Souls

A couple of weeks ago, Strawberry Singh challenged her blog readers to take and post black and white portraits of their avatars, and it got me thinking (read her post here - here!). Being something of an amateur photographer in real life, I have dabbled with black and white photography, but it hasn't been something I have given much time to when it comes to my Second Life photography. 

We tend to use black and white when we want to capture something beyond the immediate - beyond the tangible, the obviously-present, the singular moment. We use it to photograph the soul. I'm sure that there's a lot of philosophy and photographic theory out there to support/condemn this idea, but that's back-up I'm not sure I need right now. The idea is just interesting to think about by itself, isn't it?

Kitti

Does a Second Life avatar have a soul? Do you even believe that humans in the first life have souls - as something distinct from the body and/or brain? You could argue that avatars don't have souls...but you could also argue that we imbue them with our own souls. If that is the case, technically speaking, looking at a black and white portrait of my avatar and then a black and white portrait of my real life self, would I be looking at the same image?

You could also argue that, despite what we might say to the contrary,  our minds and souls are married to our bodies - or, at least, to the concept of flesh and bone. So Kitti's virtual flesh placed around my soul could create something different, something new, purely through the new combination. If these new virtual souls exist, do they exist on the same level as souls in real life, or are they somewhere else? Would they existence mean the existence of a new virtual metaphysical realm?

Posting a picture of my own virtual face here didn't quite seem like enough, so I roped sian and Niri into posing for me, too. I asked sian and Niri because they are good friends of mine and because they happened to be online when I was shooting my own portrait, but they are actually desperately interesting subjects to examine for souls.

sian

One of the other places we look for the soul, whether they happen to be in black and white or in colour, are the eyes. sian doesn't usually have what we might consider to be 'normal' eyes, but opts for these white-outs. She has said before that the realism of SL eyes makes her uncomfortable, but she's hasn't gone so far as to remove the sight-organs from her face altogether, and often her blank eyes are still decorated by make-up and eyelashes to die for. 

Niri

Niri is another interesting case in the soul-discussion because she is only one incarnation of her creator. Sometimes Niri is Nero, and everything about her changes except her creator's account name. Such drastic changes - including gender and skin colour and species - are not exceptional in SL, but the decision to label them are distinctly separate characters is. These are not alternative accounts: both Niri and Nero occupy the same virtual space, and because of that, they cannot both be present at the same time. Where is the soul division here? Is there any?

I am aware, of course, that all photography is subjective. Both knew I was taking the pictures for a post about souls, but neither knew how that might play out in practice. I asked that they pose for me in whatever pose they liked, and they had free reign on how they looked for the shoot. My only requests were that we use a white wall as a background, and that the poses be simple and allow me to clearly see their faces. In terms of post-processing, all I have done to the images is crop out the excessive white space and press the preset 'Greyscale' button in Paint Shop Pro. I began messing with the Channel Mixer filter, but that felt like I was having too much of a hand in the way the black-and-white worked, so I settled for the less impressive and less intrusive method. There would be no way to make it any less biased than this unless I did not know my subjects. 

Niri introduced her hands into the photograph, and I think there is the basis here for a whole study on where we look, and where we find, the markers of the soul in the virtual. Niri's picture is changed by the inclusion of her hands - and not only because she's using her fingers to tell us all to fuck off.

At the end of Strawberry Singh's post, she encouraged her readers to post links to their own images and thus inadvertently created a potential soul catalogue. 

What do you see here? Anything? Nothing?

Thank you sian and Niri for letting me take your picture. P.S. - nobody gets any points for pointing out that Kitti, as a ginger, has no soul.

Virtually Human

A few months ago, I was contacted via Flickr by a lady who wanted to interview me for a university project she was working on concerning Second Life and memory. Considering my own roots, I could hardly say no. A couple of weeks ago, she sent me the final copy of her work, and gave me permission to talk a little bit about it here.

Rosengren opens her dissertation with a fantastic and interesting quote: 'Memory makes us human. Without it, people are turned into a formless mass that can be shaped into anything'. In this scenario, the SL avatar is the formless mass, and the human being behind the screen, possessing a memory, imbues the avatar with form and meaning. She goes on to theorise that if memory is required to make us human, and humans are required to make an avatar, then memory is part of the 'social foundation' of an avatar. But, of course, in a virtual world of 'constant flux with avatars and islands appearing and disappearing every minute of every day', pinning memory into the virtual world proves to be a slippery task. 

Of course, to complicate it further, there are a million and one studies of memory, how it works, what it constitutes, and even more about the differences between individual and social and collective memory, and more again denouncing those differences, and more yet again talking about memorialisation. During my own university degree, we looked a lot at the idea of remembering something that never happened to you, and the work of artists such as Lorie Novak who produced a haunting set of photographs (amongst a great many other things, I'm sure) that placed herself, as well as the viewer, in context with the Holocaust she was not a part of. Before we have even entered the ephemeral and intangible world of cyberspace, the issue is already hideously complex, and we could probably talk about it forever.

Have we been here before?

