Else wise a quiet day…..

What a relief to finally exhibit after all the hard work, tests, tests and tests. I find it somehow strange that working on an art piece in the virtual world can manifest itself so demanding and profoundly on my physical body, extreme tiredness after hard work.

My virtual work seems so fragile in this virtual environment, much more fragile than a physical object. I visit KEEP IN TOUCH every day, to give her some water and love, check if her programming works. If not I mail Sophie Zhu and ask her to have a look at the script.

Sometimes I hide and look at the visitors in a distance sometimes I can almost tickle their neck hair. Its great fun, they often fall down from the platform and the man in the eye follows. Sometimes they get irritated when he keeps following, great. I would wish I could do the same in my physical work, just be invisible in the corner of the room and tickle the neck hair of the visitors.

The SL works are quite demanding for the viewer, especially if you have not navigated in a 3D world before. Therefore I find that the SL work demands a lot of explanation, which is somehow what I would normally want avoid. The visual and physical expression should be the experience, not the explanation – then I might as well just write my work instead … but there was a reason that it should be expressed visually/physically. At the same time explaining the work leads into many fun discussions – can you buy this and if you do how can you take it with you, or what makes it more yours than anyone’s else’s when it is on SL? Where is the work actually situated?

My work has now found the title KEEP IN TOUCH

It has been a long excavation and exploration of the possibilities and limitations of SecondLife.

The final work is a kind of status of the moment, a status of where I have arrived in this process of exploration – for the moment. This is in opposition to a process directed towards a fixed outcome, a certain look, although I knew from the start that I would deal with contact and control relations, the way I perceive those in SL.

What has affected this way of working is distinctively the way SecondLife works as a platform for art. To some degree it is easy to create in SL, why you keep developing on your idea and it might turn into something different, and to some degree it is limiting as I face problems with the scripts, the possibilities of streaming video etc.

The questions I have asked myself during this process, and which all to some degree has resulted in KEEP IN TOUCH are: what characterizes the contact between avatar and human? Who controls whom? What happens when the social contact in SL is non-physical? Is there in a broad perspective a relation between SecondLife and Real Life which stands in proportion to Plato’s allegory of the cave, or can we at all talk about SecondLife as less real than real life?

Plato’s allegory is about not taking things for what they seem to be – not just use sight, but insight. I think, though, that things are also what they seem to be, this is also a part of their nature. This also tends to be my opinion about SL and real life now. So I have come to the conclusive metaphor that SL and real life are in contact in the same way as inside and outside is in contact in a Klein Bottle.

This is the outer frame of my work, while the real life man I stream into SL is still the real life person seeking contact in SL, through which I thematize the form of contact between real life humans/avatars in SL and the form of contact between real life human and his own avatar in SL – who controls who. Can the real life person I stream into SL be anything but the representation of a real life person, and therefore no more or less than the avatars surrounding him?

PLOT OF THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE (ref. wikipedia):Imagine prisoners, who have been chained since their childhood deep inside a cave: not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains; their heads are chained in one direction as well so that their gaze is fixed on a wall. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which statues of various animals, plants, and other things are carried by people. The statues cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. When one of the statue-carriers speaks, an echo against the wall causes the prisoners to believe that the words come from the shadows.The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game: naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images. They are thus conditioned to judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes and dislike those who play poorly.

Suppose a prisoner is released and compelled to stand up and turn around. At that moment his eyes will be blinded by the sunlight coming into the cave from its entrance, and the shapes passing by will appear less real than their shadows.The last object he would be able to see is the sun, which, in time, he would learn to see as the object that provides the seasons and the courses of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things that he has seen.Once enlightened the freed prisoner would not want to return to the cave to free “his fellow bondsmen,” but would be compelled to do so. Another problem lies in the other prisoners not wanting to be freed: descending back into the cave would require that the freed prisoner’s eyes adjust again, and for a time, he would be one of the ones identifying shapes on the wall. His eyes would be swamped by the darkness, and would take time to become acclimated. Therefore, he would not be able to identify the shapes on the wall as well as the other prisoners, making it seem as if his being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight.


(The Republicbk. VII, 516b-c; trans. Paul Shorey)