Facing Reality

Yes, this is a generic picture of Kitti. No, I couldn't think of a picture I could take that might be related to this post.

I wanted to talk, just a little bit, about that giant of social networks, the book of faces. Yes, I've seen The Social Network (the best bits of that film were the ones where I could recognise the soundtrack as being from Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts, or variations of, anyway. And, of course, the bits with the very attractive Andrew Garfield). I know what a big baddie Mark Zuckerberg has become - and yet pretty much all of us, for all of our whinging, still use Facebook.

As I understand it, a growing number of SL users have taken to making Facebook pages for their avatars, and in a few instances, those pages have been removed from Facebook on the grounds that they are not 'for real people'. In terms of Facebook policy, I understand the move, but from the perspective of the people who have put time and effort into these pages, it sucks massively. Often, there was no plan to deceive or trick anybody into thinking the SL avatar the page was for was, in any way, a flesh-and-blood being. 

On a related by tangential note: there exists now a search engine that apparently beats the Turing test - Eugene Goostman. The creepy little guy in the top left-hand corner looks like an SL avatar from 2009.  I wonder if he has a Facebook page.

There are, however, plenty of flesh-and-blood beings out there that use Facebook to create accounts for people who are not real in either life. You only have to watch five minutes of Catfish the TV show to see that, and to see the lengths some people will go to to maintain these false accounts - with intentions to deceive. 

There's no guarantee, either, that the accounts created by flesh-and-blood people using their real names and faces are any less deceptive. There are no restrictions on the number of personalities we are 'allowed', if you like, to play out on the Internet, and there's no obvious way to weed out the fake personalities from the real. It's also possible, depending on the way you engage with Facebook, that the information on your profile and/or your wall could create an image of you that is nothing like the real. And what I understand to be 'real' from one person's page might not be what you perceive to be 'real' from that same page.

As I have written about before, the levels of reality involved in avatar creation in SL vary drastically, and I suspect it might be equally difficult, in some instances, find the line between first life personalities and second, even amongst those who claim to take on a role when interacting in SL. How do you begin to prove the reality of a virtual existence that represents perhaps one side of your first life self? Is there a button you can tick on Facebook's Prove You Are Real system for 'this person is all my good bits', or 'this is a version of me who gets to live out some of my crazier dreams'? How about 'me, but with the legs that go on forever' - because I bet most of us would need to tick that option.

I realise that there are systems in place with Facebook that mean flesh-and-blood beings - 'real' people - can be investigated and asked to prove their reality, too. But it's still a complex issue. Being asked to prove that you are 'real' is a weird request, a really bizarre thing that we are being asked to do more and more frequently these days as computers become ever more wired into our lives. Passwords, your mother's maiden name, your first primary school, the name of your first dog, captcha forms, pin numbers, separate pin codes, alternative email addresses, someone-in-Korea-has-signed-in-to-your-account-is-this-you-? emails: it's only going to get worse and weirder.

Some laptops, designed for personal use, have face scanners and fingerprint readers built into them. My laptop has the latter, and when I first got it, a little icon would pop up in my taskbar practically begging me to create an electronic fingerprint lest some awful being attempt to switch my laptop on without my consent. I've a slightly better idea, Hewlett Packard - how about I just don't let weirdos who might attempt to use my computer without my knowledge into my house in the first place? It's not like it's an anti-theft device, really, either, because burglars are not really the types to hand my laptop back once thwarted.

Whilst setting up to take the picture for this post, Norah appeared behind me doing what appeared to be a sneaky pose. When I asked what she was doing, she said, and I quote, "photobomb = reality". So there. P.S. - no, I changed my dress for the opening shot, your eyes haven't gone squiffy.

I'm not really trying to start a philosophical debate here. I don't have the philsophical knowledge to back it up, and frankly, the nature of reality is interesting but has been debated a thousand times by a million people, all of whom are more interesting than I. What I wanted to do was draw attention to this phenomenon, and say...since when did we allow Facebook to weigh in on this? Since when did Facebook become a philsophical heavyweight?

And the bottom line is: understanding the necessity of such does not make it cease to be WEIRD.

Giant Mushrooms and an Alien Bike Ride

Aletheia

Out of the blue on Monday (I think it was Monday), the lovely Bunz IM'd me and invited me out on a date. Bunz and I met through a mutual friend, and we got chance to bond one afternoon at the bottom of the sea beneath my skybox when Party Cat went missing and Bunz volunteered to help find her. We didn't find her, but we did find a massive shark that you could ride on the back off around and around in circles. As you do.

First, Bunz took me to Aletheia, home of europa. Although I've shopped at europa before, I've never been to their in-world store, and it was pretty cool! Everything had a larger-than-life cartoon aesthetic, and the water was crystalline and beautiful. We bounced around on the enormous mushrooms, and tried to climb on top of the goblin statue you can see just on the edge of the picture above (but we couldn't - he was a hollow phantom and when I tried to stand on his head, I fell straight through him). I got the urge, too, to throw Kitti off the edge of the highest mushroom down into the water - so naturally, we gave in to my impulse. I tried to take a picture as we did it, but Bunz accidentally flew instead of jumping (non SL users: it's controlled by the same button), and thus all I managed to photograph was Kitti's hair de-rendering because I had zoomed too far out.

