Look Mom I can behave like a (folding) chair!

Building and interacting with space at Beliayev

For this week's assignment, we have been asked to describe our more memorable experiences and observations within SL, as well as to speak about a range of exchanges an experiences among the different spaces and sociability patterns within Second Life. Finally, we were given a highly dense option: we should try to relate them to three out of four of this week’s readings.

This week I have read:

• ) "The Digital Dollhouse. Context and Social Norms in the Sims Online" by Rosa Mikeal Martey and Jennifer Stromer-Galley.
• ) "Life in Virtual Worlds. Plural Existence, Multimodalities and other Online Research Challenges," by T.L. Taylor.
• ) "Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment," by Bruce Bimber, Andrew J. Flanagin and Cynthia Stohl
  

Some findings on the first reading, “The Digital Dollhouse," are highly related to my views on identity, representation and embodiment in digital mediated and /or virtual ‘places’. From the reading I have gleaned a sort of confirmation that avatars and their appearance and behaviour are highly related and hyper coded (in a social sense) to the dynamics of group interaction in virtual worlds like SL. This was one of my first impressions in SL, once I became a resident. Another is the issue of the “stereotyped connection” between femininity and politeness, which must be, I believe, a major topic in research on virtual worlds (especially from the perspective of games like the Sims and SL, with such a high percentage of women playing them).
To what extent emerging and developing social norms are related and dependent on the avatar's looks, appearance and behaviour is, I believe, a continually renewed research topic, in connection with an ever-evolving technology and the aesthetic dimension of its databases as programmability, which is always involved in an analysis of VWs. This may be an inherent condition of embodiment, telepresence and behaviour in on line visuality, and according to Anna Munster a major topic that must be located within a general theory of Processual Semiotics, Distribute (approximate) Aesthetics and Network visuality.
All these subjects are of capital importance to my research subject, thus I would like to treat them separately in future entries to this blog, especially in relation to an aesthetician's analysis of digitality in virtual worlds. However what I would like to connect from this reading to my reflection as well, is the idea of the centrality of HOME as a ‘place’ of symbolic cultural production (and reproduction) of context, norms, strategies and tactics (De Certeau), and values that “influence players' sense of what is and is not appropriate” (Mikeal & Stromer 327). After all, memorable experiences in SL, at least mine, started discovering randomly, or by intuition, the boundaries of this pattern (and then, very often, transgress them).

As my first confession tonight I must say that neither social life nor social norms and codes in virtual worlds are topics of any personal obsession. Lacan conducts his (avatar) life under the paradigm of the lonesome ‘coyote’ guy (happy to be alone most of the time and trying to witness as must and cleverly as he can). However, what I’ve found in common (and find profoundly interesting) in these three readings is how fuzzy and undefined the limits can be between person and persona(s), how enigmatic (and rhyzomatic) the constant relocation/mutability and reshaping of appearance and identity can be, how stressful and recursive space and time in SL can be. BTW very soon Lacan will search for his twin sister (more to come later).

Blurriness, chaos and ambiguity, especially when the definition of a very precise virtual-cultural generative place called ‘home’—which acts as a catalyst into developing the first two terms (persona and identity) within the concert of social or group performance—arises as mandatory task.
Yes, building is crucial, in many senses because through it one can find its way into other levels and intricacies of the nature of ethics and aesthetics in SL, particularly in a creationist capitalist economy as Boellstorff establishes the political economy of SL in chapter 8. This is because in order to get land and start learning the basic ways to perform socially within SL (that is to say, exchanging goods, skills and cultural capital, both of material and immaterial value) a process close to the concept of finding/raising home has to be triggered. But before going ahead with other concepts, I would like to recapitulate a few aspects in the line of thought I started to develop in my last blog entry.

