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.

Wussy Tuna

~ (o.o) ~

This morning, I was whisked away, spur of the moment, by Ruina to Innsmouth. Although I haven't read any Lovecraft (shock horror - I know, I know, pipe down), I am familiar with some of his themes and ideas, and even if I hadn't been, this little town was a treat.

The sim is pretty old school in that pretty much everything appears to be made out of prims. But it's done really well, and there is obviously a lot of love in those broken buildings and rusted, broken cars. Right at the beginning, there's a tunnel bridge that reminded both Ruina and I of the film Beetlejuice, and I should have known then from that shared recollection how awesome this date was going to be. 

We toured the ruined town, getting rained on and being sure to steer as clear of the water as we could. There were monsters aplenty, and when forced to confront them, we realised that actually, they were pretty wussy.

The fish jokes are endless

The real monsters on the sim were Ruina and I, laughing at the poor fishy men and making awful jokes about feeding the fish lord Dagon tuna for his lunch. Coming out of His Almighty Wetness' hall, we came across a gentleman who attempted to engage us in roleplay. We played along, but only half, and pretty soon the poor sociologist was more scared of us than any finned god. We were pretty sassy.

On a more serious note - just for a moment - the sim really is fantastic, and there are some wonderful little details that really make it really interesting. You could spend a long time just wandering around it, and Ruina informed me that those little details change periodically, so it's worth stopping by every now and again for a peek. You can visit it by clicking here - here!

This stunning lady was standing in a church, right about where the cross would usually be. She's horribly beautiful.

I am always drawn to windows. I've yet to decide whether I like this shot or not.

And - less serious now - there are some brilliant poses just waiting for you to click on them.

Oh no!

Ruina, jealous, wanted some slime t0o. I had to take the picture from this angle because her cigarette really makes it.

I feel as if I haven't written substantially enough about this date here, but I don't know what to say beyond that it is a fantastic sim, and that I had a fantastic time. Thank you so much, Ruina, for taking me there!

And - I almost forgot. We got to meet the Great Cthulu. Cthulhu? Cthulululuh...lu? Am I spelling that right?! Anyway. Him. We got to meet him.

Yeah. Him. See, you knew who I meant.

It was like that when I got here

Click here! to see this full-size on Flickr

It was like that when I got here, I swear it. There were no signs of forced entry, but the CCTV camera has been spray-painted black, too, so I doubt you'll get anything off there. Why would anybody want to do that to the BaC® Conflict Management Centre™, sian's new roleplay hangout? I simply cannot imagine. I'm not paid to imagine, right? Right. Anyway.

Click here to read about BaC on sian's blog - here! or click here to go straight to the hangout - here! Or do both. I'm not here to tell you want to do.

Fall (from Grace)

Left to Rust

Strawberry Singh's meme challenge for today is a few questions about Autumn. It included suggesting we take an Autumn-themed picture to go with the post, but after despairing searching for good autumnal sims that weren't full of afk avatars photo-bombing every shot, I decided I'd take a different angle on the theme. 

So here - I give you Kitti-turned-Ariadne (if Ariadne had pointy teeth, and the sense to steal some armour, which I'm not wholly sure the Ariadne of the stories had). Ariadne put herself out to help Theseus escape the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, and received in return what amounted to a quick roll in the sack and then abandonment. Theseus got bored with her and instead of braving up and telling the poor girl how he really felt, he left her miles from her home, miles from everything she knew and loved, on a random island in the middle of the sea. 

What a bastard. Silly, silly Ariadne. 

If that island had been Autumnal England, Kitti-Ariadne would quickly realise that, beautiful as the island was, it was wet and windy and cold. The fog coming in off the sea would stick in her lungs and smell faintly of burning (am I the only one that thinks that?), and start to rust her armour. Hopefully she'd land somewhere in the North, because the South of England is pretty disappointingly flat once you get passed the pretty cliffs.

Anyway. The Challenge.

1. Is Autumn your favourite season? Why or why not? - Autumn is my favourite season, but it is often disappointing. As I look out of the window now, the leaves on the trees are green and muddy brown, and it's raining. Autumn is supposed to be thin jacket/jumper weather - not too hot, not too cold. Red leaves on the trees would be very, very nice. It's also my birthday next month.

2. Do you call it Autumn or Fall? - Autumn. I exploited what I believe is the American term, 'Fall', for the title of this post, but that's about it.

3. What kind of weather does your area get during this season? - The same as the rest of the year. I live in England! :P No, seriously. It's a little cooler, and the Sun can be lovely and bright...but it also rains a lot, and is damp. Apparently, it's unseasonably warm here right now, but I think the weather is just being a bit crazy. 

4. What colour do you associate with Autumn? - a nice crisp red :)

5. Which Autumn related sim is your favourite at the moment? - I don't have one! If anyone has any suggestions, please send them to me. I tried Strawberry's suggested Tempura Island, but there were afk avatars everywhere. I took the photos for this post at a completely unrelated sim, but I was inspired by the grey-greenery and the oh-so-English Autumn fog. The name of the sim is The Citadel of the AdEternum Horde.

Oh - one last thing. The Kitti-Ariadne should have a conclusion. I think she's a savvy kind of girl. Maybe she used Theseus just for the lift, knowing he was a bastard. She was probably weary of these 'heroes' to start with, especially after hearing what happened with Jason and Medea. I reckon Kitti-Ariadne would make this little green island work for her.

Weary

Click here for: Strawberry Singh's original post and the pictures from this post (and many that don't get blogged) on Flickr.

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 Love Letter to Hangars Liquides

My favourite sim - aside from the one that houses my lovely skybox garden, of course - is Hangars Liquides. If you hadn't worked this out already...where have you been?! What I love about Hangars is...pretty much everything. It is a beautifully built science-fiction sim, and though it is dark and mysterious, and it is often raining, it is not without a sense of humour. 

Its builder, Djehan Kidd, is probably a genius. She pays so much attention to detail that there is even graffiti on the walls, and, in one apartment, there is a smoking cigarette resting in an ashtray. The sim features almost every kind of setting you could require from a science-fiction sim (at least in my limited experience of sci-fi, anyway) and probably some settings that had never occurred to you before: including busy streets, a market, a nightclub, a sky garden, a temple, public baths, holding cells, scanning machines, offices, junkie apartments, a taxi system and the most beautiful virtual beach I have ever seen...and the list goes on. 

It is presided over, too, by Lawrence Celestalis, who is a wonderful and charming gentleman who was totally cool with me repeatedly throwing my avatar off high objects and attempting to photograph her mid-fall. That was one of our first encounters, actually, when he caught me doing that, and do you know what he did? He laughed.

The one thing I hate about Hangars Liquides is that, no matter how many times I have tried (and I have tried many times), I cannot take good photographs of the sim when my intention is to take good photographs of the sim. In other words, I only seem to be able to capture the beauty and the intricacy of Hangars Liquides when I'm trying to photograph Kitti in that setting. My general landscape-type photos fall utterly flat, and do the sim absolutely no justice whatsoever. 

So here. Instead of posting a whole bunch of flat, useless, unflattering landscape-type pictures of Hangars Liquides, I am going to post utterly un-new pictures of the sim, some of which may have appeared on my Flickr before if not on here, and hope that these give you a sense of what an utterly wonderful place it is. If you want some more, please click the links at the end of this post - or visit! 

Scanning

Le Jardin Electric

The Beach

In the street - the streetlights make me want to be a saint

Apartments for rent

Apartments for rent - with the wonderful Mr.Celestalis

For more: Hangars Liquides in my Flickr stream / Hangars Liquides on the whole of Flickr.

Want to visit Hangars Liquides? Taxi!

Rolling Flashback

As you may or may not recall, I spent five weeks last Summer in SoCal, staying with my mum in a little 'city' not far out of LA. On a couple of days, tired of the heat, we retreated to Westfield, Santa Anita, and spent the day wandering through beautiful air-conditioned shops. When we had to venture outside, either to go into another shop or to rush back to the car - hiss! sizzle! -, we passed by these utterly charming wicker chairs and tables, arranged beneath parasols. I'm sure these arrangements much exist in the UK, but I've never seen them. I've never seen a long enough period of good weather to warrant their existence! I thought they were great. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that I took a photograph. 