Bald Kitti and Non-Existent Bunz. Oops.

Next, Bunz took me on the most insane and hilarious joyride of my life...with ET.

Here we go

Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore, eat your heart out!

When you arrive, a bicycle for two plus a fruit crate containing a wrapped-up ET appears on the floor of the forest. As soon as you hop on, the race begins. We were chased through the trees by police vehicles with flashing lights before we zoomed up into the sky, and cycled passed the Moon to recreate the classic ET image. After that, though, the ride stopped resembling any Steven Spielberg film and just turned to the insane. We were bombarded by all kinds of aliens and weirdos perched on different levels in the sky (but unfortunately, we moved far too fast for me to snap any pictures of them). They were hideous, and looked like something out of Monty Python.

At the end, we landed and the bike vanished, and ET appeared in a stereotypical flying saucer and took to the sky in the wake of a pretty impressive firework display and light show. However, I obviously triggered the button for ET's ascendance a second time when I tried to leave the scene because it started up again and the ever-charming Bunz laughed her head off and said ET wanted to abduct me. 

Attempted abduction

You'll be relieved to know that I didn't get abducted. We managed to escape off the mud and out passed a whole wall of aliens-for-sale. If you're looking for some aliens to jazz up your house or whatever, I'd recommend seeing ET about them.

I had an absolutely fantastic time. Bunz is lovely and hilarious, and this was a fantastic and certainly original date. I laughed for the duration of the sky bike ride, and for a good ten minutes afterwards. It was brilliant. I'd recommend it to everyone and I am seriously going to be taking/sending everyone I know to experience it :P.

If you'd like to see it for yourself, click here - here! Likewise, you can visit Aletheia by clicking here - here! Thank you so much, Bunz, for a great time.  

If you'd like to take me out on a non-romantic date, whether you know me in-world or not, please don't hesitate to send me a message :). I'd love to hear from you.

Om Nom Noming into Forever

Simon took this. His shots came out much prettier than mine.

So the feedback I've had to my proposal idea has all been positive, and I'm excited to say that people are starting to message me and ask to take me to places. This is exciting!

My first came on Saturday in the form of Simon May and the Pixel Pot Restaurant and Cafe. The only warning I had about where we were going was "for dinner", and Simon had never been to this place before either.

The restaurant was very prettily put together, with indoor and outdoor dining spaces and, across the way, a stretch of pretty prim-sea complete with a ship and a lighthouse. The best, weirdest and most interesting thing about the restaurant was that the owners provided a waiting-on service, a full menu, and what we ordered was actually brought to the table, in actual pixel-food form. I'm just going to let that sink in a minute.

This is one of my shots. See, not half as pretty as Simon's.

There it is, see. The waiter showed us to our table, sent us a menu, took our order, took it away to the kitchen for the "chef" to "cook", and returned with plates of exactly what we had ordered. Here's my spaghetti and meatballs, and Simon's tuna steak with asparagus. There were animations in the chairs that allowed us to simulate eating, and knives and forks were given to us to make the experience all the more authentic. We even had a glass of white wine each. And dessert.

I took a shot with the interface in view, so you could see the menu and how the ordering worked. And our waiter, Gavin :). In the background is the main restaurant itself.

The desserts too pretty to eat, even if we could.

The restaurant even has a reservation system, although it was pretty quiet whilst we were there. You do have to pay for the experience which, I confess, I found slightly odd since we weren't actually paying for any ingredients. However, the owners of the restaurant must still have to pay rent, and I guess we were paying for the waiter's time (and I have no issue with that). We spent about as much time there as I would expect to spend in a real life restaurant, and it didn't cost anywhere near as much as that real experience would have.

Whilst we were eating, too, the waiter, unbeknownst to us, took our picture, and when we came to leave, we were presented with the picture in a frame and stamped with the restaurant's logo. The idea seems more reminiscent of rollercoasters than restaurants, but I think it says a lot about the kind of experience the restaurant owners expect it to have been.

Simon remarked that it was funny how something as mundane and normal as eating could be transformed into something I considered to be weird in SL (and I do think it's weird, really weird), especially considering the time I spend in science fiction and fantasy roleplay and dress. We can be anything we want to be, and that is normal, but eating? Eating is weird. 

I see his point, but I think the strangeness of the concept is rooted in something other than flouting supposed impossibilities; it lies in necessity. It reaches back to the first essay I ever wrote about SL wherein I commented on virtual washing machines and toilets. Why worry about eating when you don't have to?

Of course, dining has become an activity for pleasure as much as need - for some, I guess it could even be considered a hobby. And whilst there is nothing stopping me from going out to a restaurant in the real world, it would take an awful lot of time, effort and money to arrange to go out to a restaurant in the real world with Simon because he lives quite a way away from me. There is something good and happy, I think, in the spontaneity of virtual dinners with faraway people. We take intimacy from breaking bread with each other, and after this experience, I think it's fair to say the breaking of virtual bread feels no different.

