PATHS TO WISDOM: Reflections on Why I Chose Interactive Video for a Recent Project

Paths to Wisdom is an interactive video exploration that uses some of the features available in YouTube for navigation.  For the past few years, especially in refining and teaching my course Digital Narrative Theory and Practice, I've been experimenting with making different kinds of interactive media--interactive fiction, interactive comics, and slowly delving into Mozilla's Popcorn for interactive video--but YouTube afforded the quickest way to connect the different video segments together for the UWA MachinimUWA V: Seek Wisdom Challenge.

I had a version of the movie that was the first segment, "Paths to Wisdom" and the "last," "Conclusions?" but I had always had the idea of making this entry interactive because I so firmly believe that the path to wisdom is a participatory, interactive one.  That is the bedrock of my educational philosophy as a teacher and a life-long learner.  So I wanted the experience of my "Seek Wisdom" entry to mirror the ideas I expressed explicitly and implicitly in the video.  Most of the footage is of movement through the art installations I chose as companions to the concepts, with repeated motifs of paths in those installations and Hannah Hannya's terrific Ear Labyrinth.  Looking for and filming different paths made me realize once again the spectacular diversity of aesthetic and technical approaches in virtual art.  Having only a laptop and not my usual more powerful desktop machine made me more aware of the limitations faced by my students when they film machinima for assignments, an example of wisdom gained from the experience of being on a path different from the usual, and not completely of one's own choosing.

The labyrinth is the central visual and thematic metaphor.  A labyrinth that people walk for meditation and contemplation is not a maze, where one is lost, or a puzzle that you try to solve.  In a labyrinth, you can see where the end is, but that is not the point.  The point is the winding journey, the reversals, taking the time, taking the indirect route to the center.  My experience in Second Life and virtual worlds really coalesced when I participated in a research study by the Massachusetts General Hospital Neurology Department to see whether people could be taught the Relaxation Response in a virtual environment.  (They conclude yes, and I agree.)   I no longer have access to the 3D virtual labyrinth that was built there, so I searched for other labyrinths and looked around until I found Hannah Hannya's Ear Labyrinth.


The idea for Paths to Wisdom is that you watch the first part (below) and then use the links to click on your next path in any order you want.  At one point I had a branching structure, where you could only choose between two options, but then I opened it up to all the options in keeping with the overall concept of participation and agency.   At the very least, I hope people will watch the first, perhaps one more, and then "Conclusions?"

Click on the links at the end to choose your path -- The Past, Nature, Science, The Future, The Oracle, Art -- in any order you want.  You may want to end with "Conclusions?"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVhZddnjwz8 -- or not! 

Can't see use the interactive features because you are on a mobile device?  Use the playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72E8F830FF1D9BC1

The paths to wisdom intersect and circle back; it is the exploration, the journey that is most important, and this interactive video piece uses YouTube annotations to offer you choices about which path to explore next.  Form and interface reflect and shape the paths to wisdom.

Written, filmed in Second Life, narrated, and edited by Lori Landay.  Music by Moby.  Featuring selected art at LEA (Linden Endowment for the Arts) regions and Treasures of University of Western Australia in Second Life.  Full credits at the end of the last video, "Conclusions?"

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Is Paths of Wisdom interactive?

When “interactive” refers to human-machine communication, we get into the idea of a communication loop.  Interactive architecture systems designer Usman Haque explains, “At its fundamental, interaction concerns transactions of information between two systems (for example between two people, between two machines, or between a person and a machine). The key however is that these transactions should be in some sense circular otherwise it is merely ‘reaction’ “ ("Architecture, Interaction, Systems," by Usman Haque, 2006 http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/ArchInterSys.pdf , p. 1).  However, and perhaps more applicable to art experiences, motion-tracking and biosensor performer and researcher Robert Wechsler elucidates, “we must think of interaction primarily as a psychological phenomenon, rather than a technical one” ("Artistic Considerations in the Use of Motion Tracking with Live Performers: A Practical Guide," in Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity, Susan Broadhurst & Josephine Machon, eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p.62), and adds, “interaction in a feeling you an achieve in a performance setting.  It relates to spontaneity, openness and communication” (64). 

