77 Million Mildly Interesting Images

Brian Eno, a personal hero of mine, brought a project into SL a couple of weeks ago entitled 77 Million Paintings By Brian Eno: An Art Installation. I'm all for people pushing the aesthetic boundaries of Second Life and so was excited that legendary innovator Eno was bringing an installation to SL.

The project was described as follows:

Conceived by Brian Eno as "visual music," his latest artwork, 77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape which continues his exploration into light as an artist's medium and the aesthetic possibilities of "generative software."

Below are a couple of images from the exhibit. Note that the exhibit is only one screen, which visually morphs over time, so the following two images are just snapshots of different moments of time, these two obviously close together.





My reaction is in many ways anticipated by the description of the exhibit quoted above: "77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape." Certainly the abstract images were compelling, well textured compositions that occasionally threw in bits of recognizable photographs. The sound was actually a little bland for my taste, but it was a mellow techno groove that accompanied the image progression appropriately, if not compellingly.

But beyond the image screen, the exhibit was more or less an SL theatre, with seats arranged in rows facing a screen in a darkened room. I'm not crazy about watching video in SL, because there doesn't seem to be much point. I was mostly alone in the theatre (shocking, I know), though for about 1 of the 10 minutes I was there, another avatar was in there with me. He never said a word to me--possibly due to the cultural habit of shutting up (a) in the presence of art and (b) in darkened movie theatres.

So SL's two best features--3D and its social capabilities--are both neglected. Instead, a 2D animation is the focus, and the experience of it is largely solitary. Why not just create the thing in Java and throw it on an HTML page with a black background?

I believe that SL arts have a future (and even the beginnings of a present), but unfortunately the great Brian Eno has not advanced the cause with this installation.

Ransom!

Ah the pranks we pull when we are bored. This is a message I sent to my friend P-- after her partner E-- and I spent an evening dancing together. Both P-- and my L-- have been largely absent this week, so it got the wheels turning....

------

Dear P--,

I regret to inform you that while you were gallavanting around some trivial and manifestly unimportant RL something-or-other last night, E-- and I spent a lovely evening together of intimate dancing and girl-talk.

After pensive reflection on the dreadful negligence shown to both of us by our respective partners, we decided to kidnap A-- [their Second Life baby] and take off on a continental rampage in a red convertible. Robbing banks has never been so fun or so stylish.

Sorry for your loss,

alle

P.S. If you ever want to see A-- again, please leave $300,000,000,000,000,000 Linden dollars in a Gucci purse in the shadow of the pi exhibit at Splo! We'll send you a 512x512 pic as well as a Notecard with A--'s first word on it. Oddly, it was Gorean in origin.

Paper Dolls (Copies without Originals)

[Note: this post has been edited to correct a few errors.]

The complex relationships between real life and Second Life give rise to paradoxes and strange phenomena, such as copies without a source, because "reality" is never fully in real life or in Second Life, but in some liminal space in between.

Let me tell this as a story. Meet Luth, a dear friend of mine. She's a Second Life resident, its most successful animator, a successful SL entrepreneur, and a distinctive personality. She helps others and she also tells it like she sees it, without worrying too much about how it will be received. Luth is a real character.



One of Luth's colleagues is Elika of ETD fame, and Luth asked her to consider making a hair. Luth felt a little odd about showing her a picture of her RL self, so instead she gave Elika a copy of the picture she takes to her RL stylist when she gets her hair done:



What Luth looks like in real life, with her real-life copy of this model's hair, is unknown. This artist's rendering in Photoshop will have to suffice:



Some time passes, and the ETD Luth hair style is released. Though Luth's hair is almost invariably black and red in Second Life, the ETD Luth pack contains about 20 different color combinations. The model in the following vendor image is not Luth, but someone else who sorta (I guess) looks like Luth (green eyes and of course the hair).



Alongside dozens or more likely hundreds of other Second Life avatars, Luth wears ETD Luth, which is one of several reproductions of a reproduction of an image, which is reproduced on RL Luth's hair every time she gets it done in real-life, which is surely a reflection of her real-life (and Second Life?) personality and aesthetics.



What is the source of all these copies? Is it the hair worn that day by the unknown model in the photo? The image in the mind of the stylist who created that style? Some other image that stylist was looking at? Or is it the avatar Luth, since the hair style is, in fact, named Luth? Is it the real-life also nameless person behind the avatar Luth? Or perhaps it is the image in the mind of Elika--derived from the picture Luth sent as well as her perceptions of who Luth is--that is the truest source of this hair. There are as many sources as there are copies.

