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.