New media theorist Lev Manovich distinguishes between "open" and "closed" interactivity:

In the case of branching interactivity, the user plays an active role in determining the order in which the already generated elements are accessed. This is the simplest kind of interactivity; more complex kinds are also possible where both the elements and the structure of the whole object are either modified or generated on the fly in response to user's interaction with a program. We can refer to such implementations as open interactivity to distinguish them from the closed interactivity which uses fixed elements arranged in a fixed branching structure. Open interactivity can be implemented using a variety of approaches, including procedural and object- oriented computer programming, AI, AL, and neural networks. (Manovich, The Language of New Media, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, p. 59).

Although there is not the loop that Haque describes (the videos do not change based on the order, or your input), Paths to Wisdom might fulfill Wechsler's emphasis on interaction as a feeling, and definitely is an example of branching interactivity, a curiously and deliberately open instance of "closed" interactivity.  Either way, it employs "interactive video" how it is used and understood right now, with popularly available tools like YouTube.  I am working on a more extensive interactive video project, part of which is web-based and uses a branching structure with changing outcomes depending on your choices.  The issue with interactive video, like interactive fiction, is creating a satisfying narrative experience that is also interactive, without disrupting the pleasures of reading and watching with unnecessary doing, or rather by augmenting the pleasures of reading or watching with meaningful choices that do not burst the "suspension of disbelief" but create an engagement of belief and co-creation in the text.   As interactive media develops with more sophisticated circular information transactions and, simultaneously, easier interfaces through which to experience the loops, or the feeling of a loop, it should be interesting to see what kind of content suits the emerging forms.  The only thing I know for sure is that the path to discovering it will be winding, challenging, and fun.

LEA 1-4 Art Shows Open Mid-October

The Linden Endowment of the Arts is an official Linden Community Partnership program whose purpose is to help new artists, cultivate art in SL, and foster creativity, innovation, and collaboration within the art community.

The Linden Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce four art shows opening in mid-October:

On LEA1: The 2011 Survey of Hyperformalists in Second Life, curated by DC Spensley AKA DanCoyote

Opening October 15

The Museum of Hyperformalism, founded in 2006, to promote the unique genre of metasculptural abstraction in simulated space.

featuring the metasculptural artwork of:

Josina Burgess

Oberon Onmura

Ray FX

Sabine Stonebender

Selavy Oh

Suzanne Graves

Velasquez Bonetto

On LEA2: The Path, curated by Bryn Oh

Opening October 14

Based off the Surrealists exquisite corpse concept, each artist was randomly given a scene to compose. A narrative is begun by artist one who then passes it on to artist number two. Artist two adds to the story and passes it on to three and so on until the narrative reaches its conclusion at artist number eight.

Artists in order by scene

1-Bryn Oh

2-Colin Fizgig

3-Marcus Inkpen

4-Desdemona Enfield / Douglas Story

5-Maya Paris

6-Claudia222 Jewell

7-Scottius Polke

8-Rose Borchovski

On LEA3: FAST ART: Competitive Build Improvisation In The Virtual World, hosted by Solo Mornington

A series of speed build competitions, until the sim is full.

Twice-weekly events, with a number of options for artists in all time zones.

On LEA4: Interact!, curated by L1Aura Loire/Lori Landay

Opening October 15

Virtual art can invite, or even insist, that you interact with it. The artists in this exhibition cleverly and creatively make art out of interactions between data, objects, actions, and people within and beyond the virtual world in a stunning array of installations and experiences that stretch the possibilities of virtual art. Expect the unexpected, and click whenever you can. #interactLEA

Installations by:

Eupalinos Ugajin

Glyph Graves

Lorin Tone

Maya Paris

Misprint Thursday

PinkPink Sorbet

Selavy Oh

Interactive environment for audience participation & interactive mixed reality cross-cultural performances by: Butler2 Evelyn/Senses Places

With: Mesh by Sage Duncan, Machinima Mutoscope Viewers by FreeWee Ling, Twitter Garden by Frans Charming, Inner Tube Ride of Your Life by UzzU Artful

All four art shows will run for three months.

Also, on LEA6, ongoing, monthly, the LEA Full Sim Art Series

and the first Wednesday of each month, 7 pm SLT, at the LEA Theater, the Month of Machinima Screening Event, with conversations about the films with L1Aura Loire & the filmmakers

Check back here for more information about opening events, schedules for LEA3 speed builds, performances, and more . . . including some big news from the LEA.

