Interactive art

This is a quick post but here is an interesting place to visit - The Pencil Factory - some great interactive art projects. http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Port/31/66/26

Second Life is a Carnival, old chum

Damn that was fun! I don’t always get to say that about college classes. Oh occasionally I do – like after dadaday or the genart final projects or the final projects for postdramatic theatre – but it doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should. Part of what makes those days stand out is they feel a bit like recess – pockets carved out of an otherwise “serious” day of study for play-full activity. It strikes me that we don’t do this nearly enough at the college level – or even the high school level. I agree with the early education folks like Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget that play is never a frivolous activity – but a time for experimentation and growth. Rather than a supplementary activity or distraction from the “real work,” play-ful-ness is often the impetus for creativity and real learning.

So – “Avatar Day” – not what I expected – and that is a good thing. As a teacher I love being caught off guard – when a student rises above expectations, points out an overlooked idea in a reading assignment, or solves an open-ended question is unique way. Essentially by telling the students to shape and outfit an avatar Bob and I presented them with an open-ended question to which we did not know the answer. This leaves a great deal of room for surprise and for each student to develop ideas in their own way. Out of the simple rules established – present your avatar and tell us a bit about it – a complex – somewhat chaotic class erupted (I am sure that there is a bit in here about complexity theory – but I will leave that to be developed in a later blog). We built a runway stage on which each avatar was to take focus – providing a space that was designated as the “performance space.” This seemed to work ok. But, why I thought we would need chairs is beyond me. It became immediately apparent that no one was going to sit quietly while the others presented their work. To begin with, half of the avatars couldn’t even fit in the chairs – I mean I really didn’t bargain on Optimums Prime, a Zebra, a Hot Dog, and Cheese Burger. Needless to say – I was delighted that the chairs were unnecessary. And lesson learned – don’t try and contain avatar activity in a traditional space. Perhaps next time we should just meet in one of those giant bouncy things.

But beyond the chaos of size and weaponry – the play-full attitude that the class started with right from the beginning was overwhelming. Now for the thinking part - from time to time I will get all theoretical in this blog. I am always fascinated not by what happens, but how what happens can be used to talk about something else. There is a 20^th century theorist named Mikhail Bakhtin who developed ideas on what he called the “Carnivalesque” – which grows out of the carnival/feast of fools stuff from the middle ages. Essentially what he pointed out about certain literary forms and real world experiences is how the normal everyday rules are overturned and, for a time, the world is free from the deadening control of social etiquette, hierarchies, and authority. Why this comes to mind comes out of how each avatar was presented and the response by the other avatars. Immediately the entire class began riffing on the presentation. Leading questions, double entendres, sexual innuendo, puns, word-play were all established as appropriate responses to the presentations. The question I have for the students is would they have reacted the same way to an in-class presentation? So – a classmate gets up to present ideas from a reading assignment, or a monologue, a movement, a model, a drawing, a film clip – do you immediately start making unusual comments and demanding that they discharge their weapon? From the most visibly complex avatars built with layers or contrasting elements to the more subtle, but no less engaging approaches each avatar opened up with the presented narrative and the explosive responses. This is exactly the point of play – it creates a free zone where you do not need to self-censor – a space that can be used for riffing, for experimentation, for improvisation. Teaching at an art school I feel compelled to point out that this type of space is a creative space. Why we don’t construct spaces like this more often is beyond me. But there it is. Second Life is a carnival, old chum – no question about it.

Derridada

This is Derridada Mimiteh who, in the parlance of this era, is a steampunk – or – to be more specific – he is dressed as a steampunk aspiring to be one. Why steampunk? To begin with his creator likes hybrids - any mashing together of two ideas he find supremely satisfying. Postmodern, postdigital, praxis (theory and practice) top the list. This is akin to what Lewis Carroll referred to as portmanteau words like snark (snake + shark) in which a new idea, creature, identity, etc is formed by the collision of two or more ideas (Derridada is one such example perhaps pointing to possible anarchistic or at least play-full SL activity. Derrida was a brilliant post-structuralist French thinker who developed the idea of deconstruction while the dadaists, as imagined by Hugo Ball, saw their activities as a farce of nothingness in which all higher questions were involved). Spending hours haunting the SL marketplace and shops the creator discarded one identity after another – goth, furry, vampire, punk, tiny, fantasy – all seemed too limited, too focused. The idea of mashing up industrial revolution technology with today seemed like a nice place to start. He began his infatuation with the form in New Babbage – a steampunk city complete with shops, dirigibles, and other steampunks. Since this initial commitment to steampunk Derridada has undergone a number of metamorphoses – including a 19^th century wardrobe offset by 21^st century accessories like steam boots, tattoos, tinted glasses, and a Reboot pin which firmly places one foot in the future and one in the past. The most recent addition is the golden metallic skin. Derridada is in the process of evolving into a clockwork man – one who’s outward appearance suggests human, but the inner workings are run on industrial age gears and cogs. The new skin is a start, but the creator knows that in order to fully complete the transition he will need to learn about modifying or creating skins. As an “intentional body” the creator knows that it is possible to tinker with Derridada in drastic and subtle ways without the need to explain to anyone why his skin is green one day and metallic the next. The future may hold another form, but for now the project is underway and the creator would hate not to see it to its conclusion – or at least its next iteration.

