Dance and Gravity For gravity is everywhere, loving us bone by bone, cell by cell, atom by atom; think of gravity as strings everywhere in a dream, caressing and tugging the world into shape. [...] I envy Foofwa who travels with his body, observing the movement of the scenery, the great wheel of the world, within the atmospheric, untoward stars and constellations. Teleporting not only collapses distance; it implicates space itself in fraud, the clearest evidence of database. I long for the seamlessness of the real world, its inconceivable vulner- ability, its joy and suffering in our darkest hours, its fantasms and hallucinatory quality. In Second Life, one never wakes from the dream, dream is all there is; in dance, gravity surrounds and infiltrates the body - Foofwa travels to Lebanon on a plane whose wings suck it up into the sky, where comfort, great circles, and vectors reign. It takes time and shadows of dawn and dusk, morning and evening, to achieve anything. It takes rehearsal time, stretching and turning and other movements and parallelograms of force, the soft speaking of gravity, the hardness of silence, among dance and a communality of dancers, audience, presenters, choreographers, as if the world momentarily separated into categories. In Second Life there is nothing to see; it is all visible, all present, even give members-only barriers. It is flat, simulacrum and hyperreality all in one; it goes nowhere. Something drops from the sky, founders, but nothing breaks, there is no wear-and-tear. Even the text-based MUDs in a sense were more realistic; one's avatar had to eat and drink, wore out, perchance to sleep, but the MUDs were game-based and one can't fight forever. Dance is brilliant burning; bodies wear out, and even today documentation of choreographies is insufficient: What goes, what leaves the earth in exhaustion or death has placed memory at the heart of the world, and memory is the most vulnerable of all. Still, memory seeps into the mind, into the very bones, of the spectator, who moves and thinks differently, however slight; her body's muscles carry the evening, even from the silence of a chair. It is a ritual of inhering; the scopic act, I think, is always already ikonic, always at work with the dancer, in a way one only dreams about in Second Life. Second Life's simulacrum is binary, either on or off; the screen is illuminated or dark, sound and video present or absent, and so forth; these doors don't wear out, but are replaced by newer versions of the software brought down to hard drive by the mother company. Second Life seeps into the first; being in Second Life, as anyone will tell you, is being in the first, and Second Life's dreams are tableaus in first life's night. But still there's a difference which goes back to the negation of the planet, negation in the world as one turns away from another, as a species dies or a forest is logged or a community is slaughtered. I think this is at the heart of the real and oddly at the heart of Second Life itself, which is pushed into modes of surrealism and the fantastic, as if it were possible to keep dis/ease at bay. I am sure, though, that Second Life, like MUDs or MOOs or other populations, will have its death off-screen, silencing every and all, returning these to memory as well. (I remember the 'QRB' - quota review board - on PMC-MOO: who even knows what I'm talking about?) By the time and space of that death, only a virtual world will disappear, one whose weight is zero, and whose gravity may be turned on and off at will. Or at the will of another in physics calculated, not from the very inhering or substance of matter, but in the matter of a suitable abstraction intentionally built-in. Falling is no danger; and Foofwa, on his way to Lebanon for choreography, dance, presentation, warmup, rehearsal, blocking, teaching, learning, is up there above a game-space from which there is no escape, the 'idiotic' and inert real of a world of given without a giver - a world whose resource use is already above its carrying-capacity, and therefore a world of zaniness and suffering. This is a world always at war with itself with greater and greater fire-power, while we avatars fall and fall from the sky, always landing in interesting ways, undamaged and somnolent while we take a break for dinner. | Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist: | http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], tel US 718-813-3285 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
