Final Project: Take I, notes on filming “Election night in SL”
This is my first take on my final project. I finished editing the small documentary of election night that I filmed in the Obama Sim in Second Life.
I tried to work on the concept of “remediation”, referencing one medium to another, one type of aesthetic, the one of documentary, to the one of video game platforms and TV .
I pointed the camera to the computer screen and to the TV and by doing so i was surprised to find new spaces that I would not think could possess such depth of field. I guess i have always seen the “screen” as a flat surface, a mechanical instrument, moving in two dimensions… but it suddenly became something more, a multi-dimensional space made of information patterns in constant motion, always shifting its reference to the *outside world*. This relationship of the content in the screen to another “space” is what interested me deeply… a space that I would have called the Real World before all the Hayles’ and the Shaviros’, the discussions in class and my direct experience in Second Life, but that now is just the same world, just more manipulated, deconstructed and reconstructed.
This perennial man made work of construction and destruction of images, discourse, interactions very often referred to as the Virtual World, seems to me now a very natural one… not different from the process of synthetizing energy from sunlight that plants have, or the annual melting and re-hardening of snow into rivers or glaciers.
My ethnographic approach to Second Life as a new media platform, fuelled by the semester’s readings have strengthened my belief that nature extends to the man made world and its constructions much more than we generally believe. This is valid also to discourse. Does it make sense to talk about cultural discourse versus genetic / organic / scientific construction ? Is an idea different to a protein sequence in a plant DNA ? Eventually as discoveries about the brain progress, this distinction is going to melt away. I was reading somewhere that we have isolated the chemical changes in the brain that relate to experiences, memories, traumas etc. Culture’s chemical impact is therefore already given.
Furthermore if we accept an epistemology of pattern and information as Bateson and Hayles have suggested, then the difference is only of formal / organizational value. Our brain seems to need categories to navigate the world in the same way bats need radars, but we should always remember to remove them when we move to higher ontological questions.
Coming back to my Machinima work in Second Life it seemed to me that the screen is particularly interesting because of its dual function of containing and being contained by *the outside world*, or better by the flow of life….that flow that we have seen theorized by Shaviro and Tsing.
Whilst filming I had my lap top on a coffee table in a room full of friends, the TV on, beside me. My attention was moving constantly between these 3 spaces that in that very night happened to be operating in sync. The election event provided a strong link amongst the three ‘situations’ and made the connection amongst these very real and obvious. The voices and sounds in the film move across these worlds and overlap. Sometimes the voices of my friends in the room provide depth to the Second Life avatars, whilst the TV breaks through providing direction to these collective performances as results are cheered, commented, referenced throughout.
Whilst operating the camera through this very unusual environment, I remembered a part of “Sans Soleil” by Chris Marker where the camera’s attention moves from the streets of Tokyo to the TV screen in the author’s dark impersonal hotel room. Suddenly the world of the room enlarges to reach the whole of Japan… the screen becomes a gateway to another experience of the country, mediated and re-written in televised form… or like Gregory Bateson would say quoting Bertrand Russel, a difference of *logical types*.
This difference is only a difference in level of abstraction, an aesthetic language that is superimposed on the usual non-man-made universe, so not a mere difference of substance. Reality is an image, over an image, over an image. My work on memory [see my previous videos and papers part of "Layers"] done last year appears very much in tune with this concept. Memory is itself a virtual reality, as Shaviro rightly points out, formed by superimposition of different layers that interact with existing ones and are constantly changing (“we are constantly re-writing history as much as history is re-written” – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil).
When editing the footage I have tried to understand the difference between the TV image of the CNN anchorman and the one of the avatars in Second Life. Whilst the TV image is still very compliant to reality, the avatar is a sort of human abstraction. It does have human features (at least the majority has) but more in a puppet sort of way. Wanting to reference this analysis to Pierce semiotic guidelines, I would say that an avatar has some iconic value, together with being also indexical in the way photographic images of people are. Infact I find very difficult to see what dominant semiosis is typical of an avatar. It’s not totally indexical because by looking at my avatar no one can really work out my real features… however it is still me and operated by me… without me, my avatar would not exist or walk around or meet other people, which makes it also very indexical.
Have we hit a semiotic double bind ? or is it just the same old stuff ? This is one of the questions that I will investigate throughout my final project.