Ka-boom!

One of the things that I had not anticipated about this course was the fragmented attention. Having 15 students in class that are simultaneously in Second Life creates a remarkably layered class experience. That is actually a polite way of saying it – in reality it feels like a bomb was set off. While each student is physically there in the classroom they are also scattered all over a virtual world. Some occupy the same world, some other worlds – so the end result is a conversation that takes place in multiple spaces at the same time. As a self proclaimed postmodernist this should not phase me at all. But, as a college teacher who’s job it is to help guide the conversation this can be somewhat unnerving.

This is, however, a main feature of living in the 21^st century in which our attention is often spread across multiple screens, multiple worlds. One of the things that I am interesting in, however, is what this sort of fragmented attention does to the educational process, how it affects way we think and learn. I have never understood learning to be a straight line – individual ideas converge as thinking develops through links and leaps. Despite this understanding I often arrange courses in a very linear – almost “well made play” fashion in the sense that we start slow with an exposition and rise toward a climax where all of the pieces are designed to congeal. Why can’t a syllabus be more rhizomatic – no beginning or end, but a circuitous path of links and connections?

What we have here in this course is a collective mind made up of 17 different minds – all headed off in different directions. It will be interesting to dip into this collective mind from time to time to see what observations and conclusions it can draw. One idea that became visible today are the philosophical implications of SL. Watching yourself do things provides that once removed so crucial to phenomenological thought. I think if we can keep the students focused on playing in the world while at the same time observing themselves playing then some of the ideas raised by our readings will be more readily absorbed. The anthropological and post-structuralist material should work well for this. I do like the structure in which we can assign the readings based on the conversation in class, but that means not necessarily knowing where we are going next – kind of like reading a non-linear story. Again – as a postmodernist I should love that, as a teacher I keep wanting to see what is around the next corner. In SL I have taken to simply teleporting to locations where a lot of bodies (or green dots) are located. Like the class - that is the exciting part – not knowing where I am headed and what I will encounter next. This is what Bob refers to as fascination – that crucial part of creativity. In SL and with this course I am engaged because I don’t know what will happen next and that fascinates me.

I would really love to listen to one of those TRS-80 cassette tapes

From an early interest in reading, to work in the theatre, to films, graphic novels, video games and the internet I have spent a great deal of time in virtual worlds. I love the notion of climbing into a world, whether it is one prompted by the rich and complex language of a novel or one generated by the ones and zeros of digital culture. I am among the first generation exposed to a digital environment and the sweeping changes in technology that I have seen in my lifetime astound me. I can recall a time in which video games did not exist and still sense that rush of wonder and excitement when they did. Hardwired into my DNA are Pong, Tank Battle, Asteroids, Robotron, Galaga, Tempest, Tetris and dozens of other spaces I inhabited for countless quarter-fueled hours. While I never quite got the hang of the programming language the way my brother did, I grew up in a house with a TRS-80 – one of the first home computers (data was recorded as clicks and pops on an analogue cassette recorder). I, along with a number of my friends in college, met periodically to slay Orcs by rolling a 12-sided die to play Dungeons and Dragons. I still have an original NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) that is now used for little more than the occasional nostalgia trip or to make some glitch art. I got on the MAC train in the late 80s and immediately understood the superiority of images over mere text. I watched as the internet moved from a useful tool to access library databases to an environment in which you could order books from a place called “Amazon.” I became, along with thousands of others, obsessed with Myst when it was released in the early 1990s and have since devoured every incarnation of the Myst franchise – including the three novels and a woefully misguided graphic one (I now play Rehm mainly because it is sort of like Myst and they are still making new games). In many ways turning attention to the subject of virtual worlds is like shining a light on decades of my life. What all of these spaces share is an intensity of vision – a mindset that suggests that they are somehow different from “reality” and yet share with it an investment in body and mind. Something happens when I climb into a virtual world, something changes, something shifts, and each time I seem to bring a little bit of that back into this world. Over the course of the next ten weeks I want to explore that sense of wonder that exploring worlds I could have barely imagined when the thrill of hitting a tiny white digital ball with two digital paddles was overwhelming.