In SL today, I found them! Their virtual twins. I know it sounds silly, but I've spent the last however many months being haunted by California (in a good way). It seems so strange and alien to me that I was ever there, and that has been made more strange, now, since the next time I go out to visit my family State-side, it will be in an entirely different location (they moved house - to Arkansas!). It would be so easy to think that the Summer was a dream. A very hot, unusually humid, dream. 

So yes. I got quite excited. And it presented an opportunity to show off my new buys today, which are special because I got them from the Arcade and I've never been to the Arcade before. It was an interesting experience.

Look at them! So inviting! Wicker chairs!

The Arcade - for the uninitiated - is basically a kind of pretty warehouse space that is...well. An arcade! Shops in SL make items specifically for the event and put them into machines called gachas, which are basically those domed things filled with toys. You put a penny in, and out pops a toy at random. It took me longer to get into the sim that I actually spend there (the sim was full!). I didn't stay there long. I wanted some skates, and one of those cute animal backpacks, and then I left.

I'm going to stop with the rambly anecdotes now. Just. Wicker chairs! Westfield! Santa Anita! SoCal! Summer! Me! Roller skates!

Steel Buns

Today, I threw together this outfit based on a prize Sian Pearl has created for the hunt her shop is taking part in, and I skipped off merrily to investigate sci-fi themed sims in which I could snap some vaguely interesting photos. I ended up - against my initial, better, judgement - in an aforementioned notorious space brothel bar, but managed to find a relatively quiet, relatively plain, spot in which to take what I hoped would be a decent shot. 

I had not been there five minutes when the IM came through: "Come join me", it read, "I'm in a dark alley."

"Why are you in a dark alley," I replied, "When there are all these lovely electric lights to bask beneath?" God only knows how he found me in such a large sim when, according to my mini-map, he was nowhere anywhere near me. 

"Come and join me," this male avatar wrote to me again. "Do you want to play?"
"No," I replied. "Sorry. I'm sure you'll find somebody who does!"

Considering the reputation of this notorious space brothel bar which labels itself a place for "rape, forced sex, alien sex, and bdsm", these IMs were very unforceful and not as presumptuous as some I have received on much nicer, happier sims. But doesn't get away from the fact that what we are talking about, here, is the proposition of a rape fantasy. The proposition of forced sex and, I'm sure, some kind of sexual enjoyment of the scenario in the real world by this person. That he propositioned me is not the issue - I was in a place where people go to do that kind of thing, and he followed the etiquette perfectly by asking me rather than attempting to force the fantasy upon me. No; the problem here is my response.

What did I do when asked if I would allow my avatar to be potentially forced into all kinds of strange and definitely uncomfortable-looking sex positions and acts? I apologised. I didn't just say "no, thank you" and move on. I apologised, and felt the need to offer him a bizarre kind of compliment.

Why did I do that?!

I got the photos that I wanted at Insilico, not the unnamed notorious space brothel bar. They weren't what I originally wanted, but I got to be a little bit more creative in my self-portraiture, I guess.

Gaaaah.

Steel Bun(ny Ear)s

Click the image to enlarge, or click here to see it on flickr.

Loose Ends

As I wander through SL, I seem to gather a whole lot of screenshots that go into my screenie folder and never see the light of day again. And a thousand tiny incidents take place, and I find lots of really cool things to share, and I never write about them because they aren't, by themselves, worth a whole blog post. So I figured I'd pile them all into one blog post, and...well. Be done with them!

So first of all; remember my cat? (If you don't, click here - here!) I logged in a couple of weeks ago to find that my cat was nowhere to be seen. I searched the whole of my house, and my surrounding 'garden' - which is empty, apart from a tree and a very small patch of flowers. When I couldn't find her, I started to panic. How had I lost a cat - a virtual cat, no less, that was tethered to this patch of ground?! 

