Schoeffer Tower at Gallery Diabolus

Over the past several weeks there has been a "cybernetic tour" and performance at Gallery Diabolus, part of CARP (Cybernetic Art Research Project), focused on a construction of the Tower of Light that Nicolas Schöffer had designed for Paris.  Schöffer is described as the "father of cybernetic art," and the Gallery is a tribute to his work.  On its nine levels are pieces by SL artists Dancoyote Antonelli, Velazquez Bonetto, Josina Burgess, Artistide Despres, Glyph Graves, Werner Kurosawa, Merlino Mayo, Bryn Oh, and shellina Winkler.  Most of the works are reactive or interactive.

The tour is an excellent way to introduce someone (like that newbie who just latched onto you) to NPIRL art, and it's worthwhile for those of us already acquainted with many of the artists' work.  The tour script-controls your camera and seat, so you see every level from various angles.  It concludes with a performance of "Alien Bolero" directed by Medora Chevalier, danced to Ravel's famous orchestral composition "Bolero" (a real treat!).  Unfortunately one can't dance it oneself, so come to a performance, it's well worth it. [Edit: there's a machinima by Debbie Trilling.]

A few photos:
The tours and performances at the Tower of Light will continue over the next several Sundays at 1:00 PM SLT.

Interview with Miso Susanowa: Sound Visionary

I interviewed Miso Susanowa for the new issue of Scruplz Magazine, which I've reproduced below.  Below it I've added a part of the conversation which I had to cut for length.

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Miso Susanowa’s art can easily mislead a visitor. One can stop by her shop and gallery, closely view her pieces, and go. But to experience and understand her work, first you have to open your . . . ears. For Miso is unusual among Second Life artists, because of the importance she gives to music and sound. Turn up the volume, touch the works around you, and listen.

Miso’s fascination with music and sounds began when she was a child, and she started working with computer-mediated communication from the very beginnings of the Internet. In an interview, we discussed the way she combines sound and sculpture within Second Life.

Dividni Shostakovich: Do you have particular ways of connecting your sound work to visual elements?

Miso Susanowa: Well, not really. Sometimes I will start with a sound, but often it is shapes that I begin with. I am less a builder here than a sculptor. I made the decision early on not to go around and see too much artwork, and to let the world and the tools speak to me. I spend a lot of time here staring at the ocean or a shape or the build tab. One thing I know from my online history is that you can get caught up in this kind of ticking clock thing, like you should be doing something. But that isn’t really how you do things in the atom world. You take rests, you sit and relax. I built the Garden of Sound because LA was being very intense for me, sound/noisewise and density wise. So the Garden was actually my escape, my peace, my slow-down spot, my meditation place.

So I’d sit and I’d play with shapes and scripts. My flowers were some of my first. And I thought, well, I could put sound in them. That led me to think about the stuff I liked—Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Brian Eno—especially because of the sound limitations in SL. I had done loop-music, “ambient” music a long time. SL made me rethink that in terms of 10-second loops and how I could spatialized them, make the same kind of music, the long-wave music I did in RL, in SL.

The Flowers became a series where I was working with spatializing sound, trying to make the loops not sound so repetitive but still be Riley-esque. I would keep each Flower that I did on a master track. Then the next Flower was tuned to that one, so that they would harmonize. Most of the Flowers work together as a composition.

DS: So a person can select some Flowers, and create a personal composition simply from those choices.

MS: Yes, that is the other main and integral thing I am working with here, with my gaming and VRML [Virtual Reality Modeling Language] background, where you explore everything. You don’t know what is a clue, like in Myst or Under a Killing Moon or Blade Runner, so you examine everything. It’s very interactive. So I make many of my multiple-sound pieces as touch-start instead of sensor. Then people can compose, or remix or whatever you want to call it—get involved, adjust, play with. That is one of the things about these worlds that is not like the web: you are interactive. It’s still hard! I see people never touch or explore things here. Many people don’t realize my work has sound. I could use sensors, but that is a rather passive, television-like thing. I demonstrate my “Solar Symphony” for people and then let them play with it. It’s really cool to watch them actually focus in and try different things and listen and be part of the process.