 As such, I'm going to narrow the field down here, for the sake of this blog post. I want to look at two main areas of memory and memorialisation in relation to SL that I think build on Rosengren's article. I am aware, of course, that the majority of my readers will not have read it (it has not been published, as far as I am aware), and I will explain myself accordingly. You don't need to have read it to understand what I'm going to say here, I promise. The two areas I want to look at are both acts of social/collective memory, and involve screenshots and memorial sites. I also want to float an idea that I think might sink - which you, lovely readers, can possibly help me out with.

I think it's far to say that most SL users take screenshots of their experience in SL, and we take them for a variety of reasons, among them a desire to preserve some record of the otherwise ephemeral. Photographs, and memories, make our avatars substantial, and our experiences online in the virtual world authentic. I've written about this before and I am, arrogantly, going to take that discussion as standard shared knowledge (if it isn't, please forgive me). When I joined SL, I began to take screenshots of everything, especially since I knew I was going to have to report back about what I had found to my class, and again in the essay I had to write for it. Rosengren seems to have done the same thing, and there was a kind of affection, if that doesn't sound patronising, in seeing images her work that mirrored the style and content of the images I put into mine. One of Rosengren's pictures showed a wide, empty space, and her avatar in the middle of it. The caption read that this was her 'disappearing into cyberspace', and I had to laugh because I know that I have taken exactly the same picture a thousand times when Kitti lagged out at Necronom VI and decided to take a walk, without my permission, into the dark. 

Does anybody else have one of these pictures? Even if you didn't snap the picture, I would be amazed to find out that any SL user was not familiar with this out-of-virtual-body experience. How many other shared experiences like this are there out there, and if we compared virtual photo albums, how many of us would find we had taken the same screenshots? That idea makes me smile. 

To jump now to a more intentional form of social and collective memory - the building in SL of memorials. Whilst I cannot give the personal details of the person interviewed, somebody else who informed Rosengren's work talked about something she had built in SL in memory of someone who died in real life. Rosengren touched on this idea at this very personal level, but I wanted to bring to attention here the builds in SL that exist as memorials and mnemonics to bigger events in social memory. In June 2012, I blogged about a sim I came across that existed as a commemoration of those who died during 9/11. I didn't write extensively about it because there seemed, simultaneously, so much and yet absolutely nothing that needed to be said about it. At the time of writing, I have absolutely no idea if the sim is still open. I also have no idea how many other such memorial sites exist in SL, nor how often they are frequented, and by how many. Perhaps having those details would offer a greater understanding into such a sim, and help us begin to unpack the issues of memory, memorial, and preservation surrounding them. Even in the virtual world, we appear to be so afraid to forget. 

Here's my last idea, and it's an unfed one. Computers have memory. Computers have cookies and caches and logs and histories of all kinds. One time, I accidentally deleted a file (like, completely - it wasn't just sitting in my recycle bin) I had been working on for months, losing everything. My mum, who is a bit of a techno-wizard, managed to find some software that could retrieve large portions of the file from wherever they had hidden in the depths of my computer. In SL, the more often I seem to visit a specific sim, the more easily my laptop seems to be able to rez (load) that place - like it remembers what it looks like, and can conjure it more quickly. So...do our avatars have some kind of memory? And if they do, to refer to the opening quote of this post, does that make them human?

[Rosengren's article is much more muchy than I have made it sound here. She has some great ideas about how memory works in SL, and how we use it, and the idea of voluntarily making memories. She concludes that SL is an extension of real life, 'opening up the possibilities of memory making'. There was no way I could write about everything in it, however - else I'd need to write a dissertation, too! I found it a really interesting read, and if I hear that her article has been published, I will, of course, update this post to contain a link to it]

The Theft of a Virtual Body

Boo

I posted this on Flickr the other day, but decided it deserved a post of its own. Please click here - here! - to go and see the picture there.

Sian Pearl has been writing recently about the idea of pornography stealing the nude from art. You can read her post here - here! - and it's worth noting that some interesting ideas have emerged in the comments beneath the post. It has opened, I think, some interesting questions, but also made me think about a few things.

I don't take particularly provocative, shall we say, pictures of my avatar. I wouldn't say she dresses massively provocatively in the first place. Maybe the odd sci-fi outfit with a bare stomach or whatever. But this is about as naked as Kitti gets. 

I don't know why that is. I seem to hold the same rules about self nudity in SL as I do IRL (maybe with some lessening - I wouldn't wear those sci-fi outfits IRL! Though maybe I would if my RL body defied gravity the same way Kitti's does). That wasn't a conscious decision, just something I have gone along with. Maybe I should examine that.

So here. I tried it. I tried to be provocative, whilst only being as naked as I ever really am in SL. Maybe you could say the outfit in the previous picture (entitled Pearl House) is more revealing, but somehow this outfit feels more naked. 

I am, temporarily, stealing the (semi) nude from Sian Pearl, who is brave in all the ways that Kitti isn't. I also took this picture in her house, when she wasn't home, and she didn't actually know I was doing it - just so it felt like real theft :P

Wannabe

In real life, I consider myself to be something of an amateur photographer. My photographs have been used for online maps, theatre funding application forms and information packs, and foreign-language textbooks - and I got paid for those last ones. I'm hardly a photographic genius, and it isn't a hobby that is going to put bread on my table, but I enjoy it, and I'm not bad at it. 