You can see her name there, over the hedge!

Because the damn thing was hiding in my hedge. In the hedge. The hedge I had assumed was solid. My friend Croon found her for me - but then I couldn't get her out. A whole lot of cursing later, she came out of her own volition. Damn cat. 

Other than that, she's doing fine. She grew some more, and after a software update, she now has more cuddle options, and my inventory doesn't get filled up with cat-toys everything I play with her. That's good - my inventory is full of all kinds of random things that would need a post of their own to explain, let alone catalogue!

Friends again <3

 After deciding that I needed to get out more, I went to Torley Island and found these really cool pieces of giant origami...

I know Kitti isn't tall in SL terms, but wow!

 ...and whilst I was there, I got to sit in another really big chair - and you know how I live for that!

Really big chair!

  ...and  I was then given a really cool add-on type thing that allows you to defy gravity and walk on the ceiling!

Look Ma, no hands! - and no strings!

The add-on was given to me by Laertes, with the intention that I could use it for roleplaying scenarios on his new shipyard at Botany Bay, but so far all I have done is walk around my ceiling a little bit. The funniest thing was that when I activated the add-on whilst still wearing my animation override, I spun around in circles. I have absolutely no idea why that happened, but it did make me giggle. Sadly, I didn't get a decent screenshot, but I do have some game capture software on my laptop, so maybe I'll utilise that.

I've also been doing some building - which, after my first post about building, I'm sure you cannot imagine. It took me so long last night, and I found the whole thing so fiddly...but I was getting pretty tired of having to throw up a wall everytime I wanted to make my own background for my screenshots, and the wall wasn't the prettiest thing in the world. So I tried to build something a little cooler, and a little more discrete. I'm not really sure what to say about them, so I'll just plonk them here.

By some miracle, I managed to put this together.

Applying textures :)

I couldn't work out why the walls were darker than the floor -

- and I could only fix it by making the walls glow XD

The end result!

After a little more playing around with the textures, I managed to make the outside of the build glass. So you can see in, but, as you can see from the above image, you cannot see out. Cool, huh? Well, I thought so.

Not the best screenie, but, I tried. I'm learning!

Well, that just about concludes my loose ends post. It's pretty much tied up, and I think I have sufficiently overloaded this post with images. There is one more thing, however. 

Does anybody remember a time when the girls' bathroom at Necronom VI wasn't out of order?!

>.<

Pretty Dangerous

On the advice of a friend, I visited a sim created by Bryn Oh called "Anna's Many Murders". I believe it is part of his Immersiva project, though I'm not one hundred percent sure that I have that the right way around. I confess, I had never heard of Bryn Oh, or Immersiva, until I clicked the landmark my friend had sent me, and teleported into what appeared to be a wooden box. 

I know that, ordinarily, I don't really like to use this blog as a kind of virtual Blue Planet Guide, but I do like to record the things that I come across that I find amazing or interesting, and this find certainly falls into both of those categories. I am not going to log here a walk-through - that would ruin it! - but there are a few things that I should like to mention and talk about.

Inside the wooden box with me was a giant bee holding some letters, and a statue of a girl, surrounded by plastic bags that looked as if they were caught in a breeze. On the wall behind her was a placard, and as I went in closer to read it, the plastic bags turned into butterflies, as if by magic. It was a beautiful illusion, and a very unexpected one. It appears to work on a timer, so that if you hang around, the butterflies will, eventually, turn back into plastic bags. It is repeated later on in the sim as you walk through it, to even greater effect, but I will let you find that one for yourselves.

I caught them as they began to transform; by the end, the bags were gone.

The placard on the wall was the beginning lines of a poem, and as you move through the sim and encounter each of the installations, you learn more and more lines of the poem. It's a wonderful mix of exploration and art, and it is beautifully done, both in the realisation, and the "ease of use", if you like - it is easy to work out which way to go, and the poem is in equal parts funny and disturbing. The title of the piece is not a brag; there are, indeed, many murders committed by our friend Anna.

A darker streak.