DS: One of your recent works, “code dreams,” was at the Art Breakers show at the Pop Art Lab. It might be described as a meditation on the dangers, pleasures and possibilities of human-computer interaction, centered around the concept of identity. How did you develop the ideas for its structure and contents?

MS: Well, many of the pieces in “code dreams” have come from the Garden. Really, it is the same theme I have been working with, but hasn’t been focused in one place yet. When Binary Quandry approached me about the show, I was very excited because it was a focus on sound, the whole show, which is unusual here. There’s a lot more graphics than sound in SL. And I’d had a previous piece which dealt with something I have studied a long time online, that of self image and projection. This is an issue as an artist I have dealt with a long time: who am I? Am I all the labels my parents, my teachers, my friends put on me? The existential question, right? So, at first I put up some Flowers, some small pieces. I realized I could expand my Garden and actually all my single piece works into a thematic statement of this question, who am I? And there’s a lot of bloggery about this now, and with Caerleon doing the Identity series: “is SL real?”

This is a stupid question to me, after all the communities I have been involved in. A voice on the telephone is “not real” in that it isn’t even an analog movement of air now. It’s all digital now. But that person is real, of course, as is a letter writer, or the electrons you see on TV that are people. I wanted to engage that question and take it further, with my experience with Jungian analysis and quantum physics. Quantum mechanics also says we are not real; we are at best whirling atomic particles . . . or waves . . . they aren’t sure :)

Einstein engaged this question, as did the Copenhagen Interpretation and Heisenberg. Yet we are real to us, and a solid oak table will hurt my foot if I kick it. Einstein, and Jung, and Sufis and the rest all agree: this is both real and not-real. It is an observer phenomenon. We participate. Jungian analysis will show you that most people are not a truly defined “I.” We are a collection of personas that are stronger or weaker in situations. So I see no difference between the “persona” of an avatar and the “persona” of a person who is one way at work, another with a lover, a third with children. They are all real in some way, parts of a human’s being.

That became the entire theme: what is real, what is definition, and who decides. People were talking about SL and computer code. I realized I could show my other background by taking the same issue into biology. After all, at base we are 90-something percent water. A handful of chemicals. A few simple amino acids. And some electricity.

But to say a woman or man or animal is just that is silly. It is sophomoric. Chemicals do not explain the Sistine Chapel. Or philosophy. Or Beethoven. Or why such things connect with us and move us no matter what nationality or race or sex we are.

DS: It’s reductive.

MS: Yes, and this is a great modern problem, reductionism, a poison from the Industrial Revolution. We are sadly hurting for generalists now. It’s affecting progress, it is discussed in many academic places. Many techs discuss it frequently. Innovation is falling. It’s worrisome. So, in “code dreams” I tried to bring out all these reductionist things. The AGCT amino acids of biology, the 1 and 0 of computers. I show that to think of such things in such a way is both stupid and ultimately denigrating yourself, computers, anything.

In “code dreams” I brought together my music, and tried to show people how my world is for me, awash in sound, like a painting but in the ear. And I used symbols of my life—the girl’s bed, the mirror, the plants. The toys I made of such concepts as identity and time and biology. How those facts enrich my life, my understanding. But yet . . . all a dream. We are all dreaming here, as both psychologists and shamans will tell us. So to me, SL is a magic mirror. People show me parts of themselves through avatar, dress, work they do. That is no less real than what they show me in atom life.

DS: By the time this interview comes out, Burn2 will have passed, but the readers may have seen “House of Cards,” which you created with Xenophile Neurocam. Can you tell me a little about it?

MS: “House of Cards” began as a silly idea, part haunted house and part disgruntled reaction to some of the business decisions Linden Labs is making. Especially with my history of watching worlds and communities like Geocities fold, and There.com, and the like. The structure of the haunted house gradually evolved through meditating about these issues, and the architecture was influenced by the theme of Burn2, the film Metropolis.

