"the feelies"
from Brave New World, chapter 11:
The house lights went down; fiery letters stood out solid and as though self-supported in the darkness. THREE WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER . AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALK1NG, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT. "Take hold of those metal knobs on the arms of your chair," whispered Lenina. "Otherwise you won't get any of the feely effects." The Savage did as he was told. Those fiery letters, meanwhile, had disappeared; there were ten seconds of complete darkness; then suddenly, dazzling and incomparably more solid-looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality, there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in one another's arms, of a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female. The Savage started. That sensation on his lips! He lifted a hand to his mouth; the titillation ceased; let his hand fall back on the metal knob; it began again. The scent organ, meanwhile, breathed pure musk. Expiringly, a sound-track super-dove cooed "Oo-ooh"; and vibrating only thirty-two times a second, a deeper than African bass made answer: "Aa-aah." "Ooh-ah! Ooh-ah!" the stereoscopic lips came together again, and once more the facial erogenous zones of the six thousand spectators in the Alhambra tingled with almost intolerable galvanic pleasure. "Ooh …" The plot of the film was extremely simple. A few minutes after the first Oohs and Aahs (a duet having been sung and a little love made on that famous bearskin, every hair of which–the Assistant Predestinator was perfectly right–could be separately and distinctly felt), the negro had a helicopter accident, fell on his head. Thump! what a twinge through the forehead! A chorus of ow's and aie's went up from the audience."
From the
"Miranda 2.0" hypertext of Huxley's
Brave New World.
Virtual Realities like Second Life have developed sophisticated visuals and a variety of audio effects from ambient background sounds to site-thematic music, but tactile and olfactory effects for VR have yet to be sufficiently developed for widespread use. Though SL and other VR programs do not have the level of sensory sophistication of "the feelies" described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, neither are they designed for the same purpose.
The feelies are a multi-sensory, sensational and simple narrative meant as an entertaining distraction for the genetically designed, heavily conditioned consumer workforce that is strictly divided by caste, completely incurious and uncreative. Huxley opens the novel with a group of Alphas, the management caste, brainlessly copying everything they are told - and it never occurs to them to ask any questions.
Second Life particularly contrasts with Brave New World and the feelies because SL not only offers a vast array of character and participatory choices, but it demands thoughtful creative participation of its viewer/users. So, if or when the tactile and olfactory features of Huxley's feelies become available to SL users, we'll at least be able to compose the story and its sensory input ourselves. Additionally avatar-educators, like Professor Ignatius Onomatopoea, are actively deploying Second Life in university classrooms with good results. As forecast by the 2008 Horizon Report by EDUCAUSE, such pedagogical uses of virtual worlds will be widespread on campuses within a few years.
So what do image, word and materialization have to do with a jug of moonshine, an old hillbilly's hat and a campfire?
Stick with me here...
The old competition between image & text may be a bogus binary that limits our fuller perception and more powerful use of language in all its forms. Try submitting a cv, resume or grant application in "Jokerman" font and you'll get a immediate sense of the powerful visual subtleties of typography.
The visually aesthetic aspects of text are often overlooked, but they are immensely important. In fact, the font Helvetica was recently the subject of a documentary that charts its design influences, deployment and ubiquity in our Web-linked global culture.
The alphabet is primarily visual, a series of simple but specifically shaped images that we group and combine in nearly infinite ways, a finely articulated complex visual code, but still essentially visual, essentially an image. And images are powerful, whether they take the form of a minutely articulated code or the broader compass of shape color and spatial composition.
Undoubtedly, humans were drawing before we were writing. The Cave of Lascaux as well as even older discoveries at the Cave of Chauvet demonstrate that we've been playing with visual communication for at least 30,000 years.
OK, so here's where we connect to the sculpted hillbilly items om the image above.
To foreground the complexity of contemporary communications, first review the layers of the image: you are looking, through a computer, at a digital photograph of three objects made of polymer clay baked in a conventional oven for 15 minutes at 275 degrees. (and in regards to the layers of image, I won't even mention the code that is behind the images on the screen!) That this astonishing complexity grew out of our first scratchings on walls and clay tablets has to be one of the most overlooked truths of human history.
While the cave wall is a galaxy away from digital palettes like Second Life, there is a clear connection between the creativity evoked and the ancient power of the plastic and imagic word to manifest material existence. Take Pappy Enoch for example.
If you've followed this blog or In a Strange Land, you've read of the backwoods antics of avatar Pappy Enoch who now has a small clan of fans and fellow hillbillies. By now, the attentive reader may have noticed the similarity between the hand-crafted hat pictured above, and the digitally crafted hat that Pappy is wearing in his close-up shot in the post below.
Certainly this is not great 'art' (and it need not be) but perhaps it's a small example of the ever-growing chain of creative inspiration that runs all the way back to those caves - and to which we all have a right to contribute. Unlike Blake's "mind forg'd manacles" this chain of playful creation is one that frees the mind from self & socially imposed limits and allows us to experiment and imagine other possibilities. The practical wisdom of this approach is becoming increasingly clear as recent brain studies have demonstrated.
In my tiny link in that chain, I saw the digital creative possibilities of Second Life when it led Joe Essid to create the avatar Pappy, whose unique charm and gentlemanly hillbilly sentiment have earned him a small following in SL as you can see in Pappy's 'blob'. Though I've found it difficult to spend much time in SL, I've been inspired by Pappy, and now the "Pappyverse" expands into material polymer clay 'reality' in some kind of post-post-modern digital-plastic version of the Golem, but hopefully less of a 'shapeless mass' and with a better attitude.