Visualizing Theorem: New Virtual Art Exhibit (with Catalog Foreward by me!)

Visualizing Theorem is a group show in Second Life that is international, transdisciplinary, multi-media, and interartistic, drawing on tracks from a music album, Theorem, (itself inspired by math and science concepts), as a starting point for each virtual art piece. I was pleased to write the foreword to the catalog for this excellent exhibit.

Visualizing Theorem Catalog--and the catalog itself is a cool object here on the web. There is a slider bar across the top after you click to see it bigger that makes the text larger or smaller.

Open publication - Free publishing - More theorem

And here is the SLurl to the virtual location of the exhibit in Second Life.

L1 in CYBERFEST 2010: Domestic Technology or, Never Alone

CYBERFEST 2010 is happening now in St. Petersburg, Russia (see) and also in Second Life at the Cyland sim (slurl). My installation, which plays a new machinima and lets you reenact moments from it for yourself, is called: Domestic Technology or, Never Alone.

When I first heard the concept for Cyberfest 2010, "Housebugs," exploring technology in everyday domestic life, I knew I had to take a comic angle. The tools of domestic technology, like vacuums are great, but what I could really use...

All the promises of technology for improving domesticity, like so many of the images of domesticity in culture, are idealized fantasies very distant from my everyday experience. In a virtual world like Second Life, representations of homes and homelife are even more idealized than on film or television, and the necessarily messier reality beyond the computer screen conflicts with the idealized images on it.

Domestic Technology or, Never Alone: Cyberfest 2010, Housebugs from Lori Landay on Vimeo.

Click on Vimeo link above to watch larger movie.

Virtual KinoEye

My "Working Theory" piece, an essay with machinima and images, that pulls together much of my sabbatical work on Second Life, is now published in the Journal of e-Media Studies!! See

Virtual KinoEye: Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life

http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/340

First Machinima Footage Posting!

Here is the a very rough cut of the footage I shot yesterday with Maya and Lynsey at the Bicylorama in Woodstock.  The sound is not done, it is not really edited down to a real piece, which will be much shorter, but you can get the idea of what I am up to making machinima.  There is a lot of footage of the bikes and the bicylorama in the middle, but some interesting interview takes with Maya towards the end.  There will be a voice over throughout, maybe with Maya's narration, too, from a voice interview.  Maya and I will also reshoot the interview, and maybe have a voice interview with Lynsey, too, to replace what we shot at our happy accident meeting late at night here/early in the morning there that I put at the end of this cut.

It has been a real learning experience getting this far with this piece.  First time working with others, which is much more fun and rewarding than with my alt avatars, but also adds an element of pressure.  Of course the lovely ladies in the video and who I am now lucky enough to have in my second life are nothing but supportive, encouraging, and well-humored no matter what time of day or night it might be in Holland or England, but I am relieved to actually have something to show them (and others) that gets this project out of my head and glimpsed by someone else.  

I am also desperate to turn off L1Aura's speech gestures, which are no longer active, but persist.  In a year when I have no students and I am not lecturing at all, my avatar is in constant lecture mode as soon as she goes into voice chat, gesturing and opening her eyes, leaning back self-importantly, blathering on and on, interminably.  After a whole day spent filming her, trying to get her to look in the right direction, staring into her face with her flip-flapping mouth, I wish she would shut the f*** up.  How's that for a person-avatar relationship?  What's the Proteus effect there?

So here are some of my thoughts: Virtual subjectivity is even more individualized, more, well, subjective, than in real life, I think, because of how differently each one of can be seeing the same thing physically with the camera feature, how no one knows what any avatar is really doing or looking at.  Add in the lag, and we are not really experiencing the same thing even when we think we are.  I see the difference between my different avatars when they are together, what they see, sometimes what they are wearing, where they are in the space.  We are liberated from so much of the mundane in SL, but we don't really have synchronicity yet.  It is still a "consensual hallucination," as Gibson imagined in Neuromancer so long ago (1984!!!!)   The gap between our own and others' perceptions and experiences is one of the elements of real life that is made literal and visual and played out in Second Life.  OK, enough blathering with only 5 hours sleep  (the really good stuff comes from 4 hours or less).