I found it absolutely impossible not to laugh. Set up with the repetitive eating animations and what was, essentially, plastic pixel food, Simon and I could have sat there eating for all eternity. The food would never run out. Our arms would never get tired. Our bellies would never be full. The waiter might get a bit bored, I'll grant, but unless he's got a hud that allows him to twist his avatar's face into an expression of annoyance, we might never know. We'd be om nom noming into forever. If that isn't funny, I'm not sure what is.

I'll be over here laughing in the corner by myself. 

The conversation was sparkling, of course, and Simon is a charming and always impeccably dressed companion. I had a great time, and it was certainly a unique experience in my Second Life. Thank you, Simon :).

If you're like to visit the Pixel Pot, you can do so by clicking here - here!

Resolution

We'd all heard about them before, of course, but they always seemed to be so far away. There were rumours and rumblings, but nothing that seemed close, pressing. Nothing that seemed...real. It didn't happen to anybody we knew and we ignored the warnings on the television because we stopped believing it told us anything close to the truth years ago. But we were fools, fools not to believe it, and when it came for us, we weren't prepared and all we could do was run, as fast and as far away as we could. We didn't look back until we reached the water - the edge of everything, or so we believed - and there it was, rolling out along the horizon like smoke but with the thick, heavy consistency of tar. Someone somewhere, God Allah Shiva Whoever, had finally decided that we had been a bad idea after all and pushed the button and so begun the system to refresh, reset, renew. Begin again begin again begin again. We were being wiped out. 

I wondered what it would be like to be crushed beneath the restart; at first to feel the coldness of it, the coldness of the fabled grave none of us had yet known but would know now, and then the stickiness, the weight, the collapse. It had been preached that this life, this world, this, our bodies, the air we breathe, wasn't real and never had been, but that storm looked real enough to me. I vowed I would never look back again - and I went forward into the water. Onwards.

That, ladies and gentlemen, was a spur-of-the-moment dramatisation of a rolling restart. I was minding my own business in my new skybox when my screen began to shake and I got the warning that my region would be restarting and Kitti would be logged out if I didn't move regions (like a group of sims). Not knowing exactly which regions were involved in the restart and where the borders for such things lie, I ran to the most remote place I could see in my landmark list and ended up in the sea. Cue drama.

It was more difficult than you can imagine not to make a "Rolling in the Deep" reference. 

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.

Turned

Vampires love knitted jumpers. Didn't you know?

sian pearl teleported to my skybox yesterday and found me on the roof, taking photos of Kitti posed with crystal tears and pointed white teeth. She said, 'Kitti has been a Creature of the Night a lot lately. Has she been Turned?' 'No,' I replied. 'Kitti is everything and nothing.' 

And then I giggled to myself (as I do) because I felt a little bit like Kohta Hirano's Warrant Officer Schroedinger, who likes to state often, courtesy of his maker's sense of humour, that he is 'everywhere and nowhere'.

I couldn't find any 'about' links that didn't lead to massive Hellsing spoilers, so I'm settling for this picture of him. Google his name at your own risk.

It's that line again, though, isn't it? - the making and breaking of Second Life, the reason to sign up and the reason never to sign in ever again. An avatar has the capacity to be everything and anything, but also to be absolutely nothing. Not everybody sees nothingness as a positive, nor as an opportunity. Freedom isn't necessarily the absence of all rules, regulations and obligations, but instead the ability to have decisions to make, and to make them for yourself. In nothingness, decisions have questionable use and importance, and if we cannot find a use or importance within ourselves, we flounder. I have said this a thousand times here, although I think that might be the most succinctly I have ever written it out.

It was kind of funny that sian made this observation, however, since all I think Kitti has consistently been lately is half-naked, and a little bit, well...of a fairy. This is new for me, as a lover of fantasy, because fairies have never been a creature I was especially interested in. And let's be fair here, Kitti doesn't look like the sort of fairy who is going to go around sprinkling magical dust or making flowers bloom, or collecting teeth - unless she'd knocked them out in the first place.

Mean Mischief

The naked-and-fey thing is courtesy of Monica Outlander and her BlackLabel collection. I haven't stopped wearing it for any real length of time since the Golden Thread show two weeks ago. It isn't that Kitti doesn't have other beautiful clothes - because she does - but I just keep switching back to the Miamai outfits. I'm addicted. And Monica Outlander is not a fan of t-shirts. We'll have the self-confidence conversation later.

I like the opportunity to play with Kitti's appearance, to dress her up sometimes as a vampire or a mean-looking fairy or anything else I can imagine. There are a few basic elements that I like to keep the same - her face and body shape, her hair colour (between two shades), her eye colour, etc - but everything else is up for grabs. And I enjoy that I can do it with such ease, and that the consequences of each change can be as significant or insignificant as I allow them to be. I am a whimsical shaper of nothingness. Let's go and play.

And on the subject of playing, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and I hope that the new year brings you what you need to (or to continue to) be happy. I will see you on the other side of the sea of wrapping paper.

Like Lazarus

Like Lazarus

Happy Birthday Kitti! - it is my avatar's third birthday today, and what a strange three years it has been in the virtual world. It was completely by accident that Kitti's rez day (the day she was first rezzed in SL - the day I first signed in - my avatar's birthday) falls so close to my real life birthday, and that both are so close to Hallowe'en, but what it means is that I get to spend a whole week feeling celebratory. Hurray for that!

