[-empyre-] outputs -- second life txt - space between people - swerve

[Christian McCrea]

Funny how things evolve... sort of naturally over the discussion took
some turns and some happy hijacks, but I wondered at the beginning of
the month whether the shadow of Second Life would be cast over it all.
I guess in terms of a productive clinamen of my own, I'd like to
coagulate some critical questions around the SL posts of the last
couple of days, but concentrating on the one of the chora - and a bit
of a manifesto (the dirty word) for the material critique for myself
if nobody else! This is because of all the time I've spent trying to
triangulate what I think of Second Life, it still requires me to
return to it. And also to say what is perhaps a little unsaid, the
relationship between Second Life (now largely abandoned to a loyal
few) and the gamic (rather than ludic, or playful) imagination.

Many Empyreans have had stakes in SL projects or articles, books,
etc.. so I doubt my experience is singular. In the process of
collating responses and doing more research into art in Second Life, I
found that through proximity much of my skepticism about Second Life
changed into something more ambivalent. I began to see more and more
of the texture of SL art, the tenacious relationships some work made.
So what if art's real role was to make Second Life legitimate for the
cliques and strata of academics, artists and cultural workers (our
other virtual world)? If the material consequence of the artwork was
to ... bring people together to witness another mechanical quirk /
glitch dance... and then dissipate.. then what is it? Bad art can do
cultural damage to a place; make slick the road for corporate control;
this is nothing new. In other words, maybe we ruined it (and thats
okay.) I had spent more time updating the SL client then in the world
itself, and it would be a place where most of the time, I just met
other researchers. Of the two sets of people who did not work for
universities or galleries I ever spoke to, (one a group of sex
fetishist gamers, the other a truly absurd eschatological Christian
death cult of some description), both continued to seek me out asking
me to write a story about them, assuming that 'researcher' meant
'journalist'. It would be irresponsible of

When those comments were made I held a fascination with the fact that
the greifing of weird semi-professional nuisance artists that was able
to shut down servers, mix up data sets, destroy buildings, upset
political rallies and so on looked a good deal more like the art I
thought was interesting that the art funded by universities, art
galleries, etc. The d.lux pony club tour and subsequent discussions
dispelled some of that sensation, but as Ana Valdes I think said in
that month, 'where are the burning tyres?'. Well, in a sad way, they
light up the sky. Left-wing politicians the world over (and a couple
of right wing ones) flocked to it attracted by the idea of making a
new sales pitch to youth. It felt as if that Second Life wasn't
sanitised, it was sanitation itself. It takes in sources and liquifies
their meaning to add to its own currency - legitimacy. The end of
2006/2007 saw a level of media coverage that was beginning to elicit a
pavlovian response. "Company X has set up a Second Life building", the
missing lede telling me to log in to do... what? Float inexactly
outside the doorway of a bank? Read text boxes in an art gallery while
the pictures load? So this is what was meant by the garden of errors.
At its worst, It is a pastoral, suburban setting meant to evoke the
crisp manifest destiny of a relatively homogeneous caucasian Christian
heaven. Or rather not 'evoke' - presage.

Thats why when things got interesting in SL (past tense), it was
through swerves. Mistakes, errors, accidents, mishaps. As Margarete
just said, "This most hated environment is an opportunity to PLAY
inside the belly of the beast!"

---Margarete said:
In order to vivisect 2nd Life critically, it must be considered not as
game – but as a hypothetical game system. Its focus is a playful 3rd
life, according to Jorge Luis Borges´s "Orbis Tertius" and Sir Karl
Popper´s "World 3". Games played in SL serve as examples for deviant
gaming behaviour on the borderline.
---
I could not agree more. It was the Ludic Society writing on Jarry that
made me see that natural link to the clinamen phenomena; errors
producing meaning, happy accidents forming knowledges, mistakes
forming games. I do not know how to land my avatar, therefore I will
make a game out of flying between buildings. I think so many people
got obsessed with capital A art this element got forgotten. Christian
Bok's book on 'pataphysics takes up the clinamen as an energetic
source, and its immanent power is that it totally deserts whatever
meaning people had for a place, thing, or world. Deviance is energy!
Christina, this is quite similar to your note of  "public space of
risk and ambiguity at its edge or threshold, as it were, its
passage=moment."

The chora: Elizabeth Grosz's chora in that book is a very potent
rearticulation of Plato, turning what was the residue of chaos into
the fundament of social change. "For Plato, chora is that which,
lacking any substance or identity of its own, falls in between the
ideal and the material." (Grosz) - which also reflect's Plato's need
to articulate an explanation of progression and procession, so its a
very heuristic, whole reading - chora is both 'receptacle' and
'nurse'. The chora is a zone ... "which exists always and cannot be
destroyed. It provides a fixed site for all things that come to be. It
is itself apprhended by a kind of bastard reasoning that does not
involve sense perception, and it is hardly even an object of
convinction. We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything
that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and
occupying some space." (Plato, Timaeus, 52)

But I think Julia Kristeva's 'semiotic chora' is not totally worthless
for the discussion as well. The word for her is totally re purposed
and stripped of its passivity and installed with its own ability to
generate meaning. It is also a chiasmic, miasmic and sometimes quite
violent state of affairs; the zone between language and recognition,
the fog of war chased away by the arrival of understanding and the
thetic break. Who has ever used SL and not felt a twinge of that
miasma creeping in, that fog obscuring buildings in the clipping
distance? That little bit of glossolalia, the almost autistic overuse
of gesture.

So this is a long way of saying I think there are bridges between all
the concepts that link up, architecture and nature to the spaces of
communication to the game, to the burning tyres. Sometimes despite
itself, when you make material links you end up with larger not
smaller fields of play. The world is crisscrossed after all with chalk
lines and circles..

-Christian McCrea