“House of Cards” is a theatre of memory for the evolution of communities on the Net. The bottom floor is the Iron Age—the hardware stuff, TCP/IP, kermit, BBSes—so it is all rusted iron, “heavy metal” as we used to call the big mainframes. The second floor is the Steam Age: a cathedral of stained glass, the laying down of the railroad tracks of the Web. It features textures of all my old worlds, the mothers of SL: Alphaworld, Cybertown, etc. The top floor is the Industrial Age, where we are now, and features most of the existing grid worlds. But all the walls are thin and have playing card backing textures. Nothing is precisely aligned either, as when you make a real house of cards. The figure on top represents both The Avatar and Maria of Metropolis. She has scaled this tenuous House of Cards in her search for the future, for the new worlds, the hypergrid, the dream we all have here. The soundtrack’s base is made entirely of computer and telephone sounds. As you rise, you hear other sounds and music. Building up to the top floor, where you hear the Great Music. And you will hear other things, notably Phillip Linden speaking about SL. :D

But under all of it you will still hear the telephone and the computers, the basis of this world here and others. Along the way are fallen pages, or cards, of worlds past or gone or backwatered. Also, ghosts of Lindens gone—Blue, Robin, Pathfinder—good people. All as playing cards.

From far back the lower building appears as a being, as the M-machine, Moloch, in Metropolis. I worry about the good people being left, or the worlds, in this quest for . . . monetization? I watched the worlds come apart before from this. It set the web back ten years. Imagine what SL would be now if that development hadn’t stopped. That is my anxiety about SL, because of course I love it. As Bryn Oh helped me do, I was able to articulate not just my fears and disappointments but what I come here for—the wonder, the creativity, the people, the hope.

Metropolis also has these themes. And it is an old theme. How much of our cities are we to sacrifice for? When does a city become a trap and not a joy? These issues are very old in the atom world and they are becoming important in the digital. “House of Cards” is not only a warning but a memory of the beauty and magic that came before SL and led to it, and my own personal feeling that expanding the grids outside LL is the best thing to do. Propagate the worlds, so they can’t all fall at once and break someone else’s heart.

I am very pleased with “House of Cards.” And Xenophile was a wonderful partner. He remembers all this too, the progression, so he got it right away.

Miso Susanowa’s Garden of Sound is at secondlife://Craigavon/48/223/67.

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Here are some additional portions of our interview, preceding the discussion of "House of Cards":

DS: There’s an interesting contrast in your work that I’d like to discuss. Your larger pieces include what might be described as “New Age” pieces such as Shinden no Kagetsu (Temple of the Radiant Moon), and political installations such as “State of Mind.” Some people might see those as a strange combination. How do you see them?

MS: My work all comes from my passion and involvement in life. No human being is polarized. I spent many years exploring meditation and spiritual working, to help balance myself, to find some personal peace. “State” came about from my knowledge of the net’s very beginnings and what it has gone through, and what is happening now: a struggle for control of this medium. But this medium is my home, more than any physical place. So my passion for “State” came from my home being threatened. There’s been a struggle for control of the Net since Microsoft started with its code pollution. People forget that television was originally spoken of in the same way the Net is now: as a tool for community, for artists and moms and communication. It was taken over and subsumed to corporate interests. And it’s been being assaulted by those same forces for 20 years now. So I am very passionate about that. “State” was an ugly piece to do. I knew quite a lot because I follow such things closely, but I put in solid 8-hour days for two months for “State.” It was quite depressing. “State” was a piece I had to do as an exorcism, to manifest my fears and frustration. At first I didn’t plan to show it at all.

“Code dreams” can be seen as the other side of that, or perhaps as one other side of Miso. Parts of my life: both “State” and code dreams. I hate politics. I wrote a political blog [in the mid 1990s]. That was another thing that burnt me out in 1999. So I try to avoid them now. But the Net is my home, and I will fight for my home. “State” is me fighting; “code dreams” is me being Miso, the flower girl—dreaming, playing. Puppies and kittens :D

DS: And the Temple as well, as a place for peace and tranquillity.

