The Poise of a Princess

a type of religion

So, the Fit for a Princess event is on its second round, and I am still, by some miracle, on the list of bloggers, so here is my post.

Poses. You have to love poses. Poses can make or break a picture, and so far some of my favourite items from both rounds of this fair have been the poses. The ones pictured above are from nani ('whirlwind'), and I love how, in this set-up at least, Kitti appears to be appealing to the virtual gods - first in worship and then in annoyance. This kind of bargaining with deities you only half believe in was fairly standard when I was growing up, so much so that it has become a kind of trope. Church on a Sunday? No way. But want to win the lottery, or blame someone for everything that's going wrong in your life? Better Call Saul. Or God.

balletic

This second set is from positure, and is named 'Princess Roza'. Princess Roza is obviously a ballerina, and I love the simple elegance of these dance-like poses. They make for beautiful shadows too, which, combined with my super cool projector, made for some interesting layering.

There is much more at Fit for a Princess than poses. Click here to go and check it out - here! If you'd like to see the pictures from this post larger, please click here - here!

Paradise Lost

Good company

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to get the chance to see Paradise Lost, performed by the Basilique Dance Company, in SL. Whilst I'd seen some of Basilique's work at the MIAMAI BlackLabel fashion show in December, I hadn't seen anything like a full dance show, and I was really intrigued with the mechanics of the piece.

WARNING: this blog post contains spoilers. If you are going to see the show, I would strongly advise that you do not continue reading. It would be great if you'd come back later and let me know what you thought of it in the comments though :).

To continue:

I was rather pleasantly surprised. Using poses and animations embedded in our pew cushions and some controls similar to those of the Restrained Life Viewer, the audience were manipulated into interacting with the performance in a very immediate way and were, at a couple of points nearer the beginning of the performance, transformed from angels (a compulsory costume, sent to us before the show) into devils. For reasons I'm not wholly sure of, the company told us beforehand that this would happen, although knowing didn't take too much away from the spectacle of it actually happening. As devils, we danced and frolicked with the fallen Lucifer amongst the prim-fires of Hell. Watching your avatar get up and move and change into something else without your fingers anywhere near a keyboard or mouse creates a slightly bizarre out-of-virtual-body experience I hadn't even considered possible before.

Audience-devils and the prim-fires of Hell (the orange on the right there)

There was not an enormous cast, and a narrator with a beautiful reading voice told us pieces of the story at different intervals to help us to interpret the dance sequences and scenes. There was music to accompany the whole thing too - classical, and they seemed to repeat Lacrimosa a few times (unless I am mistaken, which is highly possible) which makes sense considering the subject matter of the show. 

 

The mechanics of the dance itself, I cannot describe because I don't know all the details. I don't know if the dancers make their own animations, or whether they scout pose and animations shops and create a collage of movements to make a bigger dance sequence. Does anybody reading this know? I'm not sure which of those methods would be more difficult. The amount of work undertaken to create a virtual show in which the cast dance for almost as hour must be insane.

 

The set was ingeniously set up so that alpha layers (think of them as invisibility cloaks) could be removed and replaced, effectively making whole vistas appear and disappear into thin air.  Little did we know that the pews (hidden in the above picture by an alpha) we had filed into at the start of the piece were hovering just a foot or so above a cloaked River Nile. 

 

The alphas made it quite difficult to move the camera around (imagine getting stuck pivoting a camera around an object you can't see - yup, it's as weird as it sounds) which I found I had to do on a number of occasions when the company's remote control of my camera stopped working. I think that small strangeness is worth it, though, for the spectacle of the scene revelation.

The Nile

There were some obvious issues with the performance. Despite the compulsory costuming and all of the tips Basilique gave us to improve our experience and decrease lag, the piece suffered immensely from lag. In places, it made the otherwise smooth dance moves seem stilted, and some of the more fantastical sets and costumes (like the prim fire in the picture further up, which seemed like an orange wall rather than flames for a little while) were slow to rez, leaving grey blocks in their place until they did. When there are this many avatars in one space with this much going on, however, lag is inevitable, and I think that each dance sequence lasted long enough for us to get the gist, even with lag interfering. There was always something to look at: the snowy winter world of Adam and Eve's exile and the wide River Nile were particularly impressive.

Adam and Eve are exiled. The audience, angels once more, look on

When you are performing in SL, you have the ability to bring in all these 'real' elements like grass and water and even weather systems of rain and snow, and it would be a shame not to take advantage of them. However, there's a reason we don't use actual grass and actual water and implement sprinkler systems in real life theatres, and that's because it's highly impractical for very little real gain. A theatre audience is usually willing to suspend disbelief and go with you if you tell them the bare space you are inhabiting is really a forest. This willful and happy desire to believe can be somewhat dampened, however, in the virtual world by lag, and thus I think there's a delicate balancing act in working out how much scenery is worth how much lag. Since lag in the first place is inevitable, the scenery provides a reinforcement, a back-up, to the stilted and sometimes slow-to-reveal-itself action, but it also works to increase that lag.

 

A question arose when Adam and Eve, enlightened with knowledge and feeling, for the first time, lust, decided to have sex. I expected the sex to be illustrated via a fiery, erotic dance, but in a surprise move Basilique decided to go for a more direct approach. What's more, they didn't use any vanilla missionary 'standard sex' or even especially loving and sensual kind of poses, but instead chose one that features Adam standing and sort of lifting Eve onto himself and bouncing her about like one of those little balls attached to a bat by a piece of elastic. Despite the seriousness of the moment (this is, after all, Adam and Eve sealing their fate as exiles from Eden and God's grace), I couldn't help but laugh, and I wonder why Basilique chose to make this departure from dance at that moment.

