In Limbo

Over the past couple of months, I have started to feel like my blog is dying. The downside to blogging about my personal virtual experiences and applying a (super vague) performance theory framework over them is that...well...a lot of my virtual experiences are the same. And blogging about gender inequality, unfair expectations, and, I don't know, pubic hair, doesn't automatically change the entire system. The SL I was writing about two years ago is the same SL that exists now (except now we're all wearing clothes made out of chicken wire) and I have, like many of my friends who seem to own land in SL, become something of a shut-in. 

I'm afraid that this blog is dying - and I don't want it to! Writing is one of my absolute favourite things to do in life, and writing about SL has been fun and interesting, and sparked a handful of pretty intense debates with people I have met in-world who read my blog. As you may have noticed, I tend to tie SL issues in with RL ones, and these are issues I care about, or that I think are important. I don't want to stop investigating, I don't want to stop exploring, I don't want to stop writing.

But I'm not sure where I'm heading, here. And I don't really like that. This isn't a goodbye, at all. I'm dithering in limbo. For now, I'm still here. Don't let me go just yet.

Talking about things that are dithering in limbo; I have been dressing Kitti recently in increasingly more gothic-style outfits recently. There are so many Summer fairs on at the moment offering bikinis and beach clothes, but designers Glam Affair and Pixicat have brought out a range of skins and dresses (respectively) over the past couple of weeks that have fed my all-too-English desire to hide from the RL wrathful Sun who has been trying, desperately, to burn me to a crisp. Kitti, being not only English but ginger, looks all-too at ease in her paler than pale skin and decadent dresses, lurking the corners of her skybox. She's been looking increasingly less than human - beyond human, one might say. Preternatural. Maybe even supernatural. I'm working the vampire/ghoul vibe. 

But it's just a vibe, right? It's not like, heh, gingers don't have souls or anything.

...right, guys?

...right?!

[I need to get out more. Would you like to help me get out more? Click here for more info - here!]
[P.P.S.: the images from the post can be seen full size on Flickr - here!. I promise it's worth it.)

A Date to Remember

This week has been busy in terms of dates, and it's fantastic. Yesterday, Norah took me to Rose Borchovski's in-world installation, The Inevitability of Fate. I had been before, but much more briefly and it became apparently very quickly that I had only seen half of what the sim had to offer. Norah's quick wit and considerate, empathetic brain deepen any and every experience, and I just love spending time with her.

but then the war came

Borchovski's piece is part installation, part experience, and part memorial. The Holocaust has had, now, a lot of artistic treatments, and there's always a danger in approaching a subject as painful and enormous as this with any kind of creative lens. It's too easy to dismiss, to belittle, and to appropriate. Of photographing atrocities, Susan Sontag wrote "people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance", but looking at a photograph of a past event is passive and in many respects, too safe to provoke anything more than compassion. 

That isn't to say that compassion is useless or pointless - not at all - but it is an "unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers". Compassion for the victims of the Holocaust has a limited ability to manifest itself in action because the event is past and, as I have said, attempts to create additional memorials are fraught with difficulty. 

At no point during the installation is the word "Holocaust" used. We are introduced to the characters of Beth and Lot, whom the narrative follows, and at no point is it stated that what becomes of them is a fate that was forced upon anyone else. It is obvious, though, from the semiotics and "the war" what this is about. In the subtlety, there are no label-boundaries, nothing separating the audience member from touching, if you like, the horror of what one might otherwise claim as a Jewish experience. At the same time, sitting before my computer, I know that I was not a part of this event, that I hold no claim over anything pictured on the screen before me. It is a flaw of empathy that we struggle to negotiate the ownership of suffering - and that, in my experience at least, we seem to find it easier to respond to the plight of an individual than to the mass murder of a whole.

I am tiptoeing, here, around my own explanation and analysis. I am wrighting, as opposed to writing, it out. If I can keep my foot out of my mouth, that would be a good start.

Beth reaches for Lot

Empathy and sympathy are dangerous, too, in that experiencing them whilst forcing ourselves to look at images of atrocity make us "feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering". If we look beyond the individual, do the multiplication to make the many Beths and Lots, we begin, too, to feel that "the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention". Both of these systems allow for personal detachment, both from the event itself and from any responsibility to do anything other than remember it. "Lest we forget", we mumble as we file passed - and then we go home and put the kettle on and watch reruns of QI.