Been Busy!

OK, I've been away from the blog for way too long, but if you notice the previous post, you will see that I bought a big piece of land in SL adjoining my original parcel, and so of course I have been very busy!  I have been spending a lot of time inworld, immersing myself in the place and experience as if I had travelled someplace for my sabbatical year.  I am living and working there.

Here are some things I have been doing, in no particular order, certainly not of importance:

1) Building an EduGolf Course for students to learn essential skills for being a student in SL

2) Making weird sphere sculptures that as often as not make me crash when I work on them

3) Experimenting with different kinds of video screens

4) Making some wonderful, very talented and creative friends and spending time with them

5) Meeting their friends

6) Making machinima single-handedly

7) Making machinima with others (as of yesterday)

8) Finding that having experiences in a virtual world is absolutely fascinating and constantly.  I am taking the approach that the Australian aborigines do to dreaming: it is another kind of experience that you can have in a different realm, no better or worse than everyday life.  

9) Spending more time changing my virtual clothes than I used to!  It is fun after all.

10) Discovering that I am a terrible driver in SL, but I do it anyway. 

11) Trying to adjust to how much and fast things change inworld--one day your neighbor has a big house, and the next day it is just gone.  The landscape changes, buildings suddenly appear, land changes hands, people look different in the blink of an eye, and so much that you can count on in RL is mutable and unstable.  It is beautiful and poignant and unsettling.  I am trying to flow with it.

12) Slowly, cautiously doing some scripting

13) Put a camera script in a diamond earring stud and wore it around--fun and fashionable!  I asked my artist friend Maya for help and just before she told me (in IM) to make a box for it before I started to edit the earring because otherwise I would lose it on the ground, I lost it on the ground!  Fortunately it is a huge diamond stud.  Every one should be so lucky; such diamonds really are a girl's best friend.

14) Gave L1 a makeover--new hairstyle, including a fair approximation of my silver streak.

15) Got a tour of the fantastic Virtual Harlem, where Bryan Mnemonic is breaking new ground teaching his students about the Harlem Renaissance and other topics in American literature and culture.

16) Been putting buildings in the sky, thanks to my neighbor's influence in showing me how nice things can be up there.  So I have a SkyOffice for students to come to, with a big video screen (where I have been filming lectures, too), an Art Deco house that can become a hangout for the increasing party of real world friends interested in SL but who don't know where to go, and another building that I think will be a gallery space.

17) Had a fantastic conversation with two talented folks from Mass Art who are doing fascinating things in SL--my teacher from the summer, the ever-fabulous Nettrice, and Vu Sosa, who is a professor at MassArt and getting ready to teach some parts of her classes in SL.  Her island, 4dmap, is an ongoing installation and an inspiration.  So I actually did what I wrote about in the description of my land when I first bought it: used it as place for conversation about the possibilities virtual worlds and digital media.

18) Getting ready to interview Ray Kurzweil on the big stage at the Berklee Performance Center as part of the annual BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching) conference next week.  He is interested in virtual worlds, so I hope that is a topic that we can explore.

19) Thinking about how the camera feature creates a totally new kind of subjectivity.

20) Playing with a pet wolf.

21) Celebrating New Year's Eve.

See, that is a lot.  And there is even more.

Let the Relaxation Begin

Last night was the first class of the MGH Study on the teaching the relaxation response in Second Life.  The island is a beautiful space, with lovely sound and particularly shimmery water.  I still am blown away by how much I am affected by the virtual nature in SL, especially the water, and this space was no exception.

The class itself had some interesting aspects.  Like the "Creativity in Second Life" course I took in the summer through MassArt, we sat on cushions for a lecture/presentation part and then moved around for other parts of the class.  It was less active because unlike the other class, we are not building or scripting.  There were nine of us; two avatars I know and the others I don't.   I resisted the temptation to make an in-joke on the text chat, which definitely operated as a "back channel."  YES, I just criticized that precise behavior in the CCK08 Elluminate session a couple of posts ago, but last night I participated in that discourse.  Maybe in a smaller group it is different, or if there are only short comments that in a real life discussion might be uttered.  Still, it is a bit like passing notes in class.  Which is fun!  Everyone can see them, though.  IMs are the virtual passed-notes.