I want to take a look at the word 'rez'. A rez day is, as I have already clumsily explained (and in brackets, no less), effectively an avatar's birthday, and is the term used in SL to mean the day an avatar first appeared in the virtual world. The date is marked on our profiles for the world to see, and acts as an automatic and completely passive way of letting other SL users know that if you're looking a little blocky and you only rezzed for the first time last week, you might well be in need of a little help without you having to pluck up the courage to ask for it. Otherwise, it serves as a talking point when you've run out of things to say to your SL friends ('Oh, wow, so, yeah, looks like I've been in SL for three years now!' 'Yeah, what are you doing with your life?' 'You think I'd have learned how to edit prims better by now' etc).

Move Beyond

Whilst I am not the most widely travelled gamer, I have never heard the term 'rezzed' used anywhere beyond Second Life. In most other games, characters and monsters are 'spawned', which suggests something entirely different in terms of the way they are propelled into the virtual landscape. When I put 'rez' into Google, the only definition I found that wasn't trying to sell me something was an entry on the SL Wikia (here!) that suggests the term was pinched from the film Tron, but it doesn't offer anything else by way of explanation or origin. 

I haven't seen Tron to know if that connection should provide me with more information, so everything I say from now on might be even more obvious and/or made null and void by that film.

It seems a little obvious to suggest that 'rez' would appear to be an abbreviated version of 'resurrect'. When we log into Second Life, therefore, we resurrect ourselves from the first life into the second, as if our bodies and minds in the first world were now dead or obsolete, or perhaps killed in the transition. The logic there would be obvious if SL was a little more immersive, but we still become somewhat 'dead to the world' when our concentration is focused on the computer screen. When we are not signed into SL, our avatars vanish from the plane, banished, perhaps, to Virtual Purgatory until we log back in, when our first life selves resurrect them and bring life back to their intangible bodies. Upon logging out, our avatars are banished to the non-realm again to await our return. We are necromancers, using what our ancestors would have seen as black magic to reanimate a body we have conjured again and again and again. That, or we are ghosts...or our avatars are ghosts...I haven't decided yet. Either way, we are unsavoury and ghoulish types.

Resurrected

'Rez' is a loaded term, suggesting death and life and reincarnation and planes of existence and non-existence, and yet we use it without much consideration of what we are implying about our relationship with SL. And we will continue to do so - but I thought it made for an interesting and nicely sinister post for Hallowe'en.

Unless, of course, I've got completely the wrong end of the stick. Happy Hallowe'en, you wicked things.

[We had a little party last night. If you'd like to see the pictures, please click here and also here.]

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]

Naked Truth

In a recent blog post, sian asked 'how nude can an avatar get?', and then 'does it matter?' That wasn't throwaway rhetoric on her part, and she explained her reason for asking in the subsequent line: 'our identities are mutable.'

I asked exactly the same question - 'does it matter?' - in a post I wrote on this blog in June, and concluded, a little uneasily, that for reasons I couldn't wholly put my finger on, the nudity of my avatar did matter. It does matter. And it matters moreso now than it did in June because the pictures in that post featured an un-naked Kitti, wearing a skin that was beautiful but which appeared to be made of porcelain. In the picture in this post, Kitti is wearing her everyday non-porcelain skin, and combined with Second Life's advanced rendering and lighting settings, it looks all too real. And, of course, this time Kitti is naked.

 But this brings us back to sian's first question- 'how nude can an avatar get?'. Whilst Kitti might not be wearing clothes in this picture, she is not naked in terms of avatar-nakedness. She is wearing mesh hands and feet, hair, eyelashes, eyes, skin, and a body shape. It is impossible for an SL avatar not to have a shape and a skin and eyes - those are a given, simply part of the way SL works - but I have chosen to put on everything else. 

And why have I chosen to include these 'wearable' items in my attempt at a tasteful nude of my SL avatar? Because these are the things which allow the picture to be about Kitti's nakedness. Without them, it would be impossible, after the initial oh-she's-naked, not to notice the unreality of Kitti's virtual body. Her blocky hands and strangely triangular feet would act as a barrier between the point of the picture and the viewer (and so would her baldness, but that's mostly because Kitti doesn't look good bald). They would serve to alienate, in more ways than one, her nudity, perhaps offering it up instead as a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills. 

Don't get me wrong; the supposed reality of this image could also be used to offer a critique of Linden Lab's graphic skills, and a whole lot more besides, but that it not its primary purpose.

This isn't the picture that I wanted to take. I wanted to take a nude photo which revealed precisely nothing, but avatar limbs don't always play ball, and finding poses that weren't uncompromising in one way or another was impossible. Whilst I didn't want Kitti to be flashing her bits, so to speak, I didn't want her to be actively hiding them either. I didn't want her posed with the intention of being seductive, nor did I want her nudity to seem like a mistake. This turned out to be quite a tall order, and in the end, I felt forced to compromise, although I did so on my own terms. 