What the Inevitability of Fate does, then, is offer us a way in to the whole through the individuals Beth and Lot. There is a narrative to follow, but there is little to stop you wandering from tableau to tableau in any order you choose, doubling back to see them again or working backwards. It is still a flat image, yes, contained by the computer screen, but it utilises the liminal space of the virtual as best it can, and employs movement and sound in really interesting ways. Things spring up out of nowhere, other things drop down. You dance, you fly, you hide, you climb. You are bombarded, literally. You are given space to think.

 

There is no accusation in the installation, not pointed fingers. From the beginning, Borchovski has really worked to make the audience feel watched, but that watching is done by a faceless, nameless power that seems to be omnipotent, omnipresent. Placards fly up from the ground bearing the new rules for the new regime, and the voices that repeat them are heavily distorted, inhuman. You are watched by floating, disembodied eyeballs.

you are not allowed

A real effort has been made to include the audience in the narrative, with countless poseballs dotted through the tableaux allowing you to literally insert yourself into the frame. You do not, at any point, however, take the place of Beth or of Lot in any (virtually) physical sense. We are alongside, witnessing, sometimes joining in.

Happy Birthday, Lot!

 

up

 

in happier times

There are no images of atrocity, no reliance on the familiar photographs of the Holocaust that we have come to accept as part of a social consciousness (although there are some photos on display in the sim, they are not emblazoned across the walls and floors and burned onto the retina). Nothing about the scenes feels familiar in any boring, dismissive way, and there is so much going on that the act of looking and exploring never gets boring. At no point, either, does it become too much. The semiotics, as I have said, are recognisable, understandable, but not stale. 

Ultimately, I think the sim works because it can be understood as an expression and memorial of grief - Beth's grief for her daughter, Lot, who goes missing and can safely be presumed dead. We aren't asked to appropriate the horror that befell people who died before most of us were even born, and we aren't told to take to the streets and hang the descendents of those responsible. We aren't asked to imagine that we ourselves have been tortured or killed. We have all, at some point or another, felt the fear of potentially losing a loved one, and the personal horror of that is easily transmutable from the all-too-human and contorted faces of the models before us. 

 

Honestly, I think their expressions are the most human things I have ever seen in Second Life.

Lot and a forbidden book

Beth, in grief

 Again, personal grief is an individual route into an otherwise enormous and difficult subject matter, and taking such a personal interest in an event that categorically did not happen to you has criticism.

 

So much more could be said about this sim, and where it might fit within a canon of memorials and installations. I haven't touched upon the props we are given and told to wear as you follow the narrative (and which have an afterlife as they remain in your inventory when you leave the event). I haven't talked about the use of light, or the installation walls which are covered with names we assume are the names of the dead. I haven't made any kind of list of symbols for further analysis, and I haven't reached for any text books beyond Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others from which I have source all of the academic quotes in this post (if you'd like specific references, I will gladly give them). I haven't touched at all on the performance of guilt, nor on the significance of a memorial in an ephemeral realm. There is criticism in abundance of everything I have brought up here, but I wanted to focus now on what the sim achieved (which I think is a lot) and not what it may have wrongly assumed or been lacking in. But I think, for now, that I have written more than enough.

 

no chance

Thank you so much, Norah, for taking me here and letting me experience it with you. If you would like to visit the Inevitability of Fate, you can do so by clicking here - here! If you would like to share your opinions, comments are always welcome.

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. 

Not Too Soon

Not Too Soon

I have a friend in Second Life whom I haven't heard from in weeks. I'm sure she's fine, but there's always a little worry in the back of your head when someone goes quiet for a while that maybe everything isn't fine. There's a kind of arrogance that goes with the it-won't-happen-to-me assumption that none of us want to be found guilty of, and it feels too much like tempting fate to be something most of us are comfortable with anyway. I've written before about this strange missing-persons problem, and - don't worry - I don't have any real intention of repeating myself. I wanted to focus instead upon another, equally strange, idea involving people that go missing in SL.

Half of the time, we're not sure we want them to come back. 

As I have said on more than one occasion (oh hush), there are a myriad reasons why people sign up to and engage with Second Life, and since many of them are rather on the negative side, it is very difficult not to worry about the quality of first life your friends might be languishing in when not plugged into SL. However, it's also impossible not to hope that their absence might mean that whatever they came to the virtual world in search of might have materialised for them in the real world, and thus their need to log in has been diminished dramatically if not altogether.