Aretha Frankling on video at a Jazz Club

Blocs de sensations

I was talking about the problematic, blurry and enigmatic characterization of a number of variables at the core of what I will address here as digital aesthesia. That is to say the group of sensory space-time-meaning experiences that may occur during digital interaction with games and interactive applications like SL. I was referring as well to a paragraph from Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media. Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2006) in which the author quotes this idea of ‘blocs de sensations’ from Deleuze and Guattari:

“Life alone creates such zones where living beings whirl around, and only art can reach them and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation. This is because from the moment the material passes into sensation, as in a Rodin sculpture, art itself lives on in these zones of indetermination. They are blocs.”

This is Deleuze and Guattari's description of the grouping of sensations into effectual moments that occur in aesthetic experience (see G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, H. Tomlinson translator, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, 173-4.)

I would like to underline three salient topics from this idea, as the founding blocks of what I am going to talk about on this occasion:

1. Those zones (of indetermination) where living beings (‘whirling around’) can be reached only by art (and be penetrated and get involved in a common task)
2. The quality and density of that common task, as co-creation
3. The quality and density of that indetermination regarding its particular dynamics (the material passing into sensations, in my view, must be a permanent research topic within SL)

Of course, the feeling of a natural transposition from these conditions in RL to similar ones (equivalent?) in the digital realm is not new. Approximately five years ago, when I started the first draft for my master’s Thesis, I was playing American McGhee’s Alice quite a lot. I have never been a hardcore video or computer game player; I am, strangely, highly competitive in sports and table games in RL, and being very busy as normally I am, I always managed to stay away from ‘games’. But Alice was a big exception: I started playing it (without even realizing that I was starting at hard level) and; step by step I discovered—the hard way—how intense in physical response may be the projection of yourself into the character. I am talking about embodiment, and also about synaesthesia and uchronic time (according to Edmond Couchot, this is neither past or present, but rather the state of "to be doing" much like the time of eventuality), perhaps the three major axes of aesthetics approaching digital and virtual experience. These processes are basically synthesized in what is called embodiment (although rapture, agency, personification can be very valuable synonymous), because you as a player ‘unfold’ yourself into the character.

I soon discovered the pain, stress and anxiety a poor performance can produce, despite the fact that re-launching the game brings Alice immediately to life again. Yes, it is very different being Alice than being Lacan for many reasons, which are too long to mention here, but I would mention just one of capital importance: Alice is a CD ROM-based game and as such its aesthesia is a closed experience, while SL is a virtual world open (and core-dependent) to the concourse and interaction of N ‘participants’. This kind of world has many aspects that I have been identifying in the last weeks.

Lacan wants to get a surrogate vampire avatar

In a land of non existent mirrors, the number of Vampires should grow exponentially

In the chapter Mirror Image (one of my favorites) in the game Alice, we get the illusion of an active interaction with a deformed mirror. Actually there is no such mirror, it is just the programmer’s trick, but a very effective (and affective) one, especially in the context of that particular stage in Alice's saga whose (unavoidable) task is to reestablish balance in a currently Sick and Demonic Wonderland that used to be very different. If you have a few minutes, I hope you can look at the short clip below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ipw4cMGrss

Thinking analogically, I see the world within SL as a reversed metaphor of that in Alice. Perhaps it is the way social bonds are mostly shaped through commodification of every single action or skill an avatar can perform: from design and building to dancing and sexual competence. Or the conditions of access to higher levels of recognition and respect from more seasoned residents, based on the loss—ASAP—of your newbie looks. Yes this is a universe that performs its own boundaries with every movement at the processor’s pace, and which is dependant on the enactment of very brief populated sets of individuals, as their respective embodiments may demand major a quota of resources. One of my favorite, most memorable and interesting moments, being as of yet a newcomer to SL, is the effect of lag on everybody’s appearance/identity: when arriving to a very crowded place, for some few seconds everybody is represented ‘naked’, colour-blind and dimmed, until gradually all of our clothing, accessories and other coded goods are rendered. So a nice and neat place is oscillating into permanent unbalance toward the ‘other’ side.

