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03/03/2008: "Is there life after virtual life?" by Walter King
Some time back I found a two video box set of Fritz Lang’s famous films ‘Metropolis’ and the somewhat less successful ‘Things to Come‘ in the cut out bin at a local video outlet. I was thrilled. I love old sci-fi stories and films. I had loaned an earlier copy of Metropolis to a friend who’d never seen it and of course I never saw my video again either. So when I was able to replace it for about the same price from the cut-out bin but got the second film VIRTUALLY FOR FREE! But after thinking about the term virtual and the total amount of money I’d actually spent I realized that I had practiced a bit of creative book keeping in my mind. Truth be told I got nothing for free. Even though I replaced my original film with two for the same price as I paid for the one previously lost I still ended up with two films for the price of two films when I could have had three. The only one who got something for free was my friend who never returned the original. Fooling ourselves into such belief is dangerous. Like virtual money, i.e. our paper economy and more recently our plastic economy, we should worry about abuse, fraud and identity theft. People are living more and more of their lives virtually. It is easy to be fooled or simply to fool ourselves in a virtual world. Think about that. The very words virtual and reality are in opposition pretty much negating each other. Rather than walking down the street and running into an old friend at the mall and sitting down for a cup of coffee and a chat we now say we “ran“ into old friends on the internet. True, we may both be sitting in an internet café having coffee while checking email but it isn’t the same when your are sitting on different sides of the planet. That’s more or less how I found my old friend Chris Boyle of whom I’ve written before. Recently Chris sent me a myspace message in which he said it was a great morning to have a cup of coffee together-- virtually of course since he’s in L.A. and I’m somewhere landlocked in the middle of the continent. It took a little longer than a real conversation. You could say it is still going on even now as I await his reply to my recent message. Sort of like the way chess aficionados separated by long distances sometimes played chess via the post office. Knight 1 to pawn 4. But chess is not a game of passion but of careful intellectual and objective distance.
I hear from former students all the time as well and keep up with their careers once I have their web address. I get announcements of their successes, their jobs or exhibitions, frantic emails asking advice during professional crisis’ and even get birth and death announcements via my computer screen.
I came into the digital world with a lot of what I considered healthy skepticism. When asked to join absolute arts my first thought was “who is going to buy art unseen on a screen in their second bedroom?” Well, they do. I thought this would be just another way to squeeze money from unsuspecting victims. Well, it is. But it also has it’s up side. Like anything else the internet can be a tool for good or bad. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still very wary. Scams, identity theft, hackers who hijack sites and email for their own illegal use abound. Virtual theft ultimately becomes actual theft. Many of us have experienced this in some form over the last few years. You’ve either been phished for personal info, had funds taken from your accounts or even volunteered your very real money for scams that blew away like virtual dust in a virtual breeze once the very real culprits have it in their very physical hands.
I’m not really a Luddite. I don’t mind technology and even enjoy it as much as the next guy. I certainly depend heavily on my computer. I began to notice digital technology in the very early 70’s. It was innocent enough at the time. I played Asteroids, Pac Man and Centipede on game machines outside my parents arts and crafts store shortly after I graduated high school. It was fun as I whiled away the time waiting for friends to pick me up for a night of recreation or simply kept me from being bored when nothing else was going on and I wasn’t in the mood to make art. I watched the whole phenomena move from pinball like games in bars and arcades to home units like Atari. My folks bought an Atari game system in the mid 70’s for my little sister who loved Frogger and the Mario Bros.. My wife and I even managed to pick up used systems for our kids even though we were pretty much dead broke while I was a student and shortly thereafter. At one time I made a fair living working for various publishing and advertising companies as a free lance graphic artist mimicking screen shots for printing purposes and creating humorous illustrations which depended on my lack of computer understanding cause it made the visual puns funnier and more memorable for the audience who likewise had very little computer terminology to work with. Terms like ‘RAM‘, ‘SCSI ports‘, ‘garbage in garbage out‘, ‘user friendly’ were very easy to turn into double entendre’s and lent themselves to all sorts of humorous interpretation. It was fun, profitable and even educational. I even had a hand in the big marketing push that got the Apple II Graphics and Sound products out into the public with huge effect on the internet we now know and rely upon. But I stayed pretty much computer illiterate even then. It was in my professional interest to stay stupid making my visual and verbal humor more effective and genuine.
Eventually I was given a home PC. It was a Heathkit unit my father made in a short course he took as one of his UAW benefits. My brother beefed it up with extra memory and RAM which eventually got me onto the net via a free email address on Juno.com. And from there it was a fairly short jump to Absolutearts. Now I am (ahem) computer hip. I’m a veteran of the hot blog-o-sphere phenomenon since kicking off absolutearts front page blogs with their ( and my ) first blog: 07/15/2004: Impressions of Argentina more than 3 years ago. Seems like only yesterday.
The technology explosion has overwhelmed us making business go faster, in some ways making our lives better but in other ways harder to stay in the saddle. It’s had a hugely demoralizing effect on certain professions while creating new ones we would never have thought of 55 years ago when I was born. I remember going back to Baltimore Md. when I was in junior high school to visit my grandmother and family. She still had one of the old hard and heavy black Bake-lite rotary telephones (Bake-lite is the first plastic made of thermosetting phenol formaldehide resin )…you know the ones with the handset on top of the iron hooks with the big rotary dials? They weighed so much that they were often portrayed in detective films as the murder weapon. They were the antique phones now replicated and sold in those catalogs one might still find in the mail box, I mean the snail mail box.