Instead of using the voice chat, the tech wizards have it set up through Skype, which is pretty interesting.  Some people were new to it and didn't have their mics muted and that drove me crazy.  A good case for using the text chat for group feedback is so we can all keep our mics off until we really have something more to say than a couple of words.  The Skype conference call also disconnected a few times, and then the text chat was the only way we had to communicate.  There was a blissful, peaceful silence when the Skype quit, sudden and surprisingly isolating.

Part of the commitment to the study is agreeing to do a meditation at least once a day and do 20 mini-relaxations.  I don't know if I got 20 in today, but I did do some, and listened to the CD from the Mind/Body Center they gave us for the 20-minute mind-focusing meditation.  I am supposed to set up a place where I can do these meditations, but the only place I know I can be uninterrupted is in my office at home, which is cluttered with the detritus from the I Love Lucy book manuscript I finished yesterday (!) and all manner of other positively stress-inducing sights.  Me sitting in my chair at my desk looks nothing like L1Aura Loire on her cushion on the Connected Health Island.

I have some other comments about the teacher's avatar (mist!), but I am going to hold them until I have a picture of it, which I hope to take on Thursday.

Connectivism, meanwhile, suffered a little this week.  I tried to attend the Elluminate session, but I got frustrated after I lost the connection for the third time.  I've been doing the reading and will try to catch up with the Friday discussion session, which is on a tool I'm unfamiliar with, UStream.  

Elluminating CCK08

Just had the first Elluminate session.  I had anticipated/feared hundreds or even more than 1000 people, but there were around 70 in the "room."  A good interface, with some nice features, like a raised hand, yes or no vote (green check or, as people commented, a pretty hostile looking thick red x), a microphone you could "grab" (click on, which I eventually did right at the end, because for whatever reason, I am shy about the voice chat), and a white board.

The conversation was free-wheeling, nicely moderated, and interesting, if a little on the slack side.  A good first day.  One of the things I notice is that there are many distractions.  First of all, there is my computer, with incoming e-mail, browser windows peeking out and tempting me, and everything else there.  Next, there is the whiteboard that people were doodling on.  But the best/worst is what someone rightly called a "back channel," the text chat.  In part because there were so many people, the text went by fast, too fast to keep up.  In the "Creativity in SL" course, which did have fewer people, the text chat and voice chat were complementary, and at times they functioned that way today, but mostly it was a separate and sometimes undercutting, snarky thread.  Even reminded me a couple of times of the students you  have to hush at the back of the class.   I'm not sure I like the fragmented experience of the Elluminate space, although I definitely see the possibilities.

CCK08: Week 1

CCK08, the massively multi-participant learning experience being mounted by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba, is a 12-week on-line course called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" that has over 1900 people who signed up for it.  That is indeed massive.  There are also about 70 of us in a Second Life group.  

The first synchronous meeting in Elluminate is being held in a couple of hours, although the time was switched and so now there are two meetings, so maybe not as fully synchronous as one would like, but coordinating people from around the world is not easy.

So far, the facilitators have been sending out the "Daily," a, well, daily e-mail with a summary of discussion, links, announcements, and readings.  I wonder how many of the 1900+ are specifically interested in the topic of "connectivism" (which is facilitator's Siemen's revision of the constructivist theory of knowledge in some way that, quite frankly, is not particularly clear to me yet) and how many are interested in the experience of the massively multi-participant class.  

Personally, I am looking forward to using the tools, like Elluminate and moodle, as much as I am interested in the content, and I cannot think of another educational experience I have entered into about which I could say that.  Maybe students choose colleges or grad schools not based primarily on the course content (at least here in America, unlike in the UK, where university students choose the "course" of study rather than a lifestyle or brand, or at least say they do), and then you end up taking specific courses in, say, Humor of the Old Southwest because it is a fabulous professor's interesting specialization that you never even knew existed until you started studying with him (Jim Justus at Indiana University, to be exact).   But in the online world of content delivery and "training" (I am also embarking on some serious work on my Flash scripting chops with lynda.com during this sabbatical, a different approach), this seems unusual.

Nevertheless, it is always interesting getting a glimpse into someone else's field, someone else's academic argument (is it a theory? is it constructivism by another name?), and exciting to start thinking through how networking is not only a metaphor for learning and thinking, but may be cognition itself.

