"Enough With the Simulacra"

My post at Terra Nova got so buried under the mound of egghead responses to the Architectural Contest held at State of Play that I'm going to cross post it here.

In case you didn't hear, RC Mars, an avatar created by an employee of the American Cancer Society, was chosen as the winner for the build installed on the Linden vehicle sims for the "Relay for Life".

I didn't get a chance to properly hash that yet, but when you see the picture I have to post from that event, you'll begin to see the contours, and why originally I was going to blog it as "Run For Your Life":

I, too, was disappointed by the judges' selections and also by most of the entries themselves -- but for reasons having not to do so much with the specific virtual architecture but with the social and political implications of their appropriation and usage of space.

While I can take a kind of pride that someone from Second Life won, I don't believe the appropriate entry was chosen.

First, the concept of a "public space" implies above all that *there is a *public using it.* This putative public would have been involved in the creation of the public space in some way and would be interacting in the space over time.

In RL, such "ownership" of a public space would happen through elected governments or via private corporations that still feel the need in many cases to adapt or allow for public use of their buildings, i.e. skyscrapers in New York City that still have public-access parks and benches and fountains at their base where people sit and have lunch.

In SL, the rough equivalent to something like this RL public space ownership concept would have to be something that grew and developed as an actual gathering place. For me, if a public space didn't have a track record of high traffic on it, it wouldn't be supported by the SL public as a public space, but would be looked at merely as the highfalutin favourite of judges with refined critical architectural aesthetics of the kind that gave us the famous arguments about the "turd in the public square" in the 1960s-1970s.

First, the virtual space would have to be commissioned or created by an actual resident of the world, someone with understanding not only of the world's technical building capabilities, but its people. Otherwise, how can it be called "public"? For that reason, I would think Lordfly Digeridoo's entry should have won, because he has selected a building that grew indigenously out of the world of Second Life itself, and is in an area that an actual virtual public really comes to (if I can say all those seemingly contradictory adjectives in one sentence). That is, simply put, people hang out there because it's a space residents made and occupied -- it is a public space. (It's not even an especially high-traffic space but for argument's sake, let's say it's more appropriate for the genre.)

But when the American Cancer Society, a huge and wealthy American charity, decides to come into the world, it is not coming into it as a resident of the world -- it's just using the platform as a technological device, a tool, in order to raise its profile and to raise money. It's trying to open up new vistas for its communications and fund-raising ventures. These may be very worthy causes, and forward-looking charities, educational institutions, even governments could be commended for researching and using the possibilities of Second Life and other VWs.

But these entities don't live in the world...at least not yet. In fact, quite often, what they do is come and go. The build for Relay for Life was entirely dictated as an outside venture, sprung full-blown only for that race, then dismantled. In fact, the winner himself said casually that the actual building was "outsourced" -- that is, it was just viewed as a project space and a set of tools, not a world with a public, and a public space that would interact over time. That's how it felt to me.

The Relay for Life was put on Linden sims -- not run through the world itself through all kinds of interesting user-built properties that have been built up over time and have character and a sense of place. The build was just for those three days, and therefore had a kind of hurried, ersatz, fake feel -- a shipyard or docks or bidge which no one ever really had spent any time living and moving and having their being on as a form of second life, but just a prop, a stage setting, for the big ad campaign run by ACS.

It's a noble cause and all that, and some people no doubt had meaningful experiences within SL engaging with it, but at the end of the day, it is a RL venture using the platform imposing from the outside, from the top, with a considerable budget (of time or money), not the user-created "it's your imagination" kind of world that SL is touted as.

Can stage sets built for temporary ad campaigns be called public spaces just because they are three-dimensional? I should think not!

Ad to that the kitsch that is displayed in something like the realistic-looking human mannequin figures with an almost Iwo-Jima-like staging, and you wonder how it could be commended for being especially cutting edge?

Even staying within a conservative sense of architectural, a lot more can be done to adopt SL buildings for the avian creatures that we are there, with opening of walls, roofs, windows and less dependence on the door as an entry-point. Nobody is going to want to sit and stare at a thousand points of light gyrating on a triangle representing data, they look for the immersiveness that comes to them from creating a simulated fireplace and rug.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Oct 23, 2005 10:12:21 PM

Comments

[Aimee Weber]

Four sims packed with booths and you picked MINE?

Aweee. Prok lubs me. <3

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, nothing says RUN FOR YOUR LIFE in knock-kneed terror like a giant blown up representation of Aimee Weber in a "building contest" in a "charity run" which was actually about SL big business and the big business of RL charities LOL. I asked Jade repeatedly about corporate sponsorship of the lots along the run, and whether in fact advertising could be put in, but she was vague and distracted. I ended up not being able to get a lot, whereas Aimee handily barged in with the Aimee-blimp and the Midnight City mockup as her "building contest" lol.