[-empyre-] Forwarded from Andrew Burrell [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]



Message forwarded from Andrew Burrell
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Hi Stacia and all,

I am very much drawn to your statement that opens your 'everybody hurts'
project site: "It's true. Everybody does hurt, at one point or another.
And sometimes we need to know that other people feel what we feel. So
what if those "people" are sometimes fictional characters from
television. It doesn't make them any less real." 
 
On the level where I interact with my own narrative (which is a
construct of my own memory/imagination), there is really no discernable
difference between my experience, of say, the death of Buffy Sommers (my
narrative tells me that she dies three time) and the death of Dianna,
Princess of Wales. Obviously I can use my intellect to deduce (from
narratives outside of my own, that I then include in my own) that it is
evidentially more likely that Dianna 'lived' her own narrative, while
Buffy had hers limited by her writers. Then again, surly in the
'consensual hallucination' of millions of Buffy viewers provides Buffy -
from within this collectively constructed narrative - with her own
autonomous hopes, dreams and fears: as real (at least as far as my own
deductive path allows) as those of Dianna. And I agree with you totally
that the same thing goes for any text - this is not about a particular
recent technological advancements, it is about narrative constructions,
fiction or otherwise. (I would argue that Perec's 'Life A User's Manual'
remains one of the most successful 'virtual' spaces ever created) 
 
Anyway, I do have a question; in 'finding and creating meaning' through
the construction of your alternate self-narrative in the sims, are you
not only involved in an 'ongoing *negotiation* of the self' but also in
an ongoing *construction* of the self?


cheers
andrew
___________________________________

Tracey Meziane 
Centre for New Media Arts 
The Australian National University 
http://www.byte-time.net 
http://swipezone.blogspot.com 
http://www.anu.edu.au/newmedia/pages/postgrad.html 
skype: byte-time 

------If you have received this transmission in error please notify us immediately by return e-mail and delete all copies. If this e-mail or any attachments have been sent to you in error, that error does not constitute waiver of any confidentiality, privilege or copyright in respect of information in the e-mail or attachments.
------



This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.