Posting this picture here is still something of an ordeal for me, and I still cannot put my finger on why exactly. Perhaps it is partially because, as I began to say in my original post (link at the end), Kitti acts as my medium in the virtual world, and her body is the only body many will ever come to associate with me (That I could change everything about the way she looks the moment I released the picture into the world, making the photographed body no longer even exist, is not the point). Whilst she speaks with my voice and shares my thoughts and opinions, and whilst I have always acknowledged the differences between my avatar and my self, her nakedness is a kind of honesty I have not yet ventured to share. Would her nudity be so important to me if that gap between us was greater, or if the truth of it was not so broadly known? Would I feel so uncomfortable if I wasn't going to post a link to this blog post on my Facebook profile where it will be seen by people I am friends with in both lives?

The picture I mentioned in the opening paragraph of my June post has never been posted. It is buried, as it were, in a folder on my laptop, and there it remains. It might seem strange not to post it now, along with this picture, but the truth is that Kitti's pose in that image is far more revealing. When I published that post, there were no rallying cries, no pledges of support, no encouragement to post the image if that was what I wanted to do. There was no conversation at all. Whilst that might be the reaction I was expecting, I don't suppose it was the one I was hoping for.

I'm going to see sian's questions, and raise her a couple: What does it really mean to be naked in SL? Is nudity in the virtual world measured by how many clothes we are wearing, or by how honest we are about our real and virtual selves? How naked is your avatar now?

Related/further reading: my original post, 'Stripped' / sian's post, 'Naked' / 'the intrepid reporter on: nakedness'

Unready

 

 A thought: Second Life is a wide and varied platform for social creation and experimentation. It is a new world, ready to be shaped by our values and desires. It is already well-established, both on this blog and abroad, that those values and desires are pre-conceived, and are often implemented wholesale in the virtual world without any interrogation. We haven't created a new world so much as re-created the 'old' one, making changes that are based on ideas from our real-life selves living in a world of more-limited creation and social rules. We know this.

Avatar customisation is left almost entirely to the SL user. The loneliness of this is enhanced by the way it is deemed inferior to dress yourself in the library stock clothes and accessories provided by Linden Labs. And in the age of free-things-on-the-marketplace, and mesh, it's not difficult to pick up 'better' items.

In the past, I have decried the sense of 'variety' Linden Labs advertise Second Life as having when it comes to avatar customisation. Logging in and deciding you would like to be a cyberpunk tortoise today is the easy part, but finding the type of neon-filled brain tubes you're looking for, in a colour that isn't pink, is much more difficult than dreaming them up in the first place. The masochistic would say 'build it yourself!', which is an option open to all SL users, but again...this is not as easy as it sounds like it might be (and if you think it sounds tough, the reality is probably double that).

Technically speaking, you can build your avatar from a thousand assorted bits and pieces. But there is another limitation I haven't talked about, and which I am finding now endlessly difficult to word. Despite the advances made in the last sixty/seventy years, race is still a difficult issue in real life worldwide. In the UK at the moment, we are contending with a huge percentage of the population expressing fears of a 'flood' of Islam - as if being a Muslim makes you automatically of a different race, and not a different religion. Personally, I don't care what country you're from, what colour your skin is, or what your religious beliefs are, but this is not a viewed shared by the majority. 

Here's the more difficult-to-word bit. Avatar customisation is also inhibited by those real life fears and prejudices.  We are not yet in a position, in the real world or the virtual, to pull apart the pieces that make up what we call 'race' and use them in any way we see fit. There are too many tensions and prejudices involved - too many connotations, too much fear of national identity and cultural appropriation. To wear a black African skin over a white American shape, just as to wear a white American skin over a black African shape, is to make a political statement and not an aesthetic one. I can't decide to have thick, long black hair like one of my university friends today because I find it beautiful, because I don't share in her French-Algerian descent. What this fails to take into account, too, is the way our real life world is changing, and the way immigration has allowed people with completely different physical characteristics to come together and produce children who have a share of both.

The countries we are attempting to tie ourselves don't even exist in SL - at least, physically. Admittedly, a few have been recreated, although if anybody tries to tell me that the numerous sims claiming to be London (UK) look like the real London, I'm going to start laughing hysterically. They are brought into the equation more truly by our real life selves, sharing the information that we are English or French or Indian or Japanese because we like to share, and/or because we are trying to make friends across time zones.

How is any of this policed in SL? Vigilante-ism. I don't think Linden Labs care one hoot, but some other users do, and something as simple as sharing your time zone could start a riot. There are two instances that I am aware of in which people have 'come out' about their avatar not being of the same race as they are, and the responses that each faced were vastly, vastly different. I'm not going to share the details of those instances, but I will say that if we began to unpack either, our sense of race and gender equality would take a thorough beating.

I'm not saying it should be a free-for-all at the table of worldwide physical characteristics. I'm certainly not saying that SL needs to invent an entirely new combination of features to create a look we can attribute to a 'Second Life-ian', separate from everything else. I'm simply pointing out another way in which our second world lies in the shadow of the first. And it's a damned thorny shadow.

Coming Out Party

Everyone, I've got a confession to make. Not really a 'confession', because the word 'confession' implies I've done something wrong. I haven't done something wrong - or, at least, I don't think I have. I'm babbling now. What I'm trying to say is that I've got something to tell you.