Sadly, I was not able to visit all of the sim with my avatar. At one point, there are steps which lead to a box in the sky, and Kitti's legs are apparently not long enough to make the crossing. Flying is disabled on the sim, and so is teleporting around it, so when Kitti fell off the step and down the side of the cliff, I received a notice that she had died and been returned to my home sim. I did manage to use the camera functions to look at what was in the box, but I was rather frustrated that I couldn't get Kitti up there to look at it properly!

I was also intrigued, and disturbed, by the faces on the models. It would appear that the artist has taken photographs of real life faces and pasted them onto the skulls of her characters. The effect is jarring, and eerie.

Don't mess with Anna! Behind her, the steps I could not climb.

I'm not sure, had I been the artist, that I would have done this, but I can't deny that it is certainly effective. I hope she knows the people these faces belong to...and what does it mean if she doesn't? I'm surprised that I haven't had nightmares about her!

Much of the build is really beautiful, however, and I was completely won over by this lightbulb tree. It seems like such a wonderful idea, and it was things like this, details like this, that I found really drew me into the artwork.

The Lightbulb Tree, and a steampunk-style horse behind.

Bryn Oh is not the first, I would imagine, to combine artistic and poetic elements with the explorative-game style. I have visited sims in the past that have been dedicated to this kind of game, though they are often themed by holidays or festivals or big sales, and seldom, I think, have I come across one so well-thought out, or so atmospheric, as this one. Had I been able to run my graphics any higher, and did I have any grasp of Windlight settings at all (for non SL users, Windlight is some kind of software to do with lighting in-world), I imagine it would be even better.

I also find it really exciting that Second Life can be used as a platform for not only showcasing art, but for creating it. We aren't viewing a facsimilie of the art; we are viewing the art itself, and there is something invigorating about the adaptation of new software for art's sake - especially in a day and age when funding for the arts and the future of the artists relying upon that funding has become so uncertain. 

A quick Google search turned up Bryn Oh's blogspot - here - and a quick in-world search for "Anna's Many Murders" turns up the landmark you need to visit. I got the impression that, as part of an on-going project, the sim would not be around for so long, and that I had already missed previous artworks by Oh. If there are any Bryn Oh fans reading this, please enlighten me? I am definitely interested in seeing more of his work.

On Being Offended

Now, I don't like to lie to you, dear readers, so here's the deal. I wasn't going to post today, or, at least, I wasn't going to post about this. I had another topic for discussion lined up, but the chances of me coming here today and committing it to virtual paper were incredibly slim. This evening, however, I logged into Second Life to scout out a couple of sims and found something that has genuinely outraged me. 

Because I am outraged, I should probably not be writing this right now. But I want to write it right now, and so I am going to. 

I will not reproduce the name of the sim, but when I landed there, I was directed to pick up a notecard (basically a Wordpad document) containing the sim rules and roleplay background. That's pretty standard procedure. When I opened the notecard, however, what I found is not something I consider 'standard procedure'. The notecard reads:

'BY ENTERING THE [name omitted] CITY SIM, YOU CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE IN REAL LIFE OVER THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN AND AGREE TO ABIDE BY THESE RULES. 

BY ENTERING [name omitted] CITY, YOU AGREE THAT YOU ARE NOT OFFENDED BY VIOLENCE, ADULT LANGUAGE OR SEXUAL CONTENT, AND WILL NOT HOLD THE OWNER OF THE SIM, OR ITS LEGAL PARTICIPANTS LIABLE.'

...Woah! Hold the phone! Just a minute! Back it up! Let's look at that one more time.

By entering this sim, you agree that you are not offended by violence, adult language, or sexual content - by 'sexual content', of course, they mean rape and public demonstrations of BDSM which, I should like to suggest, are not the same thing.

Don't get me wrong - in many situations (political correctness not being one), I agree with Steve Hughes - but it seems fundamentally wrong to me that this sim is suggesting that it is creating, or collecting, a society of people who are not offended by violence and sexual assault. If you wish to write about these things, by all means go ahead. Many artists and writers the world over have sought to engage with these topics. But I am offended by the idea that people should or might not find offensive breaches of morality and human rights. 