I have found Vampires in clubs and Lounges, I have been expelled (and banned) from a sordid Escort's bar by its owner (?) who, by the way, uses a cell phone hanging from his neck by a thick and shiny gold chain. Does that cell phone really work? It doesn’t really matter, but as an semiological device it is very effective. I was wearing my ‘Click me for one Linden’ magic button when I arrived there (I don’t know how) and very impolitely was required to take it off. Not reacting to his ‘bossy’ looks triggered more madness; I was trying to explain to this pimp what the button was when I was expelled and banned from the place. It was very funny thing to look at: I wound up some place outside ‘packed’ as Pinocchio (unassembled) which really blew my mind. Later, and per chance, I found very similar scripts (for free, or as a gift) and performed an operation aesthetically impossible in RL: passing from humanoid embodiment to furniture-oid embodiment. Yes ladies and gentleman, I was able to behave like a chair, a folding chair.

Lacan turned out to behave like a folding chair

It is the understanding of the aforementioned concepts and the fact that I have been wandering a lot in SL but in relatively small chunks of time (I have also been pretty busy in RL) that will allow me to relate readings and experiences within SL. Just to begin, I would say that the tension between (those) several findings and the awareness of different possibilities, not yet fully explored, have caused me the impression of a stretched-and-compressed portable time, the multiplicity of personalities, distributed identities and ad-hoc teleporting, which unfolds and develops the feeling of a multiple aesthetic when talking about SL.

To this respect, Sean Cubitt interviewed by Simon Mills in “Framed. Contextualising Digital Art and Writing” between 1998 and 2005, http://www.framejournal.net/interview/10/sean-cubitt, accessed on March 2008. establishes:

“… The kind of software critique that Matt Fuller, Anna Munster, Greg Ellmer and others have developed is clear indication that there is (no longer?) a singular digital aesthetic but many. […] I would argue that the dominant media of our times, are neither films nor games (i.e. the ludology vs. narratology argument is a bit of a red herring). The really dominant media are databases, spreadsheets and geographic information systems. What they have in common is their spatialising drive.”

Coercion vs. resistance

From the other two readings I would like to address briefly the important topics of multi-layered plural existence, digital materiality, sex appeal, looks and the lack of consistency in the avatar's identity (in Taylor). The crossing of boundaries between private and public (in Bimber, et al) can extend to the issue of VL (SL) vs RL and how these might be translated into forces acting against each other, particularly in the context of collective action dynamics, which—within SL— is permanently flickering towards commodification of cultural and social goods as practices of sociability and the creation of norms.

All of these species can be described and reenacted as different and sometimes subtle forms of coercion, which requires the implementation of certain tactics and strategies of resistance. To this respect, I would like to go a bit deeper, maybe bringing to this scenario some old understandings of Michel De Certeau that I would consider highly pertinent. But that will be a little later. Meanwhile in a bullet type list, my most interesting experiences in the last weeks in SL include the following places/actions/consequences:

• Becoming bartender for a couple of nights in a Lounge Bar. Made contacts, had fun and learned new dances.
  
• Becoming a piano player on another night. I have received tips (the monetary type), contacts and a club membership.
  
• Showing some scripting techniques in a New Media Art section at Penn State University (awe! from two lonely guys)
  
• Library patron (for some 20 minutes). I think the interfacing aspect of libraries in SL is THE ISSUE.
  
• Interrupting (and successfully dismissing) a mediocre future career as Rocker Stripper. I feel free and optimistic.
  
• Being ejected and banned from the tackiest club I have ever seen in my entire avatar life! This resulted in a very interesting finding, thanks gangsta owner!
  
• Collecting awesome T shirts at Prospero Astronomy Gallery location in SL. Lacan improved his looks in a very informal and casual style.
  
• Learning how to animate things, mapping images and moving textures. It's been fun and very instructive.
  
• Passing from humanoid embodiment aesthesia to a piece of foldable furniture. Totally awesome.
  
• Punishing myself in a bondage dungeon in the dark and sordid alleys of SL. (I'd rather not to talk about that topic.)
• Going to Second Louvre and seeing the second Egyptian art collection. Unfortunately, I ran out of time (but did not have to wait as long to get in as in the RL Louvre).
  
• And my favorite (see my next entry): visiting an Alien Space Colony. I am still so enthralled.
  

Have a good night, for now.