MS: Yes! Actually I had a house there to begin with. And I made the Earth Sphere as a relaxation meditative sound to block out the Los Angeles cacophony. Then the Temple just talked to me—the idea of a place to work with the sound work I had been pursuing with ancient systems of music and healing. I follow a doctor at UCLA who is the authority on sonic healing, she knits bones with sound. And I had studied ancient musics, mode and frequency. Some organ keys in the great cathedrals are separated from the pedals, you cannot play them, because certain notes at certain frequencies have undesirable physical effects. One of which I know, is that one will make you fart! Which isn’t good in church. But most everyone has seen films of a bridge tearing apart under soldier’s feet from resonance, and this is why they are ordered to walk out of step crossing such structures. Tesla also did fascinating work in this.

So, the Temple became a place to make pure sine waves and pursue this research. Pauline Oliveros did a lot of work in this field. The sines for the Temple were very hard. Because of the wave shapes, making the cuts to make them looped was awful. It took days for each wave, to get rid of click artifacts that would happen if the wave was not cut precisely on a curve. And to then mix in binaural beat patterns, which are well-known. Very, very difficult, I almost gave it up. The higher frequencies were murder. Easy enough to generate at home but in SL ... ugh. But I finally got the last two to work.

DS: The SL environment must present a lot of different technical challenges.

MS: Yes, especially because sound seems to take a back seat here. Yes, you can stream, but native inworld sound is very primitive, although the FMOD [sound] engine used in the browser is well-known and used for much more complex things. It’s a sore point with sound people. A real world’s sound informs you a lot more than people pay attention to: depth, time, space, relational geometry—ask a deaf person. But most people don’t consider it much. How much the sense of hearing is integral. It’s just intuitive. Many people know at least rudimentary color theory. But many less know rudimentary sound theory. Not music theory. But it is critical to engineering, for example, sonic stress on tension cables and so on. Standing waves, resonant frequencies. Engineers must know these things or face dire consequences in, say, a high wind. or with 1000 people walking across a floor.

So the Temple is a great experiment, especially because the computer can accurately reproduce the sines. And with headphones, where you get the binaural effects. Binaurals wont work in speakers. They do not make the phantom synergistic beat in the middle of the brain. You must always use headphones for such sound. You hear overtones which aren’t really there. They are the sum of the sides, and it only happens in your head. When it does, it entrains the two halves of the brain to synchronize. Your brain hears, say an A=440 in one side of the headphones. In the other it hears a D=880. Your own brain will make the harmonic sum of 660, which will pulse because it’s being affected by both other frequencies. That pulsing is interior to the brain, it is the halves of the brain trying to sync up the sound. It’s the same way some visual effects strobing, moire patterns, yantras, can work on the optic nerves. In fact the walls of the Temple are a particular shade of violet that is known to stimulate the pineal through the optic nerve. As are the colors of the spheres, they are the sine waves only raised by powers to the visual. Because of course it is all waves. Sound becomes light. Light becomes rock if carried low enough. All harmonics of the fundamental frequencies. Which wraps us back to physics.

Miso and I talked of much else, including her activity in the early days of the Internet and her escapades in the punk music scene.  If you ever meet her, ask.

Return of the Flux!

Once upon a time, there was the Bogon Flux. In a land inhabited by eerie creatures with one large eye on a mechanical stalk, rats, an enormous (and equally ratty) couch, and other oddities, it was a crazy, ramshackle steampunk build that grew from a smallish tower to a gigantic mishmash of rooms, tubes, outhouses and god knows what that you could wander through, soon getting entirely lost, and then tumbling out as it blew itself apart, sending pieces into the sky and onto the ground. And it was good. It was very good. And it went away.

Months and months passed. More than a year. Lovers of lunacy long lamented the loss.

Now, blotto Epsilon and Cutea Benelli, creators of Bogon Flux, have brought us the Petrovsky Flux, installed at the Spencer Art Museum sim. Its twisty branches sprout new parts of various sorts, as did the Bogon Flux, and also like its predecessor, eventually numerous parts fall off in a cascade of junk. You'll want something to protect your head, and the creators kindly provide one -- a "noggin protector" that you pick up from a sign at the landing point, complete with little propellerized sheep that fly around your head. The big sofa is back -- two of them in fact -- as are the eyeballs on stalks, now accompanied by eyeballs with wings. Pink armchairs are piled up and occasionally wander around; one or two provide rides of a sort. There are some TPs and other goodies.