I am offended by the alternatives. What else are they going to do, if not find them offensive? - and, I think, this is the crux of it - Be entertained? Be amused? Should they find pleasure in them? Should they be indifferent? 

There are no rules, I might add, governing what is or is not allowed to take place on this sim. When you sign up, as it were, agreeing not to be offended, are you taking into account all of the possibilities of what could happen within that sim? Perhaps I am overestimating the imagination of the average SL user, but there was a poster on one of the foyer-room walls featuring a pair of handcuffs and advertising the "Hard and Nasty" group. These people are hard and nasty enough to warrant their own group?

I reserve the right to be offended. I reserve the right to be repulsed by some of the darker things humans and avatars are capable of. I reserve the right to engage with material that offends me, but I also reserve the right to be offended by that material, and to draw the line where I want it. 

Why should you ever, ever, give up the right to be offended?

Needless to say, I did not enter the sim.

I shall now cease this rant.

(I also touched on this topic, a little more eloquently, here)

Intimate Ethnography

University deadlines make writing anything nigh completely impossible. A lecturer told me the other day that he was so sick of reading after he graduated that he couldn't even pick up a book to read for pleasure for six months after the end of the university year. I look forward to being able to write entirely at my own leisure again. I'm easing myself into the day with this post, which I've been meaning to write for a few days now - the problems of ethnography. 

A Google 'define: ethnography' search brings up the answer 'the scientific description of the customs of peoples and cultures'. As I'm sure you are aware or can imagine, the idea of anybody writing about anything outside of themselves is problematic. Hell, writing about yourself is problematic. We are all automatically subjected to bias and cultural coding and all sorts of things that immediately begin to detract from our ability to completely understand, on an internal level, something else. 

But that's fine. In more recent times, to be vague, we have stopped trying to deny this and moved into a space in which we simply acknowledge who we are and what we are bringing with us to the table before we begin to talk about whatever it is we are researching. And that suits me - that seems to make sense. I have attempted to do such myself a number of times in various ways around this blog, and I have found it important to inform those people that I spend any real length of time with in SL about my position in the real world. I also respect privacy: I ask permission before I write about anybody in particular and, a few posts ago, I refrained from making my observations and comments about slavery sim-specific. 

I could write about the problems of ethnography and field-research until I turned blue, but instead I just want to bring up a few points about it, specifically in relation to Second Life.

Here, have a stereotypical image representing the idea of ethnography!

One. According to a website I would never normally dare cite, Second Life had roughly 1 million active users in 2011. That's apparently just under the population of Birmingham, UK (so says a slightly more trustworthy website). I think it would be rare to find all those users logging into the virtual world at one time; in my experience, I'm lucky if I bump into anyone at the times I myself choose to log in. The SL grid survey says that there are 30,592 different active sims (stretches of land/places) in Second Life currently. That's a lot of possible destinations for those 1 million people.

How is any of this related to ethnographic problems, you ask? Because it makes generalisations incredibly difficult. When I say "there are some people in Second Life", or "I have seen in Second Life", "or there are lots of...in Second Life", I am, completely and utterly, generalising. What I mean is that I have seen, with my own virtual eyes, a lot of whatever it is I am commenting on - but even that is problematic. As I have just suggested, I am incredibly lucky if I find anybody on the sims I visit, and I'd be counting on a miracle if I am expecting those avatars not only to want to talk to me, but to be able to do so in a language I am familiar with. I don't think that it would be appropriate to go up to random avatars and ask their what their views are on the purpose of a virtual washing machine.

Also, I have approximately 20 different sims bookmarked, as it were, on my landmark list. That's 20 out of a possible 30,592. Now, I've probably been to a lot more sims than those 20, but I have been to nowhere near all 30,592, and it wouldn't matter even if I had, because those sims are subject to frequent change and deletion. New sims arise. Some sims are private. What I feasibly have access to is very, very limited.

I can also see but a fraction of the sims I do visit. Without a better graphics card, I can only view Second Life on the lowest graphics setting, thus rendering many objects grey and blockish. Streaming sim music (which is not always a great idea) is difficult for my laptop to do without lagging Kitti down to a frame a minute, never mind a second, but that is a whole sensory realm I am thus missing out on. 

