[-empyre-] week 4: ethics, aesthetics and culture proper

[micha cárdenas]

2010/12/20 Gabriel Menotti <gabriel.menotti at gmail.com>:
> But: is it fruitful to pin this down? Does it make any sense to ask
> these questions? Instead of thinking of games as objects, shouldn’t we
> be appropriating them as tools and means to explore the contexts in
> which they are inserted, just like David Griffith says Naked on Pluto
> does with Facebook privacy politics?
>
> And how can a game be critical of its own platform, if not by taping
> into even lower underpinnings and conventions – ethics, aesthetics,
> legality? Ideologies? Culture itself?

Hi Gabriel,

I like the direction of these questions a lot. In my own mixed reality
work with second life and opensim, and thinking of other's work with
World of Warcraft, it seems that the gaming platform functions more as
a medium than as an object or a relation. I appreciated Domenico's
reference to My Generation as I've been very influenced myself by the
Mattes', and Eddo Stern's work, such as Portal, Sheik Attack and
Tekken Torture Tournament have been very influential for me. For me,
working in Second Life led to a broader interest in using reality as a
medium, branching out into alternate reality projects [virus.circus:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lotu5/sets/72157623782952247/] and as a
means to facilitating slipstream science fiction scenarios [becoming
transreal: http://vimeo.com/16869351].

An ongoing issue I've faced is that people at times see my work as
some sort of endorsement of Second Life, where myself and my
collaborator Elle Mehrmand both see it as revealing both the
potentials and the limitations of virtual worlds. In particular the
community of Second Life users seem largely in favor of work that is
more technical, as in Hyperformalism, and that focuses on promoting
the platform, which is also frustrating. Other groups like Second
Front have also inspired me, and I think do an amazing job of both
using Second Life as a medium and engaging with the particular ethics
and grammars of it as a medium. Here I'm thinking specifically of
their performance 28 Avatars Later [
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gByuAUcehrI ] which confronted the
beauty and vanity of Second Life users with a viral zombie outbreak.

But personally, where Elle and I are at now is more thinking about
leaving second life behind and focusing on other modes of alternate
and mixed reality. It often feels that in artistic contexts and
outside of them it's very hard to escape the baggage of a particular
platform. The perception of our work is too bound, for us, to Second
Life itself, despite our attempts to use it as one element in a larger
performative matrix including live sound, biometrics, motion sensors
and live queer erotics. Perhaps this is particular to the usage of
games in a performative mode, though... Also, after a year of working
on research into Opensim with the UCSD School of Medicine, it seems
that Opensim, the free software alternative to Second Life is still
not very appealing as a platform or a medium for making work. It seems
that so much of Second Life is driven by commerce, as in builders
making avatars, environments and clothing, that they have been unable
to draw much of an audience to OpenSim, possibly because of the lack
of an audience or the very alpha state of the commerce engine.


thanks,

  micha


-- 
micha cárdenas
Associate Director of Art and Technology
Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UCSD

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Researcher, UCSD School of Medicine
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9