The second friend I made in SL was sian pearl, back in the days before she fell out with capital letters, and at the end of one of our first proper conversations, she said to me something along the lines of 'I hope to speak to you again soon - but not too soon'. It's impossible to ignore the idea that spending too much time online and in the virtual world can be unhealthy and detrimental to what may already be a difficult circumstance to exist within IRL. With that in mind, it's easy to see why we might not always want to log in to SL and find our friends online.

I'm not saying that this is the case for my friend. I think she's a pretty well-rounded person and her priorities seem to be in what I would think of, at least, as a good order. Her absence just gave me cause to talk about this. 

I bet she's off somewhere skiing in a bikini and Trent Reznor 'Closer' -esque goggles doing super stunt tricks (safely) and quoting, I don't know, e.e.cummings, to a line of adoring fans. 'Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go'.

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.]

And I Feel Fine

So it's that time of year again. All of the SL bloggers are out in force, posting Christmas themed posts, and here I am, thinking I'll come and talk about building or buying more cats (which I have done) or Kitti's 'fat' thighs (more on that later), or, I don't know, rambling on about my ginger anxiety. I'm not going to talk about those things, however. I am really just going to post a picture and wish you all a merry Christmas. 

But there's a catch - ha ha! My 'Christmas' picture...well...it isn't so Christmassy. It's wintry, though, and I think Kitti's looking pretty bad-ass here, so that's got to count for something, right? 

Posing with me here is Carmine Chris. He's pretty new to SL, and is taking to it like Rudolph to the air on Christmas Eve (oh, come on, I tried). He's a whizz of a builder, and is turning his attentions to scripting, now, too. Keep your eye open - he'll be opening a shop before you know it. 

This is Carmine Chris' first photoshoot. He was very patient, and even suggested posing in other locations, but pickings were pretty slim. Everything is covered in flashing lights and cute scarfed penguins and stuff. Second Life has gone all-out, it would seem, to make its virtual inhabitants feel a bit of the Christmas spirit. Which is nice and lovely and sweet, but not what I wanted, here.

I feel pretty relaxed about Christmas this year. Everything is ready, almost. My family will be arriving on Sunday, and in the new year, I've tickets booked to see my absolute favourite stage-show for what will be my fourth time.  Sounds pretty good to me! There's got to be a catch here, too, right? I've yet to find it!

Anyway. I think we look like incarnate spirits of Winter.

The Winter is Coming!

...well...it might be here already...

Merry Christmas, everyone! Or Happy Holidays. Enjoy whatever you're celebrating, or enjoy the peace.

Oh - and that other thing that (isn't) happening today. You know. The end of the world. We're pretty relaxed about that, too.

And I feel fine

Being an R.E.M. fan, my first stop would, naturally, be to start blasting "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", but I have refrained.

Instead, Kitti and I are listening to: this / this / and this. We're not dead yet.

If You Die in RL...

Talking with a friend in SL yesterday, he mentioned that a particular creator had vanished from the virtual world without a word, and how he wondered what had happened to her. This set me thinking. I have written before about the idea that an avatar 'dies' when their owner logs out of Second Life, but I have only looked at this in terms of a temporary death, the idea being that the owner of that avatar will sign back in at a later point and bring the avatar back to life. It's not that that person ceases to exist, but rather they cease to exist in the virtual plain - whilst continuing in the physical plain.

This is only half of the story, however. Plenty of users sign up to SL and, after their first attempt at trying to navigate the alien landscape and all of its ridiculous sliders and confusing buttons and poorly-spelled offers of cybersex, they give up and never sign in ever again. These are dead accounts, virtual stillbirths, and every so often Linden Labs must run a clean-up and delete all of these accounts that have not been active since their first log-in. In six months time, it'll be like they never existed. What a grim analogy - but you understand my point.

And then there is the other scenario: what about avatars that just vanish? They tell no one they are planning to leave - they leave no suicide notes - and then one day they log out, never to log in again. 