Two. The level of customisation available to avatars is such that they could change their entire appearance, and through it their projected personality, from moment to moment. They could jump from science fiction sims to romantic sims to historical replica sims as quickly as it took you to read that. There is, arguably, little tethering anybody to anywhere or anything. It thus becomes difficult - though, of course, not impossible - to define groups, cultures, habits. You don't know when somebody is roleplaying a character or speaking as themselves - and, anyway, that 'self' is mediated by Second Life. Our avatars can become what is referred to in The Matrix as 'residual self image'; we perform how we think we act, we create something that represents how we think we look, or how we might wish we looked. But it is not a straightforward conversion, no matter how honest you might try to be.

A-ha! Another one!

Three. Many non-SL users view SL rather judgementally, and for somebody entering the world for similar reasons to the ones I did, those might be difficult to leave at the door. I was one of a class of around twelve students being asked to try out Second Life, and I am probably the only one still engaging with it. A couple of my classmates dismissed it out of hand, saying that they didn't understand what it 'was for'. That's a potentially dangerous question for anyone studying the arts to raise, but that is by-the-by. 

Writing about SL without establishing some sense of superiority complex, then, can be difficult. Personally, I do not think myself to be superior to other people using SL - hello, I'm now one of those people! - but when writing about slavery, or about why people build washing machines, for example, it is difficult not to come across sounding like I somehow know better. I don't know whether or not I do a good job on that, but it is something I am aware of. 

I only wish to place myself within the debate, be open to the ideas evinced/created by SL, and bring what I know about the world, and what I am learning in my Theatre and Performance Studies degree, to bear on what I am experiencing.

Four. Final point. On this blog, I only write about things that I deem interesting or important. That might not be what you find interesting or important, or what other SL users think is interesting and important. If we held a vote across SL, I doubt that everything I have written about here would prove to be important to many other people. 

The information is being mediated - through what I encounter through my experiences in SL, my own personal bias, my slant as a Theatre student, my choices about what is worth writing up, and then through the way I write it and the way you come to understand my words through your own bias.

Having highlighted the complexity and near impossibly of conveying any real sense of 'truth', I shall now continue as normal. What you are getting here instead is a mix of my truth, as it were, and your own, personal to the both of us. How intimate is that?!

And speaking of intimacy: Happy Valentine's Day!

Small Reprieve

I'm aware that my last couple of posts have been a little heavy, and whilst I don't think that that is a bad thing, I don't intend to hammer you all over the head in every post. 

So here. Have some screenshots of me exploring a pretty little sim whose name I have promptly forgotten. I'll sign back in later and find out what it is. I found it via the "Editor's Picks" on the Destination Guide, and it was certainly an interesting place to be. It looked something like an abandoned fairground, and by the shore, the fortune teller machine from the film "Big" (ya'no, with Tom Hanks) was lying crooked, half-beneath the water. For 10L$ (in-world currency), it would tell you your fortune. Having seen "Big" quite a few times when I was younger (it was one of my favourite films), I decided it was probably best to steer clear. 

Whilst I was walking around, a man in camo trousers decided to follow me. He didn't say a word, and, eventually, he took his trousers off - he had khaki shorts on underneath, thank God - and walked off into the sea. As you do. 

A view of the sim from the psychic's hut

I think, after the collar post, my mother is going to start worrying about me...

O, woe is me!

The pose ball said "freak out"...so..um...okay

Tea with the Hatter

Er...not really sure why this was there...

To get these images, I had to turn my graphics up to "medium". It was a risky move even trying to do that, since my system isn't really up to even running SL in the first place, but the difference it made was incredible. On "low", absolutely everything was grey and texture-less. In SL, your graphics card determines the strength of your eyesight, and as somebody who enjoys very good eyesight irl, it can get a little tiresome looking at  virtual grey blobs. 

Enjoy the reprieve. I cannot promise it will last long :P

For more/bigger images, see my flickr.