The wisdom of Pappy, is hybrid, exploring the new, maintaining and revising the old, always shifting with changing challenges, experimenting with new configurations, materials, media and ideas.
Stay tuned for a follow-up discussion of the technologies of fire, moonshine, jug and hat....
If you've read these few posts, you'll know that their scarcity is due partly to my disinterest in digital life, but in a fascinating technological irony, the 500-year old technology of the BOOK boomeranged me right back into SL with renewed enthusiasm. (so is that book a traitor to its specific medium?) The book that betrayed the others is second life: the official guide.
Yesterday i, uh, my creator...
(Beeble speaking here of his biological maker, one of many (i's) eyes)
or should i say I? - Beeble has tried to distinguish himself with the lower-case first-person. This identity stuff is endless...of course playing with identity didn't start in Second Life, nor with the book, but waaay back in shamanic history, identity shift was/is a regular practice.
So, nothing shamanic or anything, but i will be Beeble, and I will be his creator.
(and perhaps this "I' should be expressed in bold italics, for emphatic embodiment - 'emphatic' deriving from 'to show' or 'to appear')
got that?
(yesterday, I attended a UR Learning 2007 teaching & technology conference, and my colleague, known as Ignatius Onomatopoeia in SL, was showing his hilarious but informative video of his SL explorations so far. I'll try to get a link to it. It's worth seeing just for the scenes of him dancing in a gorilla suit!
And so the question arises, arose during the demonstration, what's the academic value? How do we apply this in the classroom? Hmmm....how indeed! I'm sure the same questions were asked of the BOOK once too!
The keynote speaker for the mini-conference was Dr. Phil Long of MIT's Office of Educational Innovation and Technology - I like the order of those words because it places the priority on education, not technology and it leads with educators. In his talk, he inadvertently affirmed educational and design principles that were articulated by transcendentalists like Emerson and Peabody and utopians like Fourier and in more modern novels like Gilman's Herland, Skinner's Walden Two, Callenbach's Ecotopia or Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.
Modern studies are confirming what our elders knew: learning behaviors, patterns and spaces should have some freedom to form their natural shape based on student interest and engagement. Learning should involve the body and real-world experiments. Learning should be diverse in content and approach, and face-to-face human interaction is an essential part of the process of learning.
The specific educational/intellecutal value of SL is primarily its invitation to creativity and "world building" as Iggy puts it. One thing many teachers have noticed of students is the waning of creative thinking and SL has many tools to spark this. Beyond that however is the intellectual value of critical discussion of this world as it evolves, as we are changed by it as we create it. Old forms of social interaction are morphing, mutating into something else...no doubt both good and bad.
SL can facilitate inter-cultural exchange as can be experienced with Iggy's new hillbilly friend "Pappy Enoch" known for his famous cry: Wee Doggies!
OR it can be a bit more sober like the Student Symposium work on display at the UR Tower.
Using SL in class, Teachers would be free to create any kind of classroom, demonstration, image, multimedia exhibit, tour, interactive space...whatever they wanted and could afford, but it can be used for free.
The Basic membership is free and you can play for years if you're not digitally materialistic (oxymoronic?) but with a Premium membership, for only a few dollars you can have access to tremendously powerful digital creation tools. And if your school won't support your work by buying real estate or building an island, you can always meet at public spaces with your students or tour the vastness of Second Life - more than likely there will be a group, exhibit or place that matches with your particular discipline. )
so, to boomerang full circle, beware the book!
(it ain't going anywhere, but there's no tellin' where one'll point you)
One of the interesting things that new technologies offer us is a nearly unlimited set of choices, customizations, or options for the visual (and often aural) enhancement of our interface and it is easy to get lost in a wilderness of digital enhancements.
For example, while waiting to observe students from a composition class as they created their first SL avatars, i began to 'edit my own appearance' and accidentally LOST Beeble's animal head! In an effort to don a 'party hat' that I found in my inventory, Beeble's head just popped off and landed on the ground.
i still am not sure how this happened, but i was amused to discover that beneath Beeble's head was the basic 'human' featured head that is part of the basic avatar model. Surely there are some rich metaphorical reflections possible here, especially with my foregrounded emphasis on human biology and animality. Is my sense of animality actually part of my core being, or is it like a hat or head that I 'put on' as in SL?
This makes me think of my current studies of the Don Juan story and how his seductive character is often portrayed as an irresistible force of Nature - the drive of desire. This question brings up the question of his moral responsibility and engages with some of our oldest discussions about what it means to be human and where we are located in the matrix of Nature.
Participation in SL can also lead to discussions about man and Nature, what constitutes human identity and what is significance we experience when we are in personal physical proximity as opposed to distant digital interaction.
In a way, this discussion goes back about 5000 years to the invention of writing. Though Socrates was suspicious of writing technology, preferring to rely on the older technology of the spoken word but if it weren't for Plato's writing, the oral traditions of Socrates might not have survived. Reflection on his response and on the varying values and deficits of each technology (spoken vs. written) can be a very fruitful exercise potentially enhancing our understanding of and appreciation for each technology.
So too, it can be fruitful for us to reflect on these amazing new digital technologies and the ways they enhance our lives as well as the ways in which they are insufficient and sometimes even destructive.
An ongoing and critical engagement with our technologies not only promises new and more useful insights about their best uses, it is essential to maintaining our mastery of our tools and preventing their mastery of us.
As Emerson noted in the midst of the Industrial Revolution:
"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments."