All photos below are taken with the "Brighton" windlight settings recommended by Epsilon and Benelli. Click on the photos to see larger views.

I have to admit, I miss the creepier aspects of the Bogon Flux, especially the large number of eyeballs on stalks watching your every move, the rats, and the disturbing and undefinable creatures in the sea. And the Bogon Flux was designed so that people can wander around inside, which this build isn't (although you can get inside). On the other hand, it also isn't as lag-inducing as its predecessor (as an occasional scriptor, I'm fascinated by the technical aspects too). Anyhow, I'm happy to see the Petrovsky Flux, and already started dragging friends over to see it. It's that sort of build -- go share it with someone.

The Identity Fix(ation)

One can scarcely encounter a blog on art in Second Life (or indeed many other blogs about SL) without coming across a discussion of identity in virtual worlds.  Many artworks focus on that theme; some artists, such as Gracie Kendal, Vaneeesa Blaylock (who recently said she's leaving SL) and Botgirl Questi, devote practically their entire oeuvre to it; and now we have the Caerleon Museum of Identity, an exhibition running through the end of October.

Commonplace topics on this theme for bloggers and artists include the question of whether the SL identity is "real," the possibility of confusion between SL and RL identities, the "ambiguity of identity" (the Caerleon exhibition originally used that phrase for its title), multiple identities and the possibility that they each have their own personalities, and attacks and/or celebrations of gender role play.

But I'm not going to examine those matters: my focus here is the "identity" theme itself.

There are two curious aspects of how the topic of identity tends to be addressed.  One is there is often slippage if not outright muddiness about concepts.  When someone takes on the theme of identity, often what they actually discuss is personality, social role, social category, personality, visual presentation, sense of self, individuality, psychology, sexuality, or some other concept.  But these are distinct ideas, or at least they can be distinguished.  For example, I have a pretty strong sense of self, but I don't have a strong sense of identity in the sense of membership in a category.  And designating an identity is often a way to safely pigeonhole someone, avoiding an actual encounter.  (Identity theft?  I'm tempted to say identity is theft.)

The other oddity is a certain, dare I say, narrowness.  One can tell a lot by what is and isn't at the Museum of Identity.  Lining the entry hallway and ringing the top of the central gallery, there's a cavalcade of avatar forms, from warriors to wolves to elderly ladies to businessmen to ducks to vampires to mermaids and on, celebrating the vast array of possibilities that SL offers.  But these seem like token appearances: the identities depicted in the artworks themselves are strictly human. There's not a furry, cyborg, tiny or even neko to be seen. (There's Maya Paris's wacky mechanoid bird, which I loved, even though—or more likely because—it seemed to merrily fail to answer any of its questions; but in context, I think it's more of a costume than an avatar.)  Somehow, alternative embodiments of identity aren't at issue: there's a distinct normativity about the sort of avatar that's up for consideration.  The depictions and obsessions suggest that the norm is young, white, and most often female.  Whether or not that reflects the demography of the real life artists in Second Life, it certainly doesn't reflect the span of avatar types in Second Life.  It doesn't even reflect the range of artists' avatars (some of which are supposedly expressions of felt identity).

Maya Paris's mechanoid bird

I should emphasize, I am not criticizing the Museum of Identity exhibition curator, FreeWee Ling, who brought together many interesting and provocative works.  The disjunction between expressed ideas about the plurality and fluidity of identity in SL vs the artistic representations about it is much more widespread than that.  Nor am I suggesting that the pieces at the exhibition are bad art.  In fact the overall quality is very high.  My personal favorites are Botgirl Questi's [correction:] Chrome Underwood's smart, witty cartoons, especially the one in which an avatar is unfaithful to one of his alts by getting into an affair with his other alt; but I liked many of the others as well.  My subject here lies not in the quality of the art, but in the nature of the ideas behind it.

