[iDC] SL and relation to the real
Joshua Levy
josh at personaldemocracy.com
Tue Mar 6 20:59:00 EST 2007
I had a minor breakthrough last night. Some of the more experienced SL
folks here are going to laugh at me for this -- but I realized that you
can do so many more things with the camera than I realized (the camera
is your POV in Second Life). It can be manipulated as you go about your
business there, panning left to right, moving up and down, and zooming
in and out. Previously I'd only zoomed in and out, struggling to focus
in on other avatars' faces, or -- because I'm recording this for a short
film -- to position my own avatar in visually interesting ways,
including actually looking at my own face. Anyway, I felt a bit
schmucky about it because I realized I should have known how to do this
all along.
After I finished flogging myself I investigated Camp Darfur in SL. It's
changed a lot since I've last been there, though the lack of other
avatars is the same. Before it was pretty empty, with information
scattered here and there and a few banners publichzing the atrocity.
Now, there are flames leaping out at you as you arrive, posters
describing the tragedy and images of refugees all over the place, and
ominous-looking, giant blue helmets (the UN, get it?) strewn about.
It's a pretty chaotic place, though this chaos doesn't suggest man-made
terror as much as a lack of design and forethought.
I was struck by the same incongruities that got me interested in SL in
the first place, the simple problem of confronting real issues in an
unreal space. It sounds mundane and obvious when describing it, yet the
feelings evoked by seeing my avatar -- or being my avatar -- standing in
front of a large image of a Darfurian child, dirty and alone and crying,
were complex and new. The child in the image was approximately the same
size as my avatar. The two images existed in the same space, and were
both representations of real people, yet my avatar was a digitized
version of myself, and the image of the child was simply an image of the
child. There were no other avatars around so I couldn't experience the
thrill of social life in SL, and this fact heightened the starkness of
the image. As I walked around I inadvertently created more of these
tableaus. In one, my avatar looked at a poster with mostly words on
it. As the camera panned around to the left side of the avatar its
profile took up the foreground of the shot. In the background appeared
an image of a woman from Darfur. In the distance were virtual huts with
more information inside them and other tiny images. The image
privileged my virtual face and relegated someone's real, distraught face
to the background.
Gazing upon this image made me think of what many people on this list
have referred to, that Second Life is the province of an educated elite
and as such is given a disproportionate amount of importance with many
tragic aspects of real life taking a back seat. More than anything
else, it felt perverted that I should be in Second Life looking at those
images taken of real women and children while my avatar and I practiced
camera moves.
Yet there was something else going on; I was moved to stop and think
about these things rather than see an image like that and pass it by
without noticing, which is more typical. In her book Regarding the Pain
of Others, Susan Sontag takes a sort of potshot at her earlier self,
arguing that images in themselves might not have the power to evoke
universal empathy and action; an image of a dead Palestinian boy evokes
one reaction for a militant Palestinian and quite another for a militant
Israeli. It's partly about the context in which we view these images.
Nevertheless, while viewing these images of Darfurian refuges taken
quite profoundly out of context I was able to see the awfulness like
never before, and with my new agility with the camera I was able to
create even starker images.
I realized after a bit that for me, the crux of the SL problem is its
evocation of and relationship to real life, it's place within real life,
and it's role, for better or for worse, as a reflection of real life
(witness the recent vandalism that plagued John Edwards' space and
various corporate outlets). Has anyone else been to Camp Darfur or a
similar space, and how did you react?
--
Joshua Levy
www.personaldemocracy.com
www.techpresident.com
The fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum is happening May 18, 2007 in
NYC.
Register now: http://www.personaldemocracy.com/conference/2007
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