Team Tut: the adventures of a curious clicker, part 3 - a Tale of Two Sims

[widescreen version, parts 1 - 3 here]

Tale of Two Iggys: Who Inspired My Avatar

Location: New World Notes

Hamlet Au posed the question after he noted Zoe Connolly's post about who inspired her avatar.

I'll join the game and continue the meme. I wish that someone as inspiring as Diana Rigg, Raquel Welch, or Sophia Loren had been my muse for SL. No, I went for the Godfather of Punk, Iggy Pop, and the strangest curmudgeon/picaro this side of Don Quixote, Ignatius J. Reilly.

Both figures spoke to me as ways to approach a world that, for the outset, I could see others taking far to seriously.

Whatever the excesses of Punk, it was about rebellion for the hell of it and questioning reality. Those are both hallmarks of SL. It suits those of us who want to subvert a popular culture on this side of the screen that seems vapid, consumerist, and doomed. Um...at times I think, "maybe it's both sides of the screen?" but then I get in my fake car and go for a drive.

Ignatius, the Rabelaisian genius of John Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, likewise raged at the world around him, in his longing for simpler times (read: the Middle Ages).

If Iggy is the muse for my desire to poke fun, Ignatius is my muse for avoiding being too self-important. He was, in the end, a lazy and self-centered slob in the midst of a sea of stupidity.

So far, SL has proven smarter and edgier than I'd thought it might. I hope that continues. I find neither the Iggy nor the Ignatius in me coming out to play that often. That's a good thing.

Marinetii Checks out Virtual Worlds

Location: Tate Modern, Futurism Show

“Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past?”

Old zealots can sill teach us lessons about the dangers of enthusiasm.

Marinetti’s ideas were everywhere, but especially in my head, as I wandered the gallery in the former Bankside Power Station in London: the sort of Nietzschean temple of electricity that the Futurists considered the most appropriate houses of worship. I don’t care for many things about F.T. Marinetti’s ideal of Futurism, but I do wish that the old war-loving protofascist could come to life for a few days, join me for a cappuccino, and log on to Second Life. He and I have one thing in common: a craving for tomorrow.

Futurism, for all its ideological warts, led to some original and dangerous art. Isn’t that the only sort of art that ends up as dorm-posters and cocktail-coasters?

The Futurists idealized speed and made a fetish of technology, which is not far off from how we all get “in the zone” when SL works well on our systems. I felt it on my last road-trip in SL, when the physics introduced since my last upgrade let the car coast and even drift, a level of verisimilitude I associate with console gaming.

When we log on, the past, of our bodies and our civilization, falls away as we roar (or fly) off into a pixilated sunset. There is no carbon-footprint in-world (though all those SL servers give pause, but that is a worry for when we log off).

Whatever the future holds for Second Life, enough of our population will crave tomorrow, or at least an idealized and streamlined version, to log on to some virtual world. Let’s face it: the masses never got flying cars and jetpacks. Such a future is only available to Spaceship 2 customers of Richard Branson—on the telly just this morning—or those with 20 million dollars for a ride on a Soyuz into orbit.

Feeling denied? Then, onward, transhumanists! You’ve nothing to lose but your sagging flesh, on that glorious day when you upload your intellects to the grid. Is it not true that “Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed”?

Of course, the Futurist impulse glorified warfare and considered women a nuisance, at best. Then World War I came and complicated matters. The best laid ideologies! One piece I loved, “Rock Drill” by Sir Jacob Epstein (shown at the top), recognized the dark side of worshiping the Machine. The piece began as a Cylon-style warbot atop a miner’s drill. Only a bronze of the torso and head, and photos of the original, survive, but it’s a warning sculpted of a nightmare about technology out of control.

As I looked at Epstein’s sculpture, a shiver ran up my spine. The things eyes wanted to light up, the steam-shovel head wanted to swivel in my direction on its metallic giraffe’s neck.

“What have YOU done to help make way for me and my kind?” It seemed to ask.

Test yourself: if you find yourself in London, get by the Tate Modern before this show ends on 20 September, 2009.

Team Tut: Ideas for Assignments

Location: Rezzable Kings Region, Second Life

Tuxedo Ninetails and I toured of a good bit of the Nile section of Rezzable's build in Second Life. We clowned around, striking poses while enjoying the stunning vista of the virtual Nile and the hippos that, luckily, did not live up to the ferocity of their real-life counterparts.

The ideas that follow are Tux's; I'm just doing my best, like Thoth, to act as scribe!

An Engineering Problem on the Nile

Tux first suggested that some sort of puzzle might enliven the granary area pictured just below. She thought that were the activity timed, with a penalty for not repairing a working mill from materials on-site. Thus students would learn about Egyptian technology and how the Nile was the "breadbasket" of the ancient world.


A later tour of the OpenSim Nile area with Viv Trafalgar led to us speculating about visitors doing the bidding of one of Pharaoh's ministers, who is trying to avert famine by getting a new mill into operation. The minister might lose favor in court if his servants--the visitors--could not repair the mill in time.

Plans for Tourism and Hospitality Students and Faculty

I stupidly deleted Tux's and my chat log, but she sent along these remarks after our tour. I have only edited them slightly.

Something else that makes sense to me as an authentic use of the Tut exhibit for those training for the tourism and hospitality industries:

• Plan tours and role-play virtual historical tour guide and museum docent roles. This might be very simple stuff, or they might have to plan and research a whole bunch of things like how to move groups of people around in virtual spaces, how to keep them interested, planning little activities for them so they aren’t just looking at stuff.
• Using the existing audio texts as models, write, record and upload further scripts to add to areas or objects that don’t currently have them, such as many of the objects in the museum and cosmic gallery.
• Add these audio texts to builds undertaken by class members, such as the granaries area we toured.
  

If Rezzable can’t see themselves having student work incorporated permanently into their build, then maybe learners could ‘buy’ copies of some of the artifacts, and add audio to their own copies. Maybe each school could have its own gallery where they have augmented versions of the objects on display with the students’ voice-overs attached. Rezzable might run competitions for visitors to develop commentaries for different objects, and include the best ones into the exhibit.

Media-Creation by Visitors

Learners could:

• Set up a ‘postcards from Kings Rezzable’ business, collecting (or creating) a bunch of good poses and animations so that people could get really good photos of their visits rather than the normal not very good ones that most of us tend to take. Learners could also make a video documentary about the site, using stills with voice-overs and nice transitions in MovieMaker or IMovie.
• Make a machinima documentary about the site, a la Kenneth Clark in ‘Civilisation.'
• Write a play and perform it, using the Tut build as the location. The performance could either move around the sim, or scenes could be rezzed in a holodeck setting so the audience didn’t have to go anywhere. The performance could be promoted across SL the same way the SL Shakespeare Company does.

Closing note by Iggy: I hope that several of these assignments, and more developed by Team Tut, can be fleshed out in a wiki so Rezzable can link to them from an Educational Kiosk on the SL and OpenSim sites.