Sickness and Second Self

It seems obvious by now that the moment I stop working even for a brief 24 hour period, I will catch a cold, flu, bug, anything that will prevent me from enjoying ten minutes of peace or an overall good time. Basically, at the end of each semester, I have given myself one day to actually sleep past 8am and each of these days has resulted in full blown sickness. So that being said, getting to writing my last entries has taken longer than it should have and I’m sitting here with a box of kleenex and a full cup of tea.

I will focus this post on the reflections from my new media end of semester project “Second Self” and I will use the next post to outline some specifics in terms of controlling the media used within the project.

Overall I think the installation was successful, in that all of our media worked and it brought about some interesting discussion. That being said, there is a ton I would change and even more that I’ve learned from the process.

At the beginning I had conceived of this installation as a multi-screen (potentially 8+) display of specific second life visuals. I had thought Lyndall and I were going to focus on the construction of identity within Second Life and let those experiencing the space drawn their own conclusions from it. In that way, I was pleased to hear some folks commenting on the self reflection they experienced while listening to others talk about their Second Life avatars but I’m sure this could have happened without the verbal or written analysis that took the fore.

When we began to run into more and more road blocks in terms of the media we were using (specifically gaining access to the amount of good quality television screens we were hoping for at first, and spending too much time trying to get the Second Life recorded video to compress properly), we started to rely more heavily on the didactic. This wasn’t a conscious decision so I think it’s something that’s intriguing to reflect upon because it’s obviously where we both find the most comfort. Since we only had minimal time left we resorted to what felt comfortable for us without even speaking about it explicitly.

We therefore ended up with a much more didactic presentation then I had hoped for. When we first talked about our ideas I was hoping to be able to visualize the idea of performativity by focusing on the visual construction of avatars and those creating them. I thought that by playing with the viewer’s mind so that they begin to map the connections between person and avatar all of these ideas that were explicitly spoken about in the interviews would come to the fore. That being said, I really like having to play with creating legible text in Second Life videos so I was happy to have some textual component there.

Some other things I would do differently within the model we had chosen in the end would have been perhaps to play with the idea of these smaller ‘pods’ and have each computer station be a different form of video. I like how you are forced to get intimate with those you are watching on the computer screens but I think that sometimes straight interviews brings you out of that intimacy. Perhaps it would have been nice to have the computers display more intimate moments with the people while they created their avatars or moved around in Second Life.

I also would have pooled from a larger and more diverse group of people in order to give those who experience the installation a vast array of understanding. I guess what could be summed up from all of this is that I would have liked the piece to cause people to question their understandings a bit more – and perhaps in a less obvious manner.

This piece for me served as an entry point into utilizing non-linear structures and performative forms in hopes of gaining comfort so that I may find better structures from which to lean my performative content off of. I have always utilized a realist mode of documentary video making but my main interests have always been in documenting performance and identity politics. I am beginning to work with different aesthetics so that my form might one day meet my content in a similar playing field but I’m not there yet.

Here are bits of media from Second Self by myself and Lyndall Musselman. Two stills from the Second Life projected video display and a video interview you can watch from my vodpod stream on the left side of the page. There was no documentation of the installation unfortunately. That’s something I always fall short on.

Troubleshooting Nightmares

It seems as though this new media project is becoming less and less about ideas and form and more and more about just getting media that plays sufficiently.

I guess it’s inevitable that in such a short time frame everything that could possibly go wrong probably would. I’m beginning to feel ashamed by the skills I once boasted about. I feel overly rushed, to the point where I’m just longing for something to work and not worrying too much about what that is.

The things I had hoped to experiment with seemed to have all slipped from my grasp. But I feel as though I’m at the beginning of thinking in a more tangible way about approaches for future projects. I’m finding myself increasingly more interested in form over content – I used to solely be concerned with content, charting change is good.

I’m finishing up the project I’ve been working on with Tori, which feels like a bit of a relief but it’s also something I’m interested in taking up as a larger project. There is also a looming anxiety over whether the media used to screen the piece will be able to retain the work’s specificities.

Which I guess brings me back to troubleshooting. I wish I understood more about screen resolutions and transferring data from one system to another – I do realize the troubleshooting nightmares are forever connected to the mediums I choose to work in, I sometimes just wish the answers were in closer proximity to me.

I’m also beginning to crash. As in shut down. As in, I need to start getting some sleep.

New Media Project

For the final project this semester I will be working with Lyndall on an installation that bridges the Second Life platform, projection and video while exploring notions of performativity and identity construction.

The concept is based around the creation of and experience as avatars within the program Second Life. We’re looking to explore some of the ways in which identity is built within the choices made in the building of avatars, but also how one interacts with those sharing the same virtual space as they embody their chosen online identity.

We will be interviewing 4 people both in ‘real’ time and space and also within Second Life. All of the videos taken inside Second Life itself will be projected on opposing pieces of velum towards the front of the space and in the back 2 corners of the room will be 2 computer stations set up with headphones to watch the live interviews with those involved. Each projected medium (both projection and computer screen) will be randomized so that the connection between Second Life avatars and the people behind them become blurred. By drawing attention to the modes of production in an installation and experiential new media performance space we hope to be able evoke questions of identity construction and the online experience of identity.