Two comic strips by Botgirl Questi [correction:] Chrome Underwood
(read the left one from the bottom up)

There is yet another important characteristic to nearly all of the art and discussions about identity in SL: its individualistic mode of thought.  The identities at stake are essentially independent beings, perhaps connected to an individual in the real world, but in all other respects separated or outright isolated from an overall social context.  Of course, individualism (in both the moral and philosophical senses) is endemic to modern industrial and post-industrial societies.  It is in fact one reason why the concept of identity is so appealing to many people: "identity" brings the self-confirming assurance of a drug that demonstrates individualism's correctness.

The one piece in the Museum of Identity that notably departs from straight-up individualism is Lollito Markham's "Identity Office," which perhaps not coincidentally doesn't portray any avatars at all: it is a police detectives' office, ready to pin down who we are in order to keep us in our place.  I haven't decided whether Markham is engaged in social critique or following the simpler idea that society is an oppressive force opposed to the individual, which is a problematic theory too; the latter seems more likely, since the police office doesn't appear to gesture outward to underlying social structures, but at least Markham engages with a concept of society.

Lollito Markham's "Identity Office"

It is worth comparing "Identity Office" to two other works, not part of the Museum.  Miso Susanowa's build "State of Mind," which had a theme somewhat similar to Markham's, was more clearly a critique, concerning a system of social structures and relationships involving the network of overreaching state power, surveillance, torture and propaganda.  Bryn Oh's "Condos in Heaven" (blogged previously) extrapolates consumerism and economic imperialism by having them win a war again heaven itself.  As far as I know, this is the only full-scale piece in which Bryn undertakes social criticism (although one should note her abandoned shopping carts), but in most of her artwork, society is felt through its absence: a key source of her characters' tragedy is their forced deracination from the world they came from.  They are not loners or renegades—they are exiles.  Because exiledom involves a relationship to one's society, Bryn's work departs from individualism, though perhaps only to an inchoate extent.

We do not exist outside society: on the contrary, society is the condition for our existence, and our ideas and experiences are deeply rooted in its structures.  Our consciousness doesn't shape our being so much as our social being shapes our consciousness.  History isn't the creation of Great Men and Great Women: we got here because of the doings of all who came before us.  And the simple fact is, life is with people.  We cannot understand ourselves outside of that fact—if understanding ourselves as personal identities is even so important.  Identities are social.

Okay: I'm perfectly aware that if any artists are reading this, they'll take or leave it, and that's the way the cookie crumbles.  Anyway I'm not interested in being prescriptive: my aim is to describe and interpret what I see, rightly or wrongly.  Still, I agree with one artist in RL, Ben Vautier, who wrote: "To Change Art Destroy Ego."

Burn 2: A few favorites

Okay, I simply don't have time to blog about Burn 2, mostly because I'm working on another post entirely that with any luck I'll have ready tomorrow or the next day.

But here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order, and not to imply that there aren't other good things -- I just crash all the time and I'll never get to everything!

Miso Susanowa's "House of Cards: The History of Social Networking Considered as a House of Cards" is both a trip down memory lane (for those of us old enough to have memories with lanes) and a warning about the dustbins of history.  Near the top are some playing cards with Philip Linden's (original) face ... and already he too seems to be in the dustbin of history.


Madcow Cosmos and Lorin Tone have an archaeological site rising from detritus to a spaceship heading to the stars. On the middle level of the part you see below, a little to the left, are buckets and oil drums which play drums and other percussion, and skulls which chant. You can easily spend an hour playing with them. Find some dances in your inventory, you'll want to use them.

Bryn Oh has a new, disturbing work -- another one of her cam builds, which you enter by leading your camera through a doorway and up a corridor to small for you to enter, until you reach a chair with a sit which you can use to get inside, later having to do more camming. The use of the sit is I think a step toward involving the viewer even more intimately than ever.

And that's all I can manage to blog about.

Pick your jaw up from the floor, Div ... twice!