Not wanting to be left out, I, too, wear ETD Luth, sporting (of course!) the Chinese reproduction.



This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Jean Baudrillard.

SLivers of Joy

So much of my time in SL has a "serious" element to it. Friends complain to one another about their boyfriends, jobs, and woes. Some are working to sustain their in-world businesses and need time to work, or feedback on a prototype gown or ceiling. We discuss the deleterious effects of the rise of evil companies like Electric Sheep and their ongoing efforts to turn our beloved world into Wal-Mart.

It's odd, because the perception of most people who don't spend time in MMOs is that we're just addicted to playing pointless games. We try to help them understand the value of spending time in MMOs, by describing the real friendships that develop, the opportunities for personal experimentation and expression, and the serious uses of these technologies by corporations, educators, and the military. They remain skeptical. But what's really funny is actually just how much time we aren't playing at all. We're scripting and modeling, cooperating on a project, launching a business, or just sitting and chatting.

Last night in Second Life, I played. It was pure silly cathartic play. It served no purpose other than the jouisssance of the moment. It was that surprisingly uncommon SLiver of joy, razor-thin lunar happiness against a beautiful and mysterious, but altogether dark, sky.

Three of us, Mistress L, dear friend C, and myself put on our bathing suits (and in one extreme case, snake outfit), whipped out diving boards and twisty waterslides, cartoon character inner tubes, swimming anims, and just played in the water for an hour. It was a lot like the experience of a child hanging out in a real pool with family on a hot summer day. What a delight! Here are some pics:

"Beautiful" Avatars

0100101110101101.org recently published a list of Second Life's 13 most beautiful avatars and the press release circulated throughout the blogosphere. Curious, I went to look at the list, and what I found disappointed me; not only were the selected avatars not among the best I had seen, but worse, they were hardly better than average.

How were they "average"? Both as avatars and photos. The avatars themselves were all beautiful in the usual SL ways: nice skins mapped onto nice shapes. That just about all of the photos were closeups or even extreme closeups didn't help: so much of what makes an avatar a statement is her full appearance, including posture, clothing, hair, and accessories. It is very hard for most SL avatars to stand out when all you have is a face.

The best of the lot were the pictures of Aimee Weber, which showed her in a bit of a pose, giving some sense of her in-world personality. But Aimee Weber is Second Life's Jennifer Aniston: her avatar is beautiful and distinctive, but how many covers of People, Us, and In Touch does she really need to be on? Picking Aimee is just too easy.

It is, of course, very easy to criticize something as subjective as a top-10 beauty list. I want to do something more useful than that. I want to explore the criteria of beauty the collection suggests. First a compliment: Kudos for not showcasing only white females (which would be all too easy in SL): both genders and different races were included. But there were no furries or non-human avatars, no fashion-extreme vamps. The notion of "beauty" was Benetton shop-window multiculturalism beauty: race is a fashion we put on--Look at me! I'm the African Jennifer Aniston!

But the most important questions remain unasked: What is the soul of beauty in Second Life? Does Second Life have its own standard of beauty? The people behind the beautiful avatars exhibit at least superficially address these issues:

The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, "artificial" light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world.

Such a description applies to every MMOG I have ever seen and most video games in general since the NES. It isn't Second Life's aesthetics at all; it's video games. So we are still left to ask what Second Life's aesthetic is.
They continue:

Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds, and questions the impact such technologies have on art and society.

While this still doesn't get at anything in Second Life in particular--it seems to apply equally to text-based worlds like LamdaMOO--at least it brings up an interesting question (albeit one that has been asked in media studies circles for over a decade): How do simulated worlds "allow the creation of alternate identities"? More interesting (but not asked here) is how these alternate identities reflexively shape (or nihilistically pull the rug out from under) our "real" identities? And anyway (this is my question), how do a dozen or so extreme closeups of Second Life pixel-faces help us get at these issues?

They continue:

Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars' icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and "traditional" art forms, and between art and life itself.

Heavy rhetoric, but what does it mean? The analogy to portraiture is interesting, but what is the significance of portraiture in a world where our virtual faces are botoxxed into immobility by a technologically enforced lack of facial expression? Second Life avatars are profoundly expressive, but it is a misplaced real-life assumption that the expressiveness is centered in the face. This is a major flaw in the exhibit. (Another flaw is hosting it in a perfect reconstruction of the actual RL museum exhibit. Note to the organizers: in RL museums, we don't look with virtual 3D cameras floating 20 feet behind our heads, and your SL exhibit is in fact frustratingly incompatible with the everyday experience of being an avatar.)

