Re: [-empyre-] [Missive 6] Alterity and dystopia in SL - a response to Dissidents in SL

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

Thanks, Patrick, for your long and complex reflection on SL dystopia. 
Although I myself am not a SL participant, I've learned a lot from 
this month's active discussion.  Even though I remain very suspicious 
of the corporatist ethos underlying SL (and myself lack patience for 
the meta/meta displacements necessary for active participation in 
SL--I've just never found myself wanting to speak via avatars...), 
your post clearly suggests that the paradox of activism within SL is 
not that different from the paradox, say, of activism within the 
academy or museum and art worlds which themselves flourish on the 
economic model of corporatist culture.  Such activism derives from 
and feeds on the rhizomatic slices of critical activity that develop 
within the fibres and pores of mainstream cultural production.

When Arthur and Marilouse Kroker and I were actively developing 
political new media projects for CTHEORY Multimidia 
(http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu), for instance, we too depended 
on the corporatist infrastructure of my well-endowed University to 
launch and maintain issues of socio-political critique and praxis 
whose aim was to highlight cultural structures of alterity and 
dystopia ("Tech Flesh: The Promise and Perils of the Human Genome 
Project," "Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia," 
"NetNoise," etc.).  The problem we face(d), however, was the 
difficulty of extending the reach of our project beyond the well 
received tenacles of CTHEORY (whose audience, although much larger, 
probably come close to mirroring the profile of -empyre- 
participants).

So I'm now wondering about how those of us invested in curatorial 
practice might develop better strategies to make these works more 
readily accessible to audiences who wouldn't be inclined to invest 
energy in mining SL or mining the few sites dedicated to net.art, 
such Ctm, Turbulence, Computerfinearts.com, or low-fi.org.

Is there a model for this being developed in Second Life or does 
activist artwork just take place kind of on the margins?

Thanks for your thoughtful contributions.

Tim
--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York  14853

office: 607-255-4086
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu