Just returned from a stroll downtown. On my way I passed the above shop window … “↑Blade Runner“ (BR) anyone? In case you share my association, here is a ↑recent interview with Ridley Scott on Blade Runner.
shopwindow
zizek on toilets
Please, somebody, fuse the insights of Slovenian sociologer and decidedly postmodern philosopher ↑Slavoj Žižek
‘s wonderful presentation above with my hints on ↵collecting toilets, ↵more toilets, and ↵on target, write a thesis on your synthesis, and make my day!
ethnographia: tom boellstorff
↑Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and Editor-in-Chief of “↑American Anthropologist“. Somewhat belated I first heard of him when in 2006 his article “↑A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies“ appeared in the newly founded journal “Games and Culture” [1(1):29-35]. Beyond his issues Indonesia, gender and queer studies, Tom does research on persistent state worlds, and even has an office in “↑Second Life“ (SL): (SLurl:) ↑Ethnographia. Among other things there you can get a notecard on what ethnography is all about, and another one with a great list of literature on research in virtual worlds. I will let speak Tom himself about his project, and his upcoming book “Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human”, and quote him in full:
My second current research project concerns human culture in “virtual worlds,” three-dimensional, persistent “places” online where persons interact and forge new forms of selfhood and society. Throughout human history, technologies—from the wheel to the book and beyond—have shaped forms of identity, community, and society. This second research project originates in the realization that we are on the verge of one of the most massive technological transformations in human history, the creation of societies on the Internet. The social sciences and humanities have only begun to acknowledge the speed with which online societies are becoming taken for granted among the young and are spreading among all age groups and around the world. We must develop tools and theories for investigating these online societies and their increasingly fundamental impact on human relations.
In my research in the virtual world Second Life, I apply the same anthropological methods I have used in my work in Indonesia to date to examine virtual culture. In this virtual world my avatar (Tom Bukowski) has an office, “Ethnographia,” which you can visit within Second Life (it is located in Dowden, [SLurl:] ↑click here for a link). As Tom Bukowski, I study cybersociality in Second Life using participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and the analysis of texts ranging from newsletters to blogs. A key element of my approach is thus to pair the study of virtual worlds with “traditional” ethnographic methods, paying attention to moments of breakdown when the social relations of the virtual world in question resist ethnographic interpretation as generally understood. How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds? By showing how “traditional” anthropological methods can be used to study what otherwise appear to be radically different sites of social interaction, I demonstrate both the continuing relevance of anthropology and key issues in the emergence of virtual culture.
The first product of this research is my book “Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human”, forthcoming with Princeton University Press. I am currently in the intitial phases of further research projects in Second Life.
In my research in the virtual world Second Life, I apply the same anthropological methods I have used in my work in Indonesia to date to examine virtual culture. In this virtual world my avatar (Tom Bukowski) has an office, “Ethnographia,” which you can visit within Second Life (it is located in Dowden, [SLurl:] ↑click here for a link). As Tom Bukowski, I study cybersociality in Second Life using participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and the analysis of texts ranging from newsletters to blogs. A key element of my approach is thus to pair the study of virtual worlds with “traditional” ethnographic methods, paying attention to moments of breakdown when the social relations of the virtual world in question resist ethnographic interpretation as generally understood. How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds? By showing how “traditional” anthropological methods can be used to study what otherwise appear to be radically different sites of social interaction, I demonstrate both the continuing relevance of anthropology and key issues in the emergence of virtual culture.
The first product of this research is my book “Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human”, forthcoming with Princeton University Press. I am currently in the intitial phases of further research projects in Second Life.
The notorious anthropologer Zephyrin Raymaker at the desk of anthropologist Tom Bukowski aka Tom Boellstorff. Note the readable copy of “Games and Culture” on the desk, and the cover of Tom’s book “Coming of Age in Second Life” behind me on the wall.
steve mcqueen
Don’t ask—just felt like it …
doctorow lookalikes
It seems that ↑Cory Doctorow somehow managed to virally spread his on- and offline looks Snow-Crash style. ↑Charles Stross ↑commented the above, non-doctored (pun not intended) picture like that:
I sometimes collaborate with sometime Campbell Award winner, EFF activist, and all-around happening guy Cory Doctorow. Cory is a big noise in campaigning for consumer rights against the big copyright cartels, and he comes up with an idea a minute and gives them away for free under creative commons a license. Yet he sure as hell wasn’t the model for Manfred in “↵Accelerando“ (because I hadn’t met him at the time), and nobody told the art director at Orbit to stick him on the cover of my book. Still, judge for yourself[.]
Now, when ↑anthronaut discovered Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing-entry
↑Second Life edition of Printcrime minicomic he at first thought it was me in the accompanying picture:
As the picture is to be ↑found on his blog, too, I suspect that the blue-man avatar in the pic is Doctorow’s “↑Second Life“-persona. So I couldn’t resist, voyaged to the ↵Fabjectory, and re-staged the scene:
UPDATE (10 September 2007):
Just received an e-mail from ↵Fabjectory founder ↑Michael Buckbee. Mike clarified the matter of the blue man in the above picture—it ain’t Cory Doctorow, but Mike’s very own avatar Hal9k Andalso. Dig the 2001 allusion and IM him inworld if you want your avatar fabjected. Nevertheless my theory of Mr. Doctorow’s likeness spreading virally still stands true. In fact Mike furnished even more evidence for it, as he pointed me to a blog-entry of his, documenting ↑Cory Doctorow in Manhunt 2. Judge yourself, here’s a screenshot of of one of “↑Manhunt 2“‘s playable characters, former scientist Daniel Lamb:
Manhunt … well, I officially declare the Coryhunt for open—feel free to e-mail me if you stumble over more Cory-Doctorow lookalikes in the digital or cybercultural realm [comments section here is still closed, due to my not coming around for working on better anti-spam measures, my apologies].
P.S.: The upcoming game “Manhunt 2” (the US-release is scheduled for October 2007) already is highly controversial due to extreme depiction of violence. Its predecessor “↑Manhunt“ (Rockstar 2004) has been banned in Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.
cyver universe info desk
Some years ago during lunch, sitting at a table besides me, two n00b-computer-scientists, young lads who just had started their first term of studies, had a conversation about the World Wide Web (WWW). Consensus between them was that HTML was dead, and that Flash was the future. Period. Now, some years later, have a look at the websites of hardcore top-notch coders and you’ll never find Flash, but clear-as-glass HTML or XML. It of course is another thing with commercial company websites, agreed. But we are talking cyberculture in a holistical sense here, not PR or marketing stuff. The point I want to make is, that despite of the convergence of Internet services, despite the fusion of different online media into combined interfaces, “older technologies” still maintain important positions within the culture and everyday social practice of online communities.
Although the ↵metaverse roadmap clearly prophesies the 3D-future of the WWW, and although—quite rightly, I think—it takes “↑Second Life“ (SL) as an example for this direction, SL with ↵its fused spaces of interaction, does not render common WWW applications superfluous. As an example, SL-veteran, businessman, and top-of-the-heap artist Detect Surface has his own Sim, the (SLurl:) ↑City of Abaddon, the SL-analogon to a WWW-website. Nevertheless simultaneously he ↑runs a weblog and today breezed online the ↑cyver universe info desk, a forum.
Only the complementary utilization of a wealth of media of interaction, both asynchronous, synchronous, and even parallel, sometimes dubbed multitasking, allows the density of online interaction to grow beyond the critical point, from which on it is legitimate to speak of community, social structure, and culture. Each medium features particular qualities, advantages and drawbacks to particular contexts. Acordingly media are chosen in respect to the social and technical needs of specific situations of interaction. More often than not multiple media are used at the same time. (cf. ↵Knorr 2006)
initially via entry at detect surface
metaverse roadmap
Over the past year the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) and its supporting foresight partners have explored the virtual and 3D future of the World Wide Web in a first-of-its-kind cross-industry public foresight project, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR). We use the term Metaverse in a way that includes and builds upon Neal Stephenson’s coinage in the cyberpunk science fiction novel, Snow Crash, which envisioned a future broadly reshaped by virtual and 3D technologies.
SMART, JOHN, JAMAIS CASCIO, AND JERRY PFAFFENDORF. 2007. ↑Metaverse Roadmap Overview. Mountain View: ↑Acceleration Studies Foundation, ↑metaverseroadmap.org. Electronic Document. Available online:
http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/
http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf
http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/
http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf
fabjectory
Michael Buckbee runs a “fabjectory”—a wormhole-Stargate connecting ↑cyberspace and ↑meatspace. Fabjectory is a combined word out of fabject and factory. ↑Fabject, like ↑spime, is a neologism by cyberpunk’s chief-ideologist Mr. ↑Bruce Sterling, and means an everyday object made by rapid manufacturing means, like ↑3D printing. ↑Buckbee’s Fabjectory offers an according service. E.g. within “↑Second Life“ (SL) you can go to his Fabjectory there, have your avatar photographed, and presto some weeks later a statuette of it will arrive at your place in meatspace. As an example I chose Lex Luthor above: To the left is a screenshot of the SL-avatar, to the right the fabjected statuette. As all this is yet another instance of cyberculture as I envision it, cyberpunk again comes into play. Out of the ↑print-and-fold minicomic ↑Martin Cendreda has made from ↑Cory Doctorow‘s story “Printcrime”—out of the collection “↑Overclocked“—, Michael Buckbee has made a SL-version, of which you can get a free copy at his (SLurl:) ↑Fabjectory inworld.
initially via e-mail from anthronaut—tnx mate
reptiles
Once upon a time, when I was a kid, as a present I received a thick catalogue of the works of ↑M. C. Escher—since back then ↵I am hooked. In ↑reply to my telling Weird Tales—see also ↵visual phenomena—, today I received a nice e-mail which rubbed my nose upon one of Escher’s famous lithographs: “↑Reptilien“ (1943). Again wondering at the picture I cherish since decades, suddenly it came to my mind: It’s the perfect metaphor for my cyberanthropological research-project “↵maxmod“. A twodimensional representation of the li’l beasts crawling out of 2D-space, ↵into 3D-space, and back again … meaning those spaces are one—not worlds apart. The 2D-picture on the page of the sketchbook in the picture, is mathematically constructed, just like everything we see on a computer screen is. Books are there, too—even in the digital age all the time in the anthropologists’ hands. Plus, there are the indispensable paraphernalia, or better: companions, of every upright anthropologist—cigarettes and alcohol. Furthermore, everything in the picture, just as it is the case with online fieldwork, happens on a desktop—pun wholeheartedly intended.
racing track
Note the filling station to the right—straight out of the Gernsback Continuum: “During the high point of the Downes Age they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations.”—William Gibson
On 23 August 2007 I spawned at ↑Detect Surface‘s working platform, high in the sky above the (SLurl:) ↑City of Abaddon. Detect was just about to finish the colour-changing head-up display (HUD) for the motorcycle he was constructing since quite some time. When he saw me he asked, if I’d help him and testdrive the bike—I became (SLurl:) ↑D&D Creative Labs‘ testpilot. During testing I duly reported, like: “Houston, we’ve got a script error …,” as of course the run made some weaknesses of the prototype visible. Once they were documented acid Zenith spawned and started to sort the scripting. D and acid threw code to and fro, while I was careening around the platform on the bike. The physics of the vehicle are marvelous, making it bank and slide when turning, the nose-pitch being controllable on the ground and airborne—but everything subdued to the Havoc engine’s physics environment. This lends the bike a tremendous amount of gameplay value, seldomly found in “↑Second Life“ (SL). Just like the bow and arrows acid made—my reporting on that is overdue—, the bike is made according to the principle “easy to use, but hard to master.” Once the bike is in your possession and you are sitting on it, you can immediately drive around by using the WASD-keys for direction and acceleration, and page-up and -down for the nose-pitch … easy to use. But in order to run around a racing course in an acceptable time, or for doing trial-tricks and stunts, you have to develope skills, because you have to deal with the physics, the bike’s inertia in particular … hard to master.
23 August 2007—me on the working platform, mounted upon the (SLurl:) ↑AK-1RA Sports prototype. Note my neither being cyber-enhanced, nor wearing protective garment … I got the wiser later on.
During my first test-run on the bike once I came close to the platform’s edge and had to turn it around in a powerslide, just centimeters from falling into the abyss. “That was close,” I commented. D pondered that a second, and then remarked: “Well, yeah, we need a li’l more space for the bikes …” After an hour or so more, I had to log off. Only later I learned that D had been up all night building … when I came to the spot the next day, Friday 24 August 2007, the once spartanic working platform looked like this:
(SLurl:) ↑The racing track was born— a full-fledged racing course for competing on the AK-1RA Sports. With that track testdriving could go into its next stage. My first runs over the course made me even more enthusiastic about the bike, as now I was able to experience its full potential. D layed out a wonderful course, and, due to his masterful optimizing, his whole Sim—in stark contrast to most of SL—seldomly lags for me. My saying still stands uncorrected: The gang at Abaddon indeed manages to make “a real computer game” out of SL. Alas, SL is a strange beast, and during the testruns I several times was blown out into nonspace, which ultimately led to my crashing … and the whole Sim crashed with me. Detect fathomed the reasons behind that effect and started to adjust the scripting accordingly. He also discovered that when you crashed with the bike, the physics didn’t die, but lay around orphaned and invisible at the spot of the crash, the scripts in it still running. This of course puts load on the Sim in question. The more orphaned bike physics lieing around, the more prone the Sim will be to lagging, and maybe crashing even. So, while D again turned engineer and solved the technicalities, his faithful testpilot turned on “highlight transparency” and walked two times all around the racing course, collecting orphaned physics, and looking for glitches in the track, marking them with red beacons. Well, that’s part of the everyday job of a testpilot, too. Our job doesn’t purely consist out of romantically zooming through the skies in never-seen-before bolides. Plus, honestly, I don’t want to run at breakneck speed into an invisible obstacle loitering around on the testing course.
On 27 August 2007 I found a completely reworked and enlarged racing course. Detect had added several levels, more of the huge, slanted 180° turns, and parts of the track running through futuristic tunnels, making the course as complex, difficult, and in parts as claustrophobic as the F1-course at Monte Carlo. I still can’t every time reliably master the dark, downward slanted curve in those dreaded tunnels. Plus, acid has scripted a stopwatch system maintaining a list of the fastest laps. My best so far was 103 sec, acid’s undisputed record stands at 97 sec. Here’s a snapshot of us all three racing through one of the tunnels:
To the far left, sitting on the frontwheel, looking ahead, is Detect Surface. On the steering handle, piloting: acid Zenith. Yours Truly meditates on the rear wheel.
Now, what has all this to do with anthropology, or cyberanthropology, despite the fact that it clearly is participant observation, or better: thick participation online?
The fieldwork of this project, which I began in 2002 within the Max-Payne modding-community, from start on happened in ↵three spaces:
First there are the conceptual communication- and interaction spaces made possible by the Internet-infrastructure, respectively by the various Internet-services like www, e-mail, IM, IRC, [VoIP,] and ftp running on top of it. […]
The second kind of space is multiplayer gamespace [and cognitively shared singleplayer gamespace]. […]
And there still is a third kind of spaces cognitively shared by the members of a modding-community. They are computer-generated, but not situated ‘between the phones’: The at first glance unfathomable black voids of diverse 3d-editors’ viewports.
The second kind of space is multiplayer gamespace [and cognitively shared singleplayer gamespace]. […]
And there still is a third kind of spaces cognitively shared by the members of a modding-community. They are computer-generated, but not situated ‘between the phones’: The at first glance unfathomable black voids of diverse 3d-editors’ viewports.
Despite of all its shortcomings, drawbacks and glitches, with SL an amazing feat has been accomplished: The integration of a row of human-to-machine and mediated human-to-human interaction possibilities into one, malleable platform. The fusion of several computer-generated spaces, if you wish. What only some years ago still were distinct dimensions for the interacting members of online communities, now can be experienced via a single interface, the SL client. In respect to game design, developing, and modding it is especially interesting, that within SL potential gamespace and editor space are one and the same. Quite trivially that means that SL-space is multi-user editor-space. I can be present while Detect builds geometry, and if he would grant me permission to edit his objects, we could work on one and the same digital object simultaneously, both of us having the same possibilities of viewing and working. While working on “↑Doom“, the ↵two Johns already did multiplayer level editing. ↑John Romero ↵relates:
In fact, with the superpower of NeXTSTEP, one of the earliest incarnations of DoomEd had Carmack in his office, me in my office, DoomEd running on both our computers and both of us editing one map together at the same time. I could see John [Carmack] moving entities around on my screen as I drew new walls. Shared memory spaces and distributed objects. Pure magic.
This pure magic is a dream, a vision which is driven forward ever farther, as if I got ↑John Carmack right, this is exactly what he wants to achieve with ↵id Tech 5, the latest generation of his game engines.
↑William Gibson can deny this as long as he wants ;-) … but today’s online technologies and game engines start to exactly realize at least parts of his vision of cyberspace as to be found in the Sprawl-novels and short stories.
D&D Creative Labs’ testpilot having a rest at the City of Abaddon’s (SLurl:) ↑Bar Substance, his online Gentleman Loser. And, yes, meanwhile I several times managed it to jump through the breakable glass windows you see in the background. I hope Summer Axon, the proprietress of Substance won’t catch me with the bike inside her bar :-)