When I came to Second Life, however, as I have lamented before, I found myself to be a pretty poor virtual photographer - and my below-par graphics card could only take so much of the blame. I didn't give up (don't be rude now), but kept trying, and I thought I would make a report on my progress.

Good SL photography is all around me. The first virtual photographer I was introduced to whose pictures have turned me green was Sian Pearl - but then I also stumbled upon the flickr streams of Croon Nandahar, Strawberry Singh, Harlow Heslop, Laverne Unit, Harp Purr, Veritable Magic and Petra Messioptra - to name but a few. They are enough to make you sick...in the best way possible, of course.

So, tonight, I really tried. I even got Kitti dressed up, and spent quite a long time (read: far too long!) searching for the right place to take the photos. This is something I never do in real life; I am very much an in-the-moment snapper. I went through the rather exhaustive list of lighting settings to choose the right one. The shots have been been post-edited, just a little, and now here they are.

SL photography, in my opinion, is much more difficult than real life photography. Controlling the camera, positioning your avatar, having too many lighting options, people walking into your shot, leaves falling right in the middle of your avatar's face...somehow, I never seem to have these difficulties in real life. Real life never suffers lag. The upside is, however, that Kitti can and will pose for as long as I make her without me needing to worry about whether she's going to faint from standing up too long, or if she needs a toilet break.

Well...I think I'm getting better!

Doppelgänger I

Doppelgänger II

Doppelgänger II

 [Click here to view the set on flickr][Alternatively, click on one of the images to enlarge, and use the left and right arrow keys to scroll between them]

Out-takes:

Doppelgänger Out-takes I

Doppelgänger Out-takes II

Fleeting Glimpse

Since I began my Second Life, I have been a trigger-happy screenshotter, pressing ctrl+alt+s every time anything remotely interesting, amusing, beautiful, or wordlessly ugly crossed my path. 

But here's the thing - just as in real life, taking a photograph does not make you a photographer, and I have not been what you might good a good SL photographer. I have often been in awe of the shots my friends have taken, and not only because they are using SL on a better set-up than mine. In my first life, I am something of an amateur photographer, and have just recently had some of my photographs published in a book overseas (which I thought was ultra-cool), so it isn't like I don't have something of an eye for the field. My SL screenshots, however, have been all kinds of suck-ish. 

Look at this classy screenshot go!

I expressed this negative view of my SL photography to Sian Pearl, and she gave me a crash-course in the tricks of the trade - really, simple button commands that allow for a much more delicate and intelligent manipulation of the viewer camera that I was just not aware of before. I had been using my mouse, and what we not-so-affectionately term the 'perv cam' (that is, the button that allows you to click around and zoom in on things without moving your avatar - you can see how it got that name!) to get the angles for my shots, and it was clunky and slow, prone to lagging out and I would somehow manage to get my camera stuck inside a wall or something. Very frustrating.

However, I think I've been getting better, and when I logged into SL the other day to take some screenshots for my new blog banner (all of which I discarded for being of entirely the wrong nature), I managed to take one that I'm actually really proud of. There have been a couple of shots lately that I have been proud of, all of which have been uploaded to Kitti's flickr stream, but I decided this one deserved a blog post all of its own. 

Ta-dah! Best viewed large on Kitti's flickr - see the link at the end of this post

 In a world as fleeting and ephemeral, as subject to nigh instantaneous change, as Second Life, how important is photography? It's a topic I picked upon in the last installment of Kit 49. How important is it to catch a moment that is just that - a moment - gone so quickly it was barely even there? One could ask the same of real life, too, I guess, but the ability to change everything so completely is what makes the question all the more poignant for the virtual world. When I can change everything about Kitti, her skin colour, hair colour, body shape, size, height, style of dress, even her name, in just a few clicks, what is the point in capturing her so?

Sulky or sultry?

I think the point is to record that ability to change, to document our virtual selves in each and every incarnation. Perhaps we applaud our own creativity, in which case it is for vanity. I mean, if I took this many photographs of myself in my first life, I would certainly be labelled vain, and probably a lot of other names besides. We have the ability to document our own lives, our own histories and stories and evolutions, in a way that was not open, or at least perceived to be open, to the generations before us. We create our own history books, censoring as we go.

But also...does Kitti change so much from screenshot to screenshot? Sometimes her hair colour might change, yes, and sometimes the exact shade of blue of her eyes is altered slightly. But in terms of height, weight, skin colour and shape of her features, she stays exactly the same. When someone speaks to her in world, my voice comes out of her mouth, whether that mouth is painted red or blue or no colour at all. 

All I know for sure is that I feel the importance of photography in both worlds, and so it makes me happy that I have found a screenshot I am truly happy with, even if I can't quite decide whether she looks sulky or sultry. Nor that, in world, it would be a rare occasion to find her behaving with each of those attitudes!

See the image large on flickr / Kit 49 - Part 3 (Part 4 coming soon)