I remember my grandmother’s phone ringing. It actually had a little bell inside and the ringing sound wasn’t digitized. Today to say one’s phone is ringing is an anachronism. I picked it up and answered. It was for my grandmother. Upon handing her the handset I had the thought how interesting it must be for her to have lived through history and watched things develop. Born at the end of the 1800’s in the age of the telegraph she saw in succession the telephone, radio, TV and whether she knew it or not the beginning of the digital age coming to life. My uncle had a Texas Instruments calculator with led numbers and a digital alarm clock on his chest of drawers in his bedroom upstairs from grandma‘s room. She still had an old wind up alarm.
Now I too have lived through similar history going from Pong to Resident Evil and World of Warcraft. Today kids can play their games anywhere at anytime with other kids on their home computers, their laptops in wi-fi cafes and bars, and even on their cell phones. When I say kids I really mean that graphic novel and computer game syndrome that expands the name kid well into the early 30’s. Dick Tracey and Flash Gordon never had it so good. We invest ourselves into these virtual dimensional diversions with gusto. Millions of people can play the game together. Sounds like the plot boiler for a Sci-Fi thriller doesn’t it? Imagine that instead of real blood and death nations might one day settle their scores virtually with virtual deaths and virtual booty and virtual war profiteering instead of the bloody reality. Or think of the opposite scenario…something like the Matrix.
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/01/08/15-minutes-of-fame-noor-the-pacifist/
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2008/01/vr-hypothesis.html
Scientists have theorized for some time about the possibility of alternate realities. It has been a theme in Science Fiction novels and short stories for the last 50 years or more and has, in a sense, prepared the way for our current fascination with virtual realties. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/31/eveningnews/main1852600.shtml
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2008/01/vr-hypothesis.html
Problem is we still have the real thing all around us. In fact I often wonder if the fact that we are playing our games in the virtual world (or worlds really) that maybe we aren’t paying enough attention to the real world that continues while we are pushing our own little buttons and twisting our own little joysticks. It does sound a bit like masturbation doesn’t it? Let’s not forget that the driving economic force of the internet is still virtual sex. Have you forgotten how many spam mails you got this week in your e-mail box suggesting with a big grin that a certain part of your male or female anatomy is not large enough, or that you can get little blue pills for less at some site shipped discreetly from India, or that there is someone who met you at the party last night who wants to hang out with you on instant messenger or send photos of herself to your cell phone-- even marry you ? Did I go to a party last night? I don’t remember. In fact the virtual world of the internet even confuses the law. Arguments over intellectual property, domain names and the sexual antics of virtual characters have recently made the news. Even the courts are having a hard time deciphering the difference between the real and the virtual.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/03/sex_com_case_heralds_end/
(You’ll have to insert the word s e x in place of the asterisks to get the link to work. Absolutearts doesn‘t censure certain words because of morality but because of the amount of bandwidth that will be taken up by those looking for s e x sites when certain key words appear.)
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000045.php http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/multimedia/2004/03/62486
Between virtual reality and reality TV I wonder what happened to reality itself? Do none of these people have a real life? As artists we know about living in virtual reality. We go into our studios, our sanctum sanctorums, and spend many hours creating our own worlds-- virtual worlds! In some sense we live out our hopes and dreams in these worlds in attempting perhaps to clarify the realities around us. We often make a serious effort to become more like the art we create. Art students walk around with paint spattered clothes as a sign or costume letting others know what they do and who they are…I’m an artist! Look at my clothes. Wearable Art! The world of fashion design is built on the urge.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/AR2006122500635.html
Some say art has often been a way to practice the hunt. Painting on cave walls at Altimira and other sites may well have been art voo-doo in which fetishists blessed or envisioned the success of a hunt rather than celebrating the results after the fact. Certainly the idea behind a fetish or good luck charm is future oriented-- meant more to ward off coming evil than past evil. Rain dancers want rain, war dances prepare for war. And funerary rites are performed to help the soul make the transition into the afterlife since the life lived is over. This is not to say that we don’t also celebrate past deeds or events with our art but that a certain posture is towards events to come, life to be lived after the virtual life has prepared the way.
What scares me silly is the idea that today with so many spending so much time in their virtual worlds not living fully in reality, what real world scenario are they preparing for? Has anyone else noticed that the Army and the Marine Corps have been using TV recruiting commercials designed to mimic the look and feel of a computer game? There is a recent ad in which a young man or woman is playing a computer game which then cuts to the scene where the same young person is in uniform and instead of a game controller they are actually controlling a digitally guided missile. Is there any doubt as to who this campaign is directed towards? Knowing, as I do, that the technology that made computers and computer games both possible and popular were military industrial corporations makes me wonder. And at the risk of sounding paranoid I wonder if this has always been part of the plan? As they say, one doesn’t make a bomb and not plan to use it under one scenario or another. Ever noticed that most computer games are war games ?
Today one wonders if there will be life after virtual life. Of course not all those who are paranoid because they think they are being followed are delusional. What was that? I take my headphones off. Did I hear a real footstep behind me?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineage_(computer_game)
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/8765/3001-AD-Brings-Virtual-Reality-to-the-Living-Room/
http://internetgames.about.com/library/glossary/blglossary.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=2771677&page=1
