When you arrive at the Push sim, the place in Second Life where artists leave their work for us to see, then you may experience all sorts of surprises: sculptural installations reacting to your avatar’s movements (last week, Werner Kurosawa’s grid followed you, now it is a work by DC Spensley), holes in the virtual water (Solo Mornington did it), or you suddenly find yourself in a three-dimensional version of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! in which you can trigger the rocket (by Penumbra Carter and Dekka Raymaker).
But sometimes there’s something really unexpected. It took me a while until I even noticed this work: an avatar with the unusual name Identity Absent is standing on the yellow stage of BiW. Next time you look, the avatar looks different, but the owner seems to be away-from-keyboard. And next time yet another outfit! Sometimes shapes, clothes, and attachments seem to mix, a female pops inside the male clothes, the prim hair of the last appearance doesn’t vanish, the guy next door is wearing a pink prim skirt …
In front of the stage, there’s a simple white panel, and if you’re brave enough to use the new Second Life beta viewer, then you can see that the panel shows a Google search for “Identity Absent”. When I came closer to the panel, the page changed, and the search was now for “Nusch Raynier” !!!
The panel is by Selavy Oh. When you look at the profile of Identity Absent, the 1st-life entry says: Selavy Oh. The avatar, who is caught in an endless search for the right outfit, is the avatar of another avatar. A genderless Sisyphus on her/his quest for identity with a yet unsuccessful ego-google.
But in fact, while I’m writing this, Selavy Oh’s Flickr picture of the installation and her blog post, where she mentions that the changing outfits are the 16 default apperances supplied by Linden Labs, had already made it to places 2-4 of the search for “Identity Absent”. And here we get yet another twist in Selavy’s work: by writing about her own work, her avatar slowly assumes some kind of selfhood in a closed-loop system of self-referentiality. We exist because Google knows us: we are no longer what we look like, what we have experienced, or what our own episodic memory tells us. Now the memory is externalized, it is the web with its social networks that stores the determinants of our identity.
Nice summary Nusch. I visited the sim yesterday after Selavy had just finished installing this piece. It is very clever, in that it invites us to dwell on our virtual identities and what meaning(or lack of) our online presence has. I was reminded of an old game I used to play called Phantasy Star Online, in that game when you died a tombstone appeared with the details of your character and how you expired. Sometimes when one of our group was offline we would come across their gravestones, and more spookily when a player had permanently left the game any tombstones they had generated would remain. It was strange to have this sentimental reminder of a person in a place that was so alien and far removed from our physical identities. Those game servers closed down many years ago but I wonder if somewhere in cyberspace coded echoes of our presence remain.
This line of thought may not be what Selavy intended with the piece but it is the direction I was inspired to follow.
Left by Arahan Claveau on February 28th, 2010