Facing Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fit for a (once) Princess (of Dorne)

Another round of Fit for a Princess has begun, and the theme, I believe, is the modern princess. Normally, when I do the posts for these events, I like to integrate them with something I wanted to write about anyway, but today I just wanted to make something beautiful, and offer a post of calmness, if you like, in the tirade that is my blog. Here it is.

If you didn't know (and I am sure you might have guessed), I am a big fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. Being in the UK, I had to wait for this week's show until last night. Even though I knew what was coming, it was still absolutely horrid. I put on this dress from Peqe and thought it was something Ellaria Sand might wear - probably in a brighter colour, but she doesn't have Kitti's ginger hair to co-ordinate with (Peqe have made it in lots of bright colours, so you can go for your life).

I don't think I am especially well-suited to being a fashion blogger, but I am trying my best to do these one-off fashion posts. Fit for a Princess is a really cool fair, and it's introduced me to some really great shops I hadn't heard of before - like Peqe, who are now a favourite, and an lar and Lalochezia and elephante who make the best poses. The pose used in my photos is one of Lalochezia's, and I believe from it's name, Cambridge, that it was inspired by our very own English Duchess of, who is a beautiful woman. Who wouldn't want her poise?

If you'd like to visit the Fit for a Princess fair, you can do so by clicking here - here! If not, come and stand by me, and think of Ellaria.

Quick credits: Dress by Peqe and pose by Lalochezia, both at Fit for a Princess. Flowers by zibska. Hair by Truth. Skin by Glam Affair. Nails by Orc Inc. Shoes by ieQED. Hands and feet by Slink.

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.