Uffa Burnstein

The take II of this ethnographic investigation of machinima involved me showing around my small doc and other clips that I filmed in SL on thanksgiving. I have also shown some of the most interesting machinima work that I found on the internet like (see clips scattered around the text)

Because I do not like questionnaires and given the ethnographic spirit of this research, I have adopted a very phenomenological approach. I have been showing the clips to various people in my circle of friends and family and encouraged conversations about the material than I then logged. Some of these people I can define as highly media literate, they were aware of Second Life and 3D interactive animation (video games etc), had been users of one of these platform at some stage in life and have previously seen or heard of machinima. Other were familiar with videogames but did not know Second Life or had heard of it but never used it, they general media literacy was average to high, not really different from mine. Some others had basic digital media literacy that generally stops with surfing the internet, using email and mobile phone. My parents and some of my Italian friends can be defined as such.  

I have noted that different levels of media literacy have influenced the way in which everyone was responding to the machinima clips.  I was expecting from people that have little of no experience in interactive 3D animation to confuse machinima clips with cartoons or other graphic type of animation. This was obviously the case if I presented the material without any explanation. My mother for instance thought they were cartoons and even joked about the fact that I am still “playing around with children’s stuff”.  My father said my doc was “very beautiful”, from which I understood that he liked the graphics (probably he found the avatars pleasant to watch as most of them were presenting some aesthetic patterns that seem very much in line with Italian ideas of beauty… symmetry, general comformism etc), but also the expression “it’s beautiful” in Italian can mean much more than just aesthetically pleasant. Not surprising what is “bello” for an Italian is also good (the legacy of the Renaissance), so it implies a wider value judgement. Maybe he appreciated the doc because it related to US elections or because it seemed to make sense to him.  After these initial comments I have steared the conversations to the fact that those avatars are manouvred by people. Even this point did not seem to interest them that much, they politely reiterated that everything was “very interesting” but I did not seem to have hit any string here. I think virtual worlds do not belong to their experiences, somehow they do not mean much to them as they came to mean for us.I remember thinking that maybe I should have insisted and explain the whole thing about virtuality and reality and what having real people moving around animated world can mean. Although I have done this job of “contemporarization of my family” before (i.e. with drugs, sexuality, race etc) i smelt the fatigue and physical strain that it usually takes me to break through these “walls”, and i gave up. I better keep my energy to fight other educational battles like race and sexuality. Virtuality is just not that important. One thing I learned during this course is that ethnographic research requires a lot of time and a lot of energy.

My friends with some average media literacy found the whole thing of filming into a video game, a very amusing thing. Again their reaction seems a function of this. They have been the ones that generated the most enthusiastic responses. “Oh my God, was there really an Obama world ??? was he actually there himself with an avatar? did he build the world to get votes? (from my friend C)” They obviously loved the idea of turning the camera to the screen, I guess more because they do not seem to have enough time / energy to participate to a virtual world, but they would like to know more about it. These people (that represent the highest amount of people I have spoken to about machinima) found the documentary side of machinima very interesting, they wanted to know more about Second Life and what is there, what are people doing. Given the hassle of having to learn a new software, they preferred the documentary/machinima form to explore these worlds. This initial interest directed most of these friends to watch the “emergent second life” TV program that I participated into. Again their feedback was very positive and excited and let them with a wish to know more. The clips stimulated the same endless conversations that we had in class about identity, virtual vs real, power, economy etc.  This group of people did not seem to very interested in the fantasy machinima clips that I showed. “These clips loose the value of documentation and return back towards animation/cartoons. (from my friend P)”.

I have thought about the fact that to be able to appreciate a certain aesthetic, this needs to have come to your personal experience already. Only after the usage of a medium, this can turn into aesthetic language. The parallel with electronic music is extremely clear to me. We had to go through decades of alarm clocks, computer clicks, various blips and blops played by our electrical appliances to be able to welcome those sounds in music. We had to spend years in industrial sites listening to the loud repetitive banging of pistons and turbines to be able to dance to it.  Language is something that humans seem to gather from their environments. They turn their worlds into art, like in a magic alchemist’ work here the elements are taken from the world around us.  This concept is to me extremely interesting because it introduces the process of the *aesthetization of the real*, a process that seems to be associated with post modernity and digital technology but that to me can be applied to human history as a whole. The ground here is extremely rich and I am going to explore it further next semester to see whether I find some interesting angle for a thesis.  The theoretical framework that I should start from to me begins with Kant and his “Critique” and has to pass through the history of Aesthetics. 

Another group of people whose judgement is meaningful for the sake of this research is the one that i would define as “cronic Second Life users”.  There is a large usage of Second Life machinima produced by and for SL residents. I guess it has become part of their “Second Life” to document themselves, just as digital cameras have become fundamental in our first lives. The Second Life group in Flickr has over 8,700 members and if you  type “Second Life” on the Flickr search engine you get over 96,000 photos / videos. Youtube gives you back 38,500 videos. You can do the same for Halo3, WWC, Tomb Raider etc etc.  This must mean something. See my post on production for more insight into how all this production is being generated and why (sorry Jason, it’s the only why i used!)

for more of amywilson work, click on the photo

One that particularly interested me was this photo of a watercolor of a Second Life Sim… how’s that for remediation ?!  This lady who i’ll refer to as “A” from Jersey city, who claims in her profile to be “female and taken” has created a whole lot of watercolors of Second Life (click on the image for more). To me this is the next stage of machinima in way, when a certain aesthetic is absorbed at a certain level of depth of experience, it starts filtering out of your first life aesthetics.  I am thinking of the dreams I used to have in Tomb Raider’s world… It is not a strange fact, and to me establishes a very strong link between aesthetics and identity. We are what we see / eat / make love to etc etc If more and more the world around us is made of colorful pixels, we start producing art and dreams that include that world’s aesthetic.

As a method of investigating the responses to machinima from the “cronic SL users” group, I have looked at the comments on the photos and videos that are published on these sites.  This is to me a great use of the feedback capabilities that Web 2.0 provides. Also given the great linkage between posts, comments and groups, I was able to let myself go and follow random threads. For example Z. writes to A’s watercolor photo: “Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Second Life – is REAL!, and we’d love to have this added to the group! “. I obviously went to check out this group who’s founding intent is to use SL photos to investigate what is reality and how is Second Life as real as reality. An interesting way of doing so is also in the specification that “The essence of this group is NOT about ‘realistic’ snapshots from Second Life®!” !