Jaw-dropper #1 is Linden Labs' bizarre asinine moronic obscene and I think self-destructive decision to double sim prices for nonprofit organizations and educational institutions, which (more or less by definition) are not major moneymakers yet are (more or less for the same reason) fonts of creativity. It's hard to imagine what LL's forecast is -- that these groups are heavily invested enough in SL that they'll choke down the additional US $150/month? Well, maybe a bunch of them will. My own university isn't doing squat in SL, but given its two rounds of layoffs, drastic cuts in the library acquisitions budget (ca. 40%), elimination of travel funds for professional (non-faculty) staff, etc etc, I doubt it would consider SL a great use of its cash. But maybe other schools are doing work in distance learning or other activities that would make the increased cost tolerable. It seems like a stretch to me. More endangered is involvement by nonprofits, many of which are small and often desperately underfunded; yes, there are a few enormous and essentially corporate foundations like the American Cancer Society, but it seems like time and again, LL's decisions favor the big guns and let the small players hang.  People keep saying small businesses generate the most jobs, maybe that should be a clue to what LL should really support....

Jaw-dropper #2 is a post John "Pathfinder" Lester (formerly Linden) wrote describing how people are already able to run OpenSim and Imprudence on a USB key. Yes: an entire virtual world and the ability to inhabit it, all on a single thumb drive, and all of its contents your own -- not rented, not reliant on someone else's servers. And since a viewer like Imprudence can be used with more than one virtual world, in principle it should be possible to seamlessly travel from OpenSim to Second Life to Inworldz and on. It's a declaration of Virtual World Independence. Go plug in.

Miso Susanowa's "code dreams"; or, "if (gAvatar == misoSusanowa) { state Identity; }"

Having picked on Miso Susanowa a little bit in a recent post, it turns out she's given me another morsel of food for thought, an intriguing one in the form of her piece at the Pop Art Lab's Art Breaker show, "code dreams." To understand it -- and certainly to make your way through it -- you can hardly do better than to read Miso's own blog post about it.

Miso is unusual among SL artists because sound is a -- perhaps the -- primary element in her work. (Her discussion of this is one reason her post about "code dreams" is so valuable.) It's crucial to turn up the volume on sounds, and probably the master volume control as well (you may want to turn down the UI volume if you do that). If you don't, you won't hear much of anything, which is how I missed almost everything in this piece the first time I visited it. Wearing earphones is a good idea, since the installation has stereo effects. Note that some objects play sounds only when you're nearby (camming isn't sufficient, though it's often valuable in order to increase volume); sometimes there is a bit of a delay before sounds play, probably due to SL sluggishness. Also, there are a lot of objects with sounds, and you may find it helpful to adjust their volume or turn one or two of them off temporarily (a click usually opens up a menu).

At first glance, "code dreams" looks like a random jumble of plants and objects and odds and ends, and perhaps not very interesting. But once you've adjusted the volume controls, "code dreams" clearly emerges as the immersive environment it is meant to be. It should be said, this quality is less pronounced in the first part of the installation, on the right side, which Miso identifies as the "input" side. (True to form, the first time I went, I unwittingly entered on the wrong side. The installation works better her way.) Here Miso introduces the most explicit codes in this work, starting with a cube at the entrance which gives a notecard about the piece, and has an image hidden within it.
Most of the codes in this part of the installation are of the computer sort: her SL avatar's unique alphanumeric key, an assortment of everyday identifiers such as her driver's licence number, audio waveform graphics, hexadecimals, and so forth. One object dispenses a notecard with a pure binary sequence of ones and zeroes. (I won't translate the computerese for you, but I'll reply to Miso by quoting Bertolt Brecht: "ein Mann ist kein Mann" ["one man is no man"].) However, "code dreams" also incorporates the fundamental code in the biological world: the four nucleic acids (as represented by letters) that combine in a dizzying array to create every living creature's ultimately unique DNA.
In the middle section ("processing"), the computer codes are subordinated to the more personal codes of memories and dreams. A couple of plants play bits of dialogue from the movie "The Wizard of Oz"; in one Dorothy declares that she'll stay where she belongs, in the other she defends the reality of her dream. A dog barks. A "guardian angel" sculpture plays a muffled recording of a child reciting a prayer. Bytes of computer and DNA code are scattered on the rug. A small table cluttered with childhood objects (some of which respond to touch) stands next to a girl's bed -- complete with Disney headboard -- which invites you to sleep. There, the sounds of the installation blend together in an intense and dynamic surround.