Here is a copy of our floorplan:

Second Life and Performativity

Second Life and Performativity

I’m still working through some of the ideas I was trying to articulate in class. Basically, the starting point for me was that the creating of avitars is something that is so inherently performative that I immediately began to think of this in the terms of queer theory.

I’m going to break this down.
Performativity as Judith Butler coined it puts emphasis on gendered and sexualized identities by drawing attention to the construction of these aspects of identity. The stress here is on the action of gender specifically – that is to say that in order for gender to exist it must be constantly reenacted through a variety of signifiers.

Butler talks about how the individual is an effect, not origin of its “performances”; it “comes into being through being called, named, interpellated . . . and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’ ” (Butler, 225).

If we are to understand performativity in this way, Second Life can be viewed as a nuanced or extremely heightened version of this. For even within this realm it becomes impossible to completely breakdown notions of gender and sexuality.
Choosing each element of the “self” becomes an act of performativity which is still governed by notions of power and ultimately the subversion of power.

It cannot be as simplistic as saying the same rules apply as they do in the “real” world, but perhaps Second Life forces those who have not thought about the construction of the self and identity to constantly question it.
In this way Second Life  can be seen as an extremely powerful tool in breaking down notions of the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed but also how to subvert power and authority through the subversion of these acted signifiers.
Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York:
Routledge, 1993.

lost without time

I haven’t blogged in too long I guess. I’ve been writing down point form ideas to talk about in length here but have not had the opportunity to actually sit down and flesh them out.

I’m in calgary at present with a short film a made a few years ago. It’s screening at the queer film fest here and I’m speaking on a panel on Sunday.

Tori and I are also working endlessly on this pride commission. All of these things are exciting but they have definitely taken an extreme amount of time and energy and I’m having trouble channeling what’s left into my school work.

I definitely don’t feel like I have had enough time to digest anything really. Even to contemplate a reading for more than 10 minutes has been difficult.

So all this to say that I’m stressed at the moment and feel totally lost in terms of what i’m supposed to be getting out of this semester.

I’ve been inspired by the new media course that’s for sure but i’m not so sure i’m ready to push that inspiration into action.

real-time real

As Alex referred to in her blog, “Virilio says that to some extent the lesson of the new technologies is that reality has never been given, it has always been acquired or generated. Our images never really duplicated reality, they always gave it shape. The difference is that previously a functional distinction could still be made on more solid grounds.” alxbal.wordpress.com

I find it easy to align myself with such ideologies, I am in a constant battle with myself to deconstruct every societal or even meaningless construct but at the same time am invested in a feminist practices which deconstruct forms and ideas with the hope of accounting for new ways of seeing. I have spent many years deconstructing the label of ‘documentary’ but am still as interested in naming what that is for myself. I can say that the meanings I have ever held on to have been in constant flux and I can’t say that I see myself aligned to any one meaning for any long period of time.

It’s interesting to me that Kac mentions that new technologies have made us doubt what we previously thought of as reality when in actuality, I somehow think new technologies maybe affirm our sense of reality by providing an anti-thesis to reality. As a media savvy culture, questions such has “how was that edited”, or “how much alterations were done” become common place. While our knowledge of new technologies expands, our desire for something ‘more real’, or more tangible continues to grow.

I’ve never thought of documentary as solely documenting the past, or revealing something that has already happened, but I can understand how perhaps society is moving towards a desire for media that allows our access into the ‘real’ to grow by doubting those images that have existed previously. So while the transition in how we experience time does change notions of documentary, I think it merely moves our perceptions into the categories of more or less real. And perhaps towards time-based documenting that views solely those moments which are being experienced in ‘real-time’ as ‘real’.

Non-linearity

I thought a lot about how to subvert linearity through non-linear art forms. I’m interested in prescribed notions of linearity within Western society – I guess the obvious ones being time and lifetimes- but moving beyond there into examinations of routines, repetitive movements or activities, societal expectations and even merely walking the distance from one destination to the next.

Heather and I enjoyed an awesome evening of rockclimbing while we joked about this exact subversion of linearity when the goal is to climb the rigid but strictly straight wall all the way to the top.

I think for this video exercise then, I may take the most banal or obvious gesture, movement, action and begin to repeat it in order to subvert the linearity of it only when it is placed out of order or a logical, linear time sequence.

This seems like a simple way of beginning this experimentation.

In regards to the class discussion that ended the class yesterday, I think we have been taught to understand documentary as a way of ordering in order to understand some things that may be beyond our understanding in the first place. Through the last 2 semesters, that was through photo and video and the theory we were engaged in was quite biased along those lines. I don’t feel like I’ve been pushed in any way to think of documentary as anything but what society has prescribed, or at least accepted it to be. In that way, I can understand how people are having trouble grasping new media concepts. If documentary is used as a tool for understanding, what happens when you subvert the act of understanding itself in order to merely question, or ponder new ideas? Is this still documentary? I would definitely say it is, but I understand how this may be out of some people’s realms of understanding.

I’ve never been one for linearity in life in general – perhaps that’s something that divides us.