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....
Normally I try to avoid advertising for companies, but the Lindens and other creator-residents of Second Life have contributed SO MUCH for free, I think they deserve an exception - and besides, I'm not advertising for their headsets so much as referencing their announcement to begin a conversation about what bringing voice to SL might mean.
Though we don't know for sure when humans first started using spoken language, some estimates are between 40,000 and 250,000 years ago - but there is no way to know for sure without written records! Of course, written records don't always lead to definitive answers either, but at least they provide an artifact to examine and debate. The origins of language may be obscure, but language and particularly the differences between spoken and written expression are more relevant than ever in the digital age.
Second Life began as an image & text-based format where participants type messages to one another's avatars. The conversation appears on the screen and can be logged for future reference. When an avatar is communicating, its hands come up as if it were typing, thus providing a visual cue and the familiar sound of the clacking keyboard adds a sonic cue for participants. Conversational coordination, just like in verbal exchange, is often tricky and related responses rarely follow immediately.
Just as in email and text messaging, some SL residents textual communications are abbreviated or accentuated with emoticons or other semiotic adaptations. And, just as in email and text messaging we never really know for sure who is on the other keyboard - it is *always* an act of faith. Anyone with sufficient technical skill can represent themselves as anyone else and only a close reading by an intimate friend would be likely to detect such deception.
Oral communication on the other hand is more difficult to fake, particularly since human hearing is quite adept at detecting subtleties of sound. Voice recognition has been one of the advantages of spoken communications over electronic media, and could provide certain identification since the pattern of our vocal expression is as singular as our finger print. Though fingerprinting or dactyloscopy has been around since the 19th Century, the science of biometrics is booming in our timid, terrified post 9/11 world. From entry gates at the local gym to forensic analysis, biometric technologies are being widely deployed for identity detection.
Thought I'm not certain whether the voice choice in SL will relay our spoken expression with accuracy and an identical voice print via spectrographic analysis, simply introducing the option of vocal verbal communcation will be a fascinating change offering many opportunities for intriguing intellectual discussion.
VUI (voice user interface) design and ASR (automated speech recognition) may combine to provide an accurate and unique transmission or rendition of our spoken communications such that we will no longer have to make that "leap of faith" that has become our default response when communicating via typed text. Further, if SL includes the option of an audio log as it does for text communications a heightened level of security or certainty may be possible.
While this is appealing, and perhaps an answer to the prayers of the most frightened, like all policing technologies, it may have an ugly underside. Since the human brain has had the longest "imprinting" with spoken language and most of us learned how to speak before we learned how to write, our oral composition skills are so automatic that we hardly notice them. Because of this, most of us speak freely and spontaneously, and sometimes to our great regret. What would a world be like that recorded every word we ever spoke?
I trust the Lindens more than I'd trust the government, so I doubt that Second Life will devolve into such an invasive policing technology, but the introduction of voice communications will certainly revolutionize this new exciting realm.
Huxley would have been fascinated by Second Life, but I'm not sure whether he spend much time there - or maybe he would, but this time he would 'write' Brave New World with SL avatars! I suppose that would have to be a collaborative project, one of the many new possibilities in this realm: the participatory novel with people from all over the world creating avatars for Bernard & Lenina, the Savage and Mustapha Mond.
I've been working on a hypertext of Brave New World, and now I can display its homepage in SL and visitors can link to it and browse - an exciting pedagogical application of this new frontier.
Huxley's novel is now more relevant than ever with advances in genetic engineering, psychiatric drugs and the naturalization of constant consumer conditioning - though his world did not sit under the threat of nuclear war.
Though the phrase "brave new world" was not originally meant as an automatically positive statement, the word 'brave' at the time Shakespeare used it in "The Tempest" meant not only courage, but also showy and both seem to apply to Second Life - and this world is just beginning to unfold....
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."