Some party, huh?

I'm not ginger in real life. I'm not blonde/white-haired in real life, either. I'm not 5ft3" tall in real life. My feet aren't that flat. I can only dream of having a ski-slope nose, high blue-blooded cheekbones and pouty lips (And - just to clarify - I only have one SL avatar. If I want to change Kitti's hair colour, I just change it. And her eyebrows, of course. I made this picture by overlaying two pictures. This is the extent of my photo manipulation skills).

Deception was not my game here, it was just that nobody told me that I had to make my SL avatar look or be anything like my real physical first life self whatsoever. That wasn't even in the fine print of the terms and conditions - which I didn't read, of course, but ctrl+f is pretty handy. Kitti is my representative in the virtual world, yes, and I have expressed before a certain guilt curtailing the way I style and dress my avatar, but at no point have I ever set out to make her a replica of me.

In many ways, we are similar. Kitti has the appearance of a young woman. In real life, I am also female, and also in the 'young woman' category, though Heaven only knows how I made it there. At 5ft3" tall, Kitti is one whole inch taller than me. She speaks with my voice, and the only time I have ever put on a kind of play-pretend voice for her is during role-play scenarios. Of course, it is not wholly my voice - it has been mediated not only by my real-life physical body and presence, but also by Kitti's virtual body and presence. I don't think it lost anything along the way. If anything, my voice gains something different when coming out of Kitti's mouth.

'Coming out' - acknowledging the gap between user and avatar - can be a much bigger deal than I have made it out to be. For me, that gap has always been acknowledged, and never hidden. A number of my SL friends have seen my RL face and heard my voice, and I have seen and heard theirs. We're friends on Facebook. But that was a personal choice of mine, and is connected to my intentions within the virtual world. For others, that gap can be narrower or much, much wider - a chasm, almost - and admitting to that can be arduous. 

It is not always met with the greatest acceptance and understanding, either, and I would go as far as to say that some relationships only function within the virtual world if the real world is censored utterly from the equation. As long as that is known and agreed upon by those involved, then there's nothing wrong with that. But what if someone slips up? What if someone changes their mind? What about if a third party, unaware of the agreement, says the wrong thing? There are so many ways things can go wrong and it's not difficult to see why relations might then turn ugly, especially, I would venture, if sexual intercourse has been involved. The situation can also go sour if one person wasn't made aware of the game in hand.

Ultimately, it boils down to lies and expectations. If I poured my soul out to you in SL under the impression that you were going to do the same back, and I learned later that you had spun me a set of well-written lies, I might well be upset. If you tell someone explicitly that you are male in real life, and later on they find out that you are female, or vice versa, they might well be upset. There are a thousand similar situations you can come up with, taking into consideration even the tiniest details which might seem like nothing out of context but which could mean the world to somebody else.

What I think is unfair is when there have been no lies, and the expectations built up have little to do with the person then accused of betrayal. I have friends in SL who were afraid to 'come out', as it were, about their real life selves and were afraid of how I would react, knowing it made no real ounce of difference to me what colour their hair is or what nationality they are or what their sexual orientation is or what they have between their legs. Imagine how difficult it must be to come out to someone who you suspect does care, or will feel lied to, especially if you yourself have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure you have never lied to this person about the truth of the matter.

I'm not saying that everyone who gets upset by a revelation of this kind is a terrible person. I'm not saying that you are never allowed to lie about who you are, or that you should tell anybody in SL or any other virtual world anything about your real life self. Those aren't the issues here - because there is no obligation anywhere to tell the truth or to say anything whatsoever in the first place. I suppose what I am saying is that we need to be understanding of each other, in all situations and positions, and try our best to work these things out. To be supportive, and to consider our own motives for being in the virtual world and for presenting the face and persona we choose to present. It isn't really mid-life crisis kind of stuff; we don't need to sit in dark rooms and contemplate the meaning of life for an hour before we log in. I have already written at length about why our avatars can mean so much to us, and I barely scraped the surface in terms of energy and emotional investment. We need to remember, too, that the reason our words and choices have an effect on other people is because we are connecting with them not only avatar to avatar, but mind to mind. And I think that connection is a good thing, even if it means we get hurt sometimes.

So will you forgive the real life me for my brown hair and superior foot-arches?

Unobviously Obvious

Ha-rumph

A conversation with Norah Vespers in-world yesterday made me realise something unobviously obvious. No, I don't care if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now - it will by the end of the post. I hope, anyway.

When I wrote about the effect SL could have on RL for my essay two years ago, I didn't realise that I had not taken into account a whole vague and difficult-to-fathom relationship between the two worlds and those of us that skip between them. This relationship, as I have said, is vague and difficult-to-fathom, and is based mainly on discontentment. 

An awful lot of time and energy goes into the creation of an avatar, and in my experience, one of the most deterring things about SL to new users is the enormity of such a task. The controls for customising your avatar are not the most intuitive, and though it becomes incredibly simple once you have got the hang of it, I have no doubt that had I not received help from various mentors and friends along the way, I'd have given up trying to make Kitti look good, and would have left SL a long time ago. Your avatar, and the time and energy put into it, represents a kind of stake in the virtual world, especially early-on when you might not have a strong base of friends or a long list of sims you enjoy spending time in.

