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| The Translucent Twin Towers |
Here are some musings I figured I'd post. This isn't, necessarily, the most detailed or thought out of my posts. But I think that it is important to mention in terms of space and notions of responsibility, if nothing else. I loaded Second Life yesterday with the
intention of looking for replicas of real-world cities - as research for another project I am involved in - but what I found
instead was this: a World Trade Centre Memorial. The Memorial is a rebuild, but the buildings are
translucent, ghost-like, and their floors are paved with concrete
blocks bearing the names of hundreds, if not all, of the victims. Just beside the ghost towers is a steel cross
labelled Ground Zero, and, nailed to it, a very small image of the all-too-familiar image from ground zero.
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| Ground Zero |
In the rules for the sim, it says ‘no aircraft, no weapons’. My first thought was, is that necessary? and then I realised that it probably was.
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| Petit-esque? |
On the top of the buildings, I felt like Philippe Petit. He remapped that space before it had even been finished, and then the events of September 11th remapped it all over again.
I’m not sure what to make of this place. I’m not sure what to make of
the rebuild. I'm not sure what to make of the buildings’ translucency. I’m not sure what to make of the land
beside it - the sprawling city one could easily imagine is a perfect
replica of New York, but which, in truth, could probably be any modern
city in the West. Any memorial/representation/recreation is problematic, of course, and I am certainly not condemning this one.
If nothing else, I guess, it suggests a kind of virtual conscience. Somebody somewhere built this, and it must have taken them a long time. And so the Towers exist in the virtual world, though not at all in the way in which they existed in the real world. The attacks upon the real Twin Towers shaped their design in the virtual. That's kind of obvious, since this is a Memorial, but it is interesting to note that they were not rebuilt virtually as if nothing had happened - which returns to the idea of the virtual conscience. At no point can we be allowed to forget (as if we could) what happened to those Towers and the people within them.
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| Names on the Floor 01 |
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| Names on the Floor 02 |
