated, "virtual agency," that so much depends on what a person chooses to do in a virtual world; as one discovers or develops new skills and interests, reasons can change. Because of the highly individualized nature of a virtual world, because virtual subjectivity is so, well, subjective, even as it is intersubjective and we create that virtual sense of self and place in our interactions with others, no one's experience of a virtual world is like another's. I have also seen quite a few people leave or drift away from SL, and that is interesting to think about, too, as I end my research time and wonder how my relationship to the virtual world will change now that it is not my primary focus. Is there a threshold of time spent that makes a difference to one's experience?

2) Although I am no Freudian, I found myself thinking a lot about Freud’s categories of id, ego, and superego, and wondering where the hell the superego is in SL. At one point, in the screwball comedy, that is what the heroine is looking for! Maybe it is the game-like environment, or the relative anonymity, or the intense visual stimulus, but people act in some pretty interesting ways, unencumbered by the internal censors that ruin so much of everyday life/keep civilization intact. At the same time, the “emotional bandwidth” of communication, to use Pathfinder Linden’s supersmart concept, is lower than in face to face communication, whether in the narrower pipeline of text chat or the wider one of voice. It is absolutely true that a great deal of actual world interaction is now computer-mediated, but in a virtual world, that’s all you got, and somehow, when combined with the relative absence of the superego, people’s interactions and actions take on a different flavor altogether.

3) A virtual world can be an extension of the actual world, and I think it will be increasingly so. It used to be that making a telephone call was a big, huge deal, involving stationary machines and an operator. Now we stop talking on the phone because we are walking up to the person we are talking to on our cell phone. The transition feels seamless. I believe that in the future, we will move in and out of virtual worlds like that, seamlessly, and our avatars will be another aspect of who we are. Combine this prediction with the observation noted in #2 above, and the future might be kind of fun!

4) There is an aura in a virtual world, and it is in the object of the avatar. I am working this up in a more detailed way, but that is the conclusion of L1AURA Loire. (Add this to #3 and #2, doing some weird insight math.)

5) There are great possibilities for both music, education, and new ways of being in virtual worlds, and Berklee should get in there!!

And here are some highlights of things I did during the sabbatical:

"Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life" Journal of Virtual Worlds Research [Online], 1 10 Nov 2008 https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/355/265

“The Falling Woman Story,” machinima http://blip.tv/file/1838833

“TOGGLE,” machinima, published on the PBS Frontline Digital Nation website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/participate/ & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRX_bt99xgs

with additional commentary on: http://www.tricksterproductions.com/toggle/

Presentations

“Virtual Art, Virtual Aura.” Presentation for Panel Discussion, Brooklyn Is Watching Best of Year One Festival. Jack the Pelicans Presents Gallery. Brooklyn, NY, July 2009.

“The Future of Virtual Subjectivity.” Inworld presentation/discussion, SL6B, Sixth Birthday Celebration of Second Life, June 2009.

“Boston Is Watching: Virtual Subjectivity.” Presentation, Boston CyberArts Festival, Boston Public Library, April 2009.

"Virtual KinoEye: Mutability, Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life." Paper, Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission, MIT, Cambridge, MA, April 2009.

"Keynote Presentation, "Digital Transformations and Conversions in Art- Web 2.0 and Beyond: Virtual Subjectivity," NMC (New Media Consortium) Symposium on New Media and Learning, March 2009.

Inworld installations:

L1Aura’s EduGolf: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boga/211/45/44

The Future of Virtual Subjectivity, Fiteiro Cultural

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fiteiro%20Cultural/103/55/21

Podcasts for Brooklyn Is Watching: http://brooklyniswatching.com

Professor Loire’s Second Life blog: http://ll2ndlife.blogspot.com/

IN PROGRESS:

Rough cuts of the screwball comedy and a music video

Machinima piece for Journal of Virtual Worlds Research on virtual goods and services

Multimedia essay on virtual subjectivity

Bouncing on my toes in preparation for the Burning Life land grab

Sabbatical Final Exam!

I have been working on my course syllabi for the Fall semester, and looking at the description of the take-home final exam, which explains that it is important to sit down, reflect, and be forced to perform a synthesis of what you have learned, even as you have one foot out the door and you are running around busier than ever (well, it doesn't use that language exactly). It occurs to me that I should have to do such a thing before I rush off into teaching and committees again, put the seat of the pants in the seat of the chair (as my professor Susan Gubar always said was the only way to get work done) and answer the question: What have you learned this year, studying virtual subjectivity on sabbatical in Second Life?

I post this here and now I have to do it.

L1 & Sage Discuss Pieces from the SLon des Refusés

L1Aura Loire & Sage Duncan talk about about some pieces in the fabulous SLon des Refusés, part of the BIW Year One Festival, curated elegantly by Mab MacMoragh, Moncherrie Afterthought, Dekka Raymaker, and Arahan Claveau.

See the SLon show here for an extra extended week, until August 30: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Magoo/128/128/2

We discuss pieces by: Azdel Slade, four Yip, Man Machinaga, and Robin Moore.

Review of several works in SLon des Refuses 2009