Virtual Facilitation

Last week, I attended (in real life) a two-day workshop on building essential facilitation skills for Berklee faculty, staff, and administrators.  It was an interesting experience to focus primarily on the process rather than on the content, and there were many valuable aspects to the workshop.  It was also a different experience to be holed up in the Sheraton Hotel right here in Boston for eight hours a day, almost as if it were a Second Life environment.  By the end I felt a little as if I were inhabiting a new avatar, Facilitation Grrl perhaps, but I also think that 2 days of indoor air, no gym, too little time with the twins, and too much coffee might have taken its toll as well.   An immersive experience indeed.  

It made me think about the issues raised by SL for facilitation, and as usual, I find that plenty of others have thought about this before me.  Beth 's Blog has a good post about online synchronous practices, and Rafi Santo over at RezEd, a good first stop for anything to do with education in SL, outlines as many kinds of situations that would require different kinds of facilitation as he can think of.  There is a New Zealand (I think) company offering specialized training in online facilitation: Zenergy and, not surprisingly, people offering the service of facilitation in SL for a fee.  

In teaching a class in SL, juggling both the text chat and video chat presents unique facilitation issues that have no parallel in brick-and-mortar education settings.  My teacher in the MassArt course Creativity in Second Life was very good at that; she would ask a question and while people were thinking or fiddling with screens or headphones or simply thinking of an answer, she would also type a short version of the question, sometimes only a word, that invited participation in both kinds of chat.  But so many of the excellent techniques we learned in the workshop were based on the kinds of body language, eye contact, facial expressions, and proximity that are absent in SL.  Until there is true video mapping of a person's face while they are talking, there won't be those non-verbal forms of information available in virtual communication.  

There are also so many distractions in SL even under the best of circumstances, forget about if there were people trying to avoid full participation who need to be brought into the group dynamic, that that would be very challenging.  It is one thing when everything is voluntary, but if education in SL were to become more widespread and part of requirements for an on-campus or online course, then other problems might arise.  

On another topic, I will be turning my attention full-time to my sabbatical project in just a few weeks.  I have been easing into the project over the summer, taking the Mass Art course, reading up on a few things, joining some listservs, working on a conference presentation for the Second Life Education Community Conference 2008 in early September, and also finishing up a book manuscript on media history and I Love Lucy, a topic I have been writing about off and on since I was a grad student.  It is interesting to think about what has changed in terms of the technological and representational challenges that the collaborators in the new medium of early television faced, in comparison to what we face as we create the new media of virtual worlds.

Maybe It's the Google

I've been away from the blog for a few weeks: first vacation since the twins were born, relatives visiting from the UK, too much rain.  Or, I could jump on the bandwagon and wonder, along with this Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  It is of course too easy to blame google, or anything else isolated, for the massive shift in the way we interact with information in the digital age, and it is much too easy to say it is a shift to "stupidity."  As my provost pointed out in an e-mail exchange about the article, innovations always change the ways we think and create.  

But what I like about the Atlantic article is the way it connects reading to thinking, and with the HAL reference, wraps them in our growing realization that we humans are not adapting technology to our needs, but that we humans are adapting to technology.  That process of becoming ever more machine-like in our cognitive styles may only be countered by deep thinking, contemplation, poetry, abstraction, and listening to the long forms, not only the loops.  

On the other hand, as my provost also pointed out, there is something to be said for the new pace, for speed, and our students have far less qualms about it than we do.  The resources at our fingertips with google do not make us stupid, and do not provide only shallow information.  Indeed, the NY Times article on reading, which referred to the Atlantic piece, explored the question of information literacy, appropriately separating it from and linking it to traditional reading skills.   For thinking about speed, there is no one better than Paul Virilio, and here is a short and swift piece from CTheory 1995 that shows how fast some things change.

The big question is how to foster a critical awareness of technology, whether it be staggeringly useful google or the compelling yet frustrating Second Life.  How do we hold onto the best of the old--the deep reading, the contemplation--and wrap our eager fingers around the wii of the new--quick, current, reflex, move on to the next youtube phenomenon because the last one wasn't worth thinking about for too long, anyway?  I think that becoming aware of the idea of cognitive style, of how the different technologies, software, and hardware we use shape the questions we ask, the processes on which we embark, and the solutions and creative work we produce, is at least a place to start. 