In terms of the story itself, Basilique introduced some really interesting aesthetics and ideas. God, appearing to watch Adam and Eve fall in love in the Garden of Eden, was green, and whilst this might seem to be a little pagan and hippie, it worked well with the earthy, natural feel of the Eden scene and the crowd of animals within it. Eden was organic, and that contrasted drastically with the dark rock red-and-black of Hell. The Archangel Michael looked seriously bad-ass, and wouldn't have been out of place if you'd popped him next to Ezio in Assassin's Creed.

The decision to make Lucifer female, and pointedly so, was also intriguing. It makes perfect sense, however, considering that the Blame For Everything Sinful falls to Eve, a woman, and that women are often considered in Biblical, mythological and historical contexts are being the origins or creatures of sin. That it is a woman who persuades Eve to eat the fruit, and a woman with whom God then wages war, opens up a whole can of gender worms. There were perhaps ways to explore this idea more, but they'd be dreams for another show, as I'm not sure they'd fit within this project as it is. 

 

I haven't read Paradise Lost, and I don't know whether any scripts exist for it and/or where Basilique drew the exact inspirations for the wording of their script. But the most interesting idea that arose from the way they told the story, for me, came with the description of Adam choosing to take a bite of the fruit. If I recall, the narrator told us that Adam, faced with Eve holding out to him the apple to bite, realised that Eve had betrayed God and knew she would be exiled. If Eve was exiled, Adam would be left alone in the Garden of Eden and, fearing loneliness, Adam took a bite of the apple too.

 

Eve offers Adam the apple

Whoa. Hold the phone. Back it up. In my interpretation of the narrator's words, Adam, surrounded by the love of God in the perfection of Eden, was lonely, and in the end chose companionship, love and sex with Eve over the safety, perfection and closeness of God. I do not claim to know whether Basilique intended for the audience to see it this way or not - this is strictly my understanding and imagination here. But I wonder how different the dance might be if Adam's loneliness, and Adam's decision to be with Eve rather than God were the focus of the story. Again, that's subject matter for a whole other show.

Witnessing this production was certainly an experience, and judging by the comments the audience were making as the dancers took their bows, it was enjoyed by the majority. With the limitations of SL and lag stacked against them, I applaud the ambition and the dedication of Basilique. I haven't heard of anyone else creating anything like this in SL, and a show of this magnitude is certainly an undertaking. To achieve so much and so well is fantastic. I think this is definitely a troupe to watch as they go forward and as SL and virtual technology gets cleverer and cleaner.

Stuck in Yesterday

Tiny irony: I took this screenshot last night...so technically, I took it yesterday. That is the level I'm at here.

Plurk has been buzzing lately with conversations about the changes Linden Labs have been trying to make to the Terms of Services and, freshly, news about the Australian annulment of same-sex marriage. I know very, very little about the former issue, but I saw the second on the BBC, and right in the middle of the television screen was a placard held by who-knows-who dismissing gay marriage because it isn't accepted in the Bible.

How are these two issues connected? They both represent our attempts to make new rules and regulations for today's people, and we aren't finding it very easy. If anything the media says is to be believed, there are many other ways in which our law system is becoming out of date. The very foundations of our societies are formed by treaties and agreements signed over fifty years ago by people who thought we'd all be flying around on jetpacks now if they could imagine this time at all. 

Those treaties and agreements are intensely important, and whilst they do the job generally, they don't take into account the way we have changed. They don't take into account the Internet, nor the collaborative way in which it allows people to work and to share ownership. In an age of CCTV and Obama reading our emails, we need to redefine 'privacy' and what we are entitled to. In an age of school shootings and children on Prozac, we need to have a conversation about mental health and gun ownership. I could go on.

That people think they are exempt from the law, even when that law has been revisited recently, is obvious: Mark Duggan, slavery in Bristol, even the crisis in Syria are examples of that. These issues should, technically, have been covered by the Geneva Convention, as well as anti-racism initiatives and on-going investigations into police brutality and what it does to your brain to hold a gun in your hand. It's a huge job but we have to keep going back, to look at these problems, to look at the laws and the attitudes that govern them. We need to make sure that they are applicable and relevant to the people they are governing, and we need initiatives in place to spread awareness, understanding, and acceptance of responsibility. 

I am not so naive as to think that there will never be people who commit crimes, and I know that there are a million mitigating factors that come into play, but I don't see how we can be ready to deal with those maturely and sensitively if we are not sure of what, exactly, we have allowed and not allowed in the first place.

I admit, I am not a religious person, but I have grown up in a country whose laws come from the Bible, and I have respect for the Bible as an important and sacred-to-some text. The Bible encourages us to be responsible and to be conscientious - to think of others as well as ourselves, and to look at each other with love. When in doubt, I understand that it is one of many places people go to look for an answer, but I think it is very, very important to remember that those words were committed to paper centuries ago. They weren't given to us; they were given to the people that lived centuries and centuries ago. They were given to people that couldn't imagine the world being anything like the way it is in 2013. They couldn't imagine a jetpack to even begin to envision us flying around with them right now.

The rules we make have got to take into account the way we have changed as well as the ways that we haven't. Go back to Geneva, make our current leaders sign the treaties they weren't even alive to agree to the signing of in the fifties after we have updated them to talk about Guantanamo Bay and the Internet and the liminal space of an airport. 

This will take time, and I am sure that we will face teething problems. The trick, I think, is to be patient but determined. Keep going, keep pushing, keep being sympathetic to everyone, not just those that share your cause. Keep going keep going keep going.

We are not the same people we were twenty years ago, let alone fifty years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. And we all deserve happiness, safety, honesty and love.

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.