There are plenty of reasons why someone might do this. Enough drama and bullying goes on in SL to make you wonder why you ever bothered signing up in the first place sometimes, and as anybody who has read my blog must realise, there are a lot of things going on in SL that are dark and grim and wrong for a whole host of reasons. It's also really, really easy to get bored, and if you aren't a builder or a creator, and you don't have a whole host of friends who happen to be on a close enough time-zone to you so that you can actually hang out regularly, SL can get tedious quickly. On the other hand, real life can get in the way, or those that use SL as an escape from something in the first world find a different outlet, or manage to resolve the issues that drove them to SL in the first place. 

But there is also a more saddening reason why an avatar might never again be signed in. Their owners can die. Due to the nature of Second Life and the reasons people engage with it, if someone dies in the real world, their loved ones might not even know they have an SL avatar. They might not care if they do know. Signing in and having to tell people what has happened might be too painful - assuming their username and password aren't hidden away. In the face of such a situation, could anybody really be blamed for not wanting to do that? 

It's difficult, when an avatar vanishes so, not to jump to that awful conclusion. You try not to, but the horror of it is inescapable. Perhaps there's an arrogance there, a sense that something awful must have happened to make someone simply remove themselves from your (virtual) life without any kind of a warning. But in some cases, it is almost certainly what has happened. And in many of those cases, we'll receive no confirmation either way.

Anonymity in Second Life brings us together, but also makes sure - in situations like this - that we realise the extent of our separation. For the same reasons that loved ones may not know about someone's engagement with SL, often people in SL do not like to share their real life names and details. There is no way to break that anonymity unless we submit that kind of information, and even then, how far can a name get you? It's crushing just to think about it, and yet this has never even happened to me. But it could.

And the concept stretches into so many other virtual mediums as we become more and move intertwined with the internet. It's important. It's becoming important.

How do we deal with this? Do we have to accept that our virtual lives are temporary, or do we make a move to bridge the gap? Do we start writing clauses and passwords into our wills? Do we say goodbye to each other as if every time is the last? Did we realise any of this when we signed up? How do we move on, here?

Virtual Conscience

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.

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.

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.

Names on the Floor 01

Names on the Floor 02

Hallo!

I started this blog some months ago with the intention of using this space to elaborate on an essay I wrote for a module I took this year, Performing Online. That essay was, as the title of this blog may suggest, about Second Life, and how engagement with the programme (I hesitate to call it a game) might provoke reflection upon experiences within the Real or "First" Life. Not the easiest topic to grapple with! - but I find the whole concept of Second Life interesting, and I guess...here I am.

Before taking the module, I knew very, very little about Second Life. I couldn't have told you what it was for, though an ex-boyfriend of my mother's had mentioned that he played/used SL and went around within it as a bunny-rabbit. When I mentioned that my lecturer had asked us to play SL, a couple of friends and an ex-boyfriend of my own came out of the woodwork and announced that they too had taken to the SL world - the latter, almost amusingly, as a transgender woman. Having friends "in-game", as it were, was a big help, and without them, I would no doubt still be wandering around Welcome Island trying to work out what the Hell I was supposed to be doing.

Although I seem to be sounding pretty negative about the whole experience (I'm not trying to!), I don't think badly of SL at all. I approached the realm with an ethnographer's stance, which may or may not be detrimental to my experience, but the point is...I wanted to see and experience Second Life. I did not sign up to slander those who use the application with more serious intent. If I ever come across that way, please slap me.

If you don't know what Second Life is, I'm afraid that I have no succinct answer. Linden Labs, the creators of SL, have very little to say in answer to that question, but they do provide a video which can be viewed here. It is, almost literally, a second life - only this time, you get to decide how you look, and you don't necessarily have to get a 9 to 5 job to be able to go out and see the world, though if you want to buy hair that doesn't look like it was painted onto your scalp, or somewhere to keep the potted plant someone just gifted you, a job is a pretty good idea.

In my essay, I focused on a couple of specific areas for discussion - SL etiquette and manners, the performance of self (I am a Theatre & Performance Studies student, afterall!), the self and the avatar, sexuality, and then several bizarre relevations that I shall term "curiosities". I'm hoping to use this space to discuss these in further depth, and perhaps to get some feedback on ideas or whatever else if I can find anybody crazy enough to read this blog in the first place.

Oh - and I'm a little trigger-happy when it comes to screenshots. Most of the images I use here, then, will be my own unless stated otherwise. If it interests me, I take a screenie, so, at the very least, this blog should be amusing for that. On that note, I shall leave you with this warning:

if you die in Second Life...

On with the introductions.