People always say "technology is neutral," but it isn't.  Perhaps the smartest quotation I've read about technology's influence is by Donald Norman, in a book whose title holds out hope against the Atlantic's google-phobia: 

Technology is not neutral.  Technology has properties--affordances--that make it easier to do some activities, harder to do others: The easier ones get done, the harder ones neglected.  Each has its constraints, preconditions, and side effects that impose requirements and changes on the things with which it interacts, be they other technology, people, or human society at large.  Finalyy, each technology poses a mind-set, a way of thinking about it and the activities to which it is relevant, a mind-set that soon pervades those touched by it, often unwittingly, often unwillingly.  The more successful and widespread the technology, the greater its impact upon all of society.  Technology is not neutral, it dominates.

Donald A. Norman.  Things that Make Us Smart.  Perseus Books, 1993, p. 243.

As we become aware of the non-neutrality, and that is what was truly shocking about HAL, then we can begin to understand and interact with technology in an enlightened way.

Third Life, Media Life

Last night, at the same time as my class met in Second Life, my family was featured on a local TV show, Chronicle. The show was about twins and multiples and they spent about four hours shooting us, so I figured that would add up to about a minute of air time, especially after the producer told me that the following day she was shooting a mother with TWO sets of twins, which surely makes better television than my one set. Anyway, I e-mailed my teacher that I would be late, figuring I would watch with everyone and then catch up. I saw that we would be taking a field trip to a scripting tutorial sim and spent some time in it ahead of time.

But as airtime approached, it suddenly (and belatedly) occurred to me that maybe the kids shouldn't watch the show live. What if there were inappropriate content? So we waited 12 minutes into the half hour to give ourselves some room and then started watching on the DVR in chase play mode, and so I teleported to class, a little late, but just as Nettrice typed, "Lori was on tv." I responded, "I might be on right now," and that's when it hit me: how many lives was I leading right then? First life/real life, already split by being at home and also online; "second life" of L1Aura Loire, present in "body" at Boga Island, although mostly distracted; and then a third existence, on tv, a persona and image as yet unrevealed to me, yet already broadcast.

Nettrice sent the class off on the field trip exercise and must have had a tivo of her own, because she typed that she had seen me on tv. A very interesting confluence of presence and absence, simultaneity and sequence: my attention shifted abruptly from my computer screen back to our television screen and we watched, rewound, watched ourselves again (slightly more than 1 minute, but I still have some time coming to get to my allotted 15 minutes of fame). Certainly television watching is different when you know you are recording it, when you know it is not just a fleeting moment of something live, that it leaves a trace, that what it means for a medium to be time-based is different.

What does it mean to my three year-old twins to be on television? They are used to seeing video of themselves on the computer in a way that I certainly was not growing up. It is a shift not unlike the first generation to have photographs of themselves when previously there were only paintings and drawings, except those first daguerrotypes were purposeful and time-consuming, and today's digital images are ubiquitous and instantaneous. It makes me think of the short story "Snow" by John Crowley, in which there is a device called a wasp that can record thousands of hours of audio and video of a person's life to be seen by their loved one's after they die, but the "memories" are not archived in a way that can be accessed deliberately, only randomly, and it seems that the moments that play for the narrator are increasingly ones of snow. One photograph can prompt a memory, sometimes becomes the memory, replacing it, rewriting it with the image at its center, but what about a dozen, hundreds, thousands? Video? My twins' three years are pretty well-documented, and they love to see themselves. How does that effect their sense of self, literally, their self images? And as avatars become one of the ways we see ourselves represented visually, how will they contribute to our changing sense of self?

"Virtual Worlds" Chosen for Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship

My project, "Virtual Worlds," was chosen as one of the two Inaugural Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowships at Berklee College of Music. The Fellowships are specifically for innovative and creative approaches, and so I thought that virtual worlds fit the profile. Specifically, I'll be exploring how education and the music industry are approaching virtual worlds like Second Life.

Congratulations to my co-awardee, Neil Leonard, for his project, "Composition and Performance for Robotics, Video and Architecture" which explores sound in connection to three visual disciplines.

For more information on my project, click here.