I would argue that our true SL expressiveness comes not through the face but instead through (a) the disposition of the body as a whole--including race and gender, pose, fashion, accessories; (b) the backstories we provide ourselves in our profiles; and above all, (c) the words we say as we interact with our friends and the world through chat boxes and IM windows.

If I, in my way, embody some part of this "Second Life aesthetic," look for it in my words and look at my whole body (in where and what it is doing); look not at my face (which can tell you only the most rudimentary things: that I am Asian). And then forget about me: look for it in the words and bodies of those avatars not possible or practical in RL: the furries, mermaids, winged vampires, aliens. Their aesthetic goes far beyond their 3D-mesh cheekbones and pretty-texture eyes. What do these avatars tell us about how people live in Second Life, about where people find (and create) beauty in virtual reality?

As it stands, the exhibit "Second Life's 13 Most Beautiful Avatars" seems like a publicity stunt. Superficial notions of Second Life beauty can be passed off as "hip" for a now-credulous press, currently enamored with all those "cutting edge" people who are "driving" Web 2.0.

Even if they are, in fact, strangers here themselves.

Physiognomic Fluidity

Yesterday, I was hanging out with Mistress L and our friend, C., when L noticed that my legs seemed a little pointy around the hips. I was wearing jeans at the time, so I switched to a bikini bottom to take a closer look. It wasn't pretty (and I won't be showing any pictures).

We spent some time monkeying with sliders in the Appearance dialog, and though I managed to make my legs and posterior look freaky in many new ways, we failed to solve the problem. Wondering if it is really a problem with my avatar shape (I'd never noticed this before) or a bug in SL that was causing avatar shapes to render incorrectly, I decided that rather than moving sliders around, I'd just put on another shape.

The only catch was that this was a shape I bought as a noob, and it was a tall, large-breasted, curvy affair. And it wasn't Asian.

Knowing that I was about to present a shocking visage to my two friends, I warned them in IM that I was about to undergo a change in race. Apparently, my warning wasn't clear enough, because when a white Amazon of an alle suddenly materialized in front of them, there were vividly expressed gasps of shock.

I won't deny it was a bit of a shock to me to see myself as a white avatar--it has been almost 18 months (and 17/18s of my SL existence) since I was white--but at least I had seen it before. (Incidentally, you can too.) I was surprised initially by the intensity of the reaction with my friends. After all, in SL, we can all change our skins, hair, clothes--just about anything. Our bodies, our clothes, our fashions, and a large part of our identities are just files in a folder tree.

What I realized, though, is that although we can change these characteristics at any time with a click of the button, people change some of them more than others. We change hair and clothes all the time. I know almost no one who has ever changed gender in SL. And interestingly enough, while a lot of people change species--human, furry, elf, tiny--people seldom change their races within a species.

For my friends, who know I am Chinese-American, and who have only ever seen me as an Asian female, this little inventory change, done to help me troubleshoot a technical problem, caused a rupture in their experience of my identity.

I never did solve that problem--my legs/butt still look funny. It occurred to me as I wrote this, that perhaps I should, while wearing my Asian avatar, change genders to see whether that fixes my legs/butt. If I do, I'll be sure to do so in the privacy of my own skybox.

Follow the Tagalong

Much of my experience and even identity over the past year has come from whom I follow around. I have been lucky enough to create friendships with some important SL people, and these people know other cool people and all the cool places and events; thus, just following them around has become a fulfilling activity in its own right. Along the way, you landmark lots of places and make lots of new friends, some of whom delete your friendship card within two weeks. But the point is, as a tagalong, you follow someone else's agenda and are often perceived as and even introduced as someone else's accessory. (Not that I mind that, especially since I am usually someone else's accessory; I'm just describing how it plays out.)

In the course of such tagging along with others, I had the lucky opportunity to bump into Ms. P. on many occasions, and gradually, as we began to recognize each other, we began to hang out and a friendship developed. Ms. P. is important in her own right--she's a major part of a high profile project and close to some SL super VIPs and communities--but for some reason she seems to relate to me more as a fellow tagalong than as a VIP. In many ways, she seems at least as interested in alle's Second Life as I am in Ms. P's Second Life.

Lately, we've come to start checking places out together as fellow explorers, where neither one of us leads the other, or, more accurately, where we trade leader and tagalong back and forth. We first became good friends dancing together at Blue Note, where we took turns on blue/pink dance balls, alternating dancing as male/female, leader/led, and those dances have become an allegory of our friendship. I look forward to our continued waltz around Second Life, two tagalongs following only our own lead.