The problem with this - one amongst many, I'm sure - is that avatar customisation never really stops. I know I have had particularly bad influences in this department since I was effective brought up by fashion bloggers, but I think it's true across the board. Fairs selling new hair styles, new skins, new shapes, new clothes, new furniture in SL remain immensely popular to the point of stupidity, and there are Flickr streams and blogs and in-world groups designed with the specific purpose of informing fanbases when the latest items are going to be on sale. Clothing in the virtual world falls prey to fashion seasons just as it does in the real world - it is a perfectly replicated copy of the capitalist system. And why shouldn't it be? But what it represents is the continual desire to better ourselves physically even in the face of the expanded choices available to us in Second Life. 

Like I said, unobviously obvious.

So were am I going with this? Here: our relationship and continual renewal of time and energy and thus our stake with/in SL is predicated on our continual discontentment. If we feel like we have seen and done everything, as if there is nothing about our avatars we can improve, what would we do? We'd probably log out.  When we begin to feel the malaise written about in my blog post, 'Sick and Tired', the 'cure' is often a partial, if not total, revamp of our avatars. 

Told you Kitti was going to be barefoot forever...except when she's wearing roller skates...

The cynicism of this is not lost on me, nor do I really think that the only reason anybody logs into SL is to buy new things to make their avatar prettier. That doesn't always mean buying new things - sometimes, finding things we had forgotten about in our inevitably extensive inventories can breathe life back into an avatar, too. For example, I'd completely forgotten about my roller skates from the Secret Store. And although I logged in yesterday with the expressed purpose of going to Glam Affair and buying the new 'Lucy' skin in the palest shade, then hung around in-world to decorate my largely-empty skybox, what I got the most enjoyment out of was finding that Norah had logged in and talking with her for a while. Then, when she logged out, I proceeded to roller skate around said skybox (which is shaped like a rectangular doughnut) as fast as I could make Kitti go until she spontaneously tripped up over nothing and went somersaulting through the air and into a wall. Hilarious.

Norah has since inadvertently suggested that my skybox could be used for a roller derby, and I reckon that could be really cool! Anybody want to join us? I'm deadly serious. IM me. But that's beside the point.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that whilst I enjoy dressing Kitti and making her look good, that is only a portion of what I enjoy about SL. But it is still a portion.

Pussycat Pussycat, Where Have You Been?

Not to London to visit the Queen. Actually, I have travelled in the complete opposite direction, and am currently in a town an hour outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

What does this have to do with Second Life? Very little, actually. But I know I haven't been in-world very much over the past couple of weeks, and I'm afraid that this trend is set to continue, although I have managed to log in a couple of times.

My absence is due to the fact that my RL theatre company are performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this month. Our show opens next Monday, and runs until the end of the festival, and there is lots of putting up posters and handing out flyers and paying of insurance to be done in the meantime. And lines to learn. Don't forget the lines I have to learn.

I'll be back soon. And I'll be back to some serious blogging. I promise. 

Where have you been?

When I logged in last night to take a picture to use for this placeholder post, I decided to stop by tram and try on a hairstyle I've been hoping will suddenly just magically fit Kitti's apparently huge head (still no luck). Standing in the hair room was an avatar dressed up as Deadpool. He proceeded to tell me that I had a beautiful mind, which he could tell because of the words I used (those words being "hi" "funny is one word" "that's very kind of you"), and ask me if I'd be his tea-crumpet. He was certainly an interesting man. A real philosopher.

In the end, I didn't get my picture, and had to log in this morning to snap this one. I'm glad, to be honest, because I teleported to the World's End Garden and found it just as the Sun was setting. It's too beautiful for words. Amongst the on-going stress of mounting a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, I needed those few moments with that light and the sea. If you haven't been to World's End, or haven't been for a while, I urge you to go. 

And if you happen to be in Edinburgh (UK) for the Festival this year, send me a message and I'll send you the details of my show. It would be great to see you there, and it's free! I made this picture here - here! - to advise my show a little while ago.

A Handful

Also in love with this skybox from Scarlet Creative, created by/for William Weaver as a gallery space

That's right - I did it. I gave up. I gave in. I gave - sigh - all my money to SLink (no, the prices are very good) and bought a pair of their mesh hands. They match my mesh feet perfectly, which I also have on in this shot, you just, obviously, can't see that far down. I'd been putting it off and putting it off, and then my friends went and bought them and I wondered why it was that I'd been putting it off. Perhaps it was out of loyalty to my lovely nail add-ons from Izzie's, but that isn't really fair because Izzie's makes nail varnishes for the SLink hands, too, so I don't have to give all those lovely nail colours up. And now I'm just babbling.

To the point: mesh hands. Kitti has mesh hands, and they're beautiful. There isn't too much more to it than that. 