Aside from the soundscape here, which is wonderful, I have some mixed feelings about this part of the work. The focus on Miso's personal "codes" is problematic since there's not much to elucidate the context or the references, or even to indicate that these are references; Miso's post identifies them, but that provides only a little bit of help and one can't expect most people to read it. On the other hand, that focus fits with one of the work's other themes, identity. However, as if to alleviate this very problem, the bed table holds the "key" to the work, in the somewhat literal fashion of a golden key which delivers a poem called "code dreams." (It also tells Miso who touched it.) In the poem, Miso tells us that she both dreams in code, and codes dreams.

Miso's post calls the last section "output"; I'd describe it as "out into the world," where one can think big. The section is dominated by large "blossom tree," above which is a model solar system. Sit on the sun, and click planets on and off in order to play Miso's "Solar Symphony." The music is similar to Steve Reich's (especially his "18 Musicians") in its use of repeated and layered musical phrases and rhythms. (I love Reich's music, so frankly this was my favorite part of the installation.) Another piece on this side of "code dreams" is Shijin, a mechanoid "poet" who utters a number of poems into chat. And near the exit there's a "data" cube (with the word "data" repeated everywhere on its sides) that shrinks when you approach it to reveal an "information" sphere that will give you a copy of Miso's painting "The Artist as a Binary Process" -- a parallel to the cube in front of the entrance. These three pieces seem oriented toward the question of finding and expressing one's place in the world.
There are many more pieces in "code dreams": I'm only picking out the most prominent. Also, the elements in the three sections aren't nearly as discreetly separated as my description may suggest: binary, hexadecimal and nucleic code is scattered everywhere, a drum on the right seems to presage the themes of memory and dreaming in the middle section, and so forth.

The soundscapes of "code dreams" are impressive. However, I have to say, I'm not enthusiastic about computer metaphors for human thought and experience. Our minds are not computers: scientific research into cognition increasingly demonstrates that thought is emphatically an embodied activity -- the body is very much in the mind. Cognition and experience are emergent capabilities, simultaneously different from flesh as such, yet deeply rooted in it and existing only on its terms. We do not process inputs and produce outputs the way a computer does: our environment and our physical interactions with it structure the conduct of thought itself, in particular the way we create associations and metaphors (which are, it turns out, intrinsic to human cognition). The close of Miso's poem "code dreams" epitomizes what bothers me: the statement "physical world / only masks on the core of self" (or in the version in her blog, "the core of experience") articulates a dualistic view of the body/mind relationship, positing a deep division between them, in which our thoughts are Cartesian ghosts in the machine, our corporeality a mask shrouding our selves. I don't believe that.

And I'm not sure Miso really does either, precisely because she's an artist. Art depends on materiality just as the mind does. The codes dominating the first part of "code dreams" are more or less isolated abstractions rather than the ground of the work (although they are important to the theme of identity). They actually have a more concrete quality -- functioning less as interesting curiosities, and more as integral components -- in the dreamwork of the middle section, surrounding the bed of the little girl; and I say this, despite the problems of having work that alludes to but does not represent private experiences. So the codes and dreams of "code dreams" are in a difficult tension; perhaps the point is irony, though it feels more like ambivalence. In either case, when the codes become the background and not the focus of "code dreams," the work takes off. The dynamic is exemplified by music itself: yes, you could say that in music, "here's a note, here's another note, here are three at once" ... but you would be wrong. Thus the two strongest moments of "code dreams" are the most symphonic: bed and planets. The artist's professional code is to dream big.

It should go almost without saying that I'm poking at "code dreams" because I think it's a really stimulating work and I think you (O Reader) ought to haul yer ass over to the Pop Art Lab pronto, because the installations are supposedly going to be removed on 4 Oct. And there are seven more besides this one. So go -- NOW!

There are a number of interesting issues regarding the theme of identity, which is central to "code dreams," but I'm leaving the subject aside for another time.

Oh, and in tribute to Miso's themes of codes and identity, the alternative title to this post is an invented snippet of Second Life script (LSL). It means, "If the current avatar is Miso, set the program into the state of Identity (and do whatever you do in that state)."