I've been waiting for an excuse to use this pose for literally months

There is a teeny bit more, though. The mesh hands work by using an alpha layer to hide your system hands, then the hands themselves go on top. That reminds me of the hands the inventor makes in Edward Scissorhands, and, I suppose, it is a little like that. But when I put the hand-alpha on this morning, Kitti's breasts suddenly burst out the front of her shirt. Confused, I went into the shirt folder and put the alpha that was supposed to be keeping her chest hidden behind her shirt back on - and her system hands reappeared again. I am a magician, ladies and gentlemen, with a handful of alphas and alphas that are a handful.

When I'd finished scowling (and reluctantly giggling), I remembered that there's a limit on the number of alphas an avatar can be wearing in one go, and Kitti was already wearing four to begin with. A fifth was too many, so was knocking the others off. Her shirt, trousers, hair and feet only attach to her body and appear to lie neatly against her skin because an alpha has hidden the limbs beneath. If I kept going, chasing fallen-off alphas through my inventory, perhaps I could make all Kitti's different body parts appear and disappear like a macabre kind of circus side-show...

But enough. I'm starting to sound hysterical. Who knew a pair of hands could cause such (trivial) trouble.

Stripped

I've been finding more and more lately that I'm photographing Kitti wearing fewer and fewer clothes.

Upon my request, Sian Pearl made these wonderful bracers (full mech arms make me nervous), and when I came to photograph them, I found that they actually looked best when Kitti wasn't wearing anything else at all. "I'm going to take this picture," I said to Sian, "And then bury it." I knew I had to have something somewhere within my inventory to go with the bracers, and eventually I found it - though, admittedly, the outfit is still a little on the naked side. Somehow, posting the nude wasn't an option, despite the fact that it is still, even after I found an outfit I was happy with, a better photo.

Braced

A couple of weeks ago, I took photos of Kitti on the shore at Winter Moon wearing, once again, only a necklace and a pair of pointed elf ears. I wasn't trying to create a fantasy pin-up, only something that seemed ethereal and beautiful. I only shot from the waist up, and had to summon all of my bravery to post the pictures on Flickr (you can see them here - here!). When my mum saw the pictures (Hi Mum!), she posted a comment saying "Hmmm", and when I spoke to her on the telephone, I laughed, a little sheepishly, and asked if she disapproved. I can't remember what her exact words were, but they were basically to the effect that it was unlike me to post images like that. When I told her how difficult I'd found posting them, she laughed and asked why - "it's not your real body, it doesn't matter!"

Does it matter? I think it does. This is the only body that many people are ever going to associate with me, and I'm not sure that I want to show all of it to everyone. On the other hand, why should I hide my body, virtual or tangible? Is my reticence based on archaic, patriarchal, Adam-and-Eve-esque self and sex shame? Is nakedness reserved only for sex and porn, and thus can I only be naked when I intend to arouse? Is there something wrong with wanting to take pictures that do or do not arouse the viewer? Can I not be naked for the sake of being naked? Is my picture somehow lesser if I want it to arouse you? Is my nakedness a gift I can only give to a few before it gets worn out?

I don't think that the pictures I took at Winter Moon are particularly arousing, and when I took Kitti's clothes off this morning and realised she looked beautiful and powerful and vulnerable all just as she was, it wasn't to create an image that I would label as pornographic. I appreciate that this is the internet, and Rule 34 of the Internet states that if you can think of it, there is porn of it, and I accept that arousing images and pornography are subjective. What I am trying to say it that creating something pornographic was not my intention. Can I honestly say, however, that I didn't want Kitti to look sexy? That I didn't want her to look beautiful? No. I wouldn't even try. It pleased me that Kitti looked beautiful, and, as I have said, strong and vulnerable all at once. Combined with that Jessica Rabbit -esque hairstyle, Kitti did look sexy.

The atmosphere of the naked picture is soft, and I could imagine that it was taken mid-stride as Kitti made her way over to a wardrobe to don the rest of her gear. In the images I have posted here, I tried to keep that strong/vulnerable aesthetic, but I lost that sense of movement, of direction, of intent in the bargain. Kitti's lacking attire is now on purpose, her outfit already complete, and it looks as if she has paused to consider something, rather than having been caught mid-stride. The tunic with its red buttons forced me to bring more colour into the picture, tying in the red with the blue that had previously been the focus of the picture. Now the blue pops because the red makes it - which, don't get me wrong, I love, but it all adds up to make a different photo. And has, arguably, a much more sexual agenda.

Braced II

All because I didn't think it was right to post a picture of my virtual body naked on the internet.

Feminism isn't, truly, about papering the streets with images of the naked female body and expecting everybody to simultaneously notice and appreciate but not be aroused, and just accept it. Sometimes, I think the feminist message gets confused in that way, and it's not helpful for anybody. Feminism is about having a choice, and being able to make it and have others judge you on the merits of you and the choice, not their pre-defined idea of what you ought to do based on what you have between your legs. It is also about feeling confident and stable enough to defend your position when challenged, and to not let the opinions of others sway yours without your consent. If somebody else came to me with this conundrum, I would tell them to follow their instincts and their heart, and only do what made them comfortable. Whilst I don't think I am the kind of person that lets others beat me with pre-conceived notions about my gender, I don't know what makes me comfortable in this situation. I am stuck in a limbo between guilt and more guilt. 

And as you can see, I have not posted the picture here. Perhaps I will yet. I honestly do not know.