The User named “showmeurcock” from Kentucky does not respond to the picture I send of the space heater next to my desk. The User named “whispers” from California rates a picture of my feet three out of five stars. The User “guest43723” from Germany sends a picture of a jar full of coins. I reply with a smiling emoticon and receive “Uu” in response.
A World of Photo is a geosocial multiplayer game during which:
Users involved in A World of Photo [AWOP] are a tightknit community where users’ attentions dilate and episodically contract along with fluctuations from their Android devices.
Although this background-running application rarely seems to have more than 100 users currently active, the game prods you towards constant connections with other users as it yanks you into a space of outright voyeurism.
This voyeuristic space is laid out on the screen through a map of the “thread” of users with whom you have connected. Few conversations carry past two messages: those that do weave scintillating life-tapestries glimpsed through a typically external visual representation. Few users send portrait pictures of themselves and instead expose their recipients to their contextual environment: the opposite seat of a subway car, a DJ Hero controller, someone drinking a beer and sitting on the floor in front of a TV. One photo displays imperceptible imagery on a television screen located in a dark room. Like the lives behind these cell phone cameras, this indistinguishable/unfocused image seems tantalizingly real, yet is ultimately unknowable. The game provides no discernible contact data or history. It is, however, possible to save the photos you receive. Once a user decides to stop replying to a textual message thread, that thread is over. It is conceivable (but unlikely) that two people would connect more deeply than the AWOP program intends without the compulsive motivation of biological and/or sexual gratification.
The possibilities of AWOP are subtly revealing in terms of a user’s constant awareness/presence. The game weaves randomized tangents from a global user-base. Like much collaborative software, AWOP emphasizes continuous threaded networks rather than merely linking individual lines of communication. Menus allow access to various statistics, including a user’s uploaded photo total, a user’s current image record and user rating system. Ratings are instrumental to the game element: User “Rob Zombie” rates my “Pretending to rock out” picture 5 stars and in return comments “Yeah!”. This comment prompts me to find objects in my surroundings that will rate highly based on user names. User “americansoldier” rates a similar picture of myself 2 out of 5 stars: as this is considered negative feedback, I am forced to lose a turn – to receive a photo from another user – and must fulfill a request positively in order to be rewarded. Thus, the game turns everyday life into an evaluation of personal experience that borders on the perverse. This may explain the missing ‘save’ functionality for a user’s sent photos.
Through peeking into the lives of others via AWOP, a user is left with reminders of spaces that exist outside the range of their mobile phone. These spaces overlay the objects that exist in the user’s “real life”/geophysicality, contrasting and contracting with[in] the corresponding layers constructed by AWOP’s present and potential social contacts. This augmentation does come at a price: such evaluation patterns (by the self and others) are, on some level, internalized. This internalization may contribute to a constricted reality sense that projects overarching importance to immediate (“real”) stimuli over the awareness of other possible environments. The gap between the two is likely where the user resides, conscious of their perceived and reinforced shortcomings. AWOP’s strongest hook is in harnessing the user’s desire to socially (and successfully) produce items for the community. Community approval becomes currency. This currency production produces struggles between internal and external systems of representation which are hashed out in lines of resolution via a personal digital assistant. If substantial narrative does not emerge, like music, “from the dimensions of ambient night” [Harry Partch, 1949, Genesis of a Music] then AWOP certainly allows the user access to its root: the personal, the spatial, and the physical.
Post Reenactment – “Don’t Kill Mr. Gandhi!”:
The 240 mile march across Second Life with my treadmill powered Gandhi ended on April 6th, 2008. At the conclusion of the walk, I had a great sense of accomplishment – feeling content and quite frankly looking forward to a much needed rest! I had completed a rather fascinating journey – both in the physical and conceptual sense. In the days that followed the end of the reenactment, this feeling of euphoria was slowly overtaken by a sense of melancholy – I found myself both saddened and conflicted for the march to be concluded.
One of the avatars who walked with me the most was named Gyovanna. She told me she was from Brazil. She had the endearing habit of referring to me as “Mr. Gandhi”. Several days after the conclusion of the walk, I received a message from Gyovanna pleading with me “Don’t Kill Mr. Gandhi!”. In the days after the reenactment, such sentiments were expressed to me by many others. I logged in once or twice as Gandhi after the march but it was just not the same. The layered factors necessary to conduct the reenactment were crucial to creating a symbiosis between the treadmill, me, and my avatar – these could not be replaced or duplicated by merely visiting SL in the traditional keyboard-based manner.
Over the course of the march I had been thinking about how best to document and, in a way, process the experience of the march into a series of artefacts and objects. As a way towards further exploring my connection with my SL avatar, MGandhi, I worked to extract the 3-D model from Second Life and process this information into several sculptural renditions – the first being an 8” 3-D print made using the rapid prototyping equipment at Eyebeam. Working with my intern, Lenny Correa, we extracted Gandhi using an open source application called OGLE developed, oddly enough, at the Eyebeam Open Labs.
As an Eyebeam resident artist, part of the award was to have an exhibition onsite at the end of the residency period. At some point during thinking about the exhibition and processing the 8” figure, I envisioned the creation of a monumental sized Gandhi figure. Most statues of Gandhi, including the one in NYC at Union Square, are roughly human scale. The thought of creating a larger than life representation of my Gandhi avatar seemed quite audacious and oddly appropriate. I settled upon using another open source application, Pepakura Designer, which is a popular papercraft program used by enthusiasts to create some rather amazing – albeit generally tabletop scale – reproductions of everything from anime figures to airplanes. I adapted this program to create a 17’ tall reproduction of my Gandhi avatar out of cardboard and hot glue. The entire process has been described and documented, in detail, on instructables.com – my first instructable which I see as an unorthodox but highly effective way to further disseminate the project. The resulting 17’ figure is a monumental physical representation of Gandi created from very simple materials. The figure was made to be the same height as Michelangelo’s David – a fitting conceptual connection to this iconic work of art history depicting the Biblical figure of David just before slaying Goliath.
Most recently, I have completed a second 3D print of the Gandhi figure that stands 12” tall. For this piece, I have treated the figure in genuine gold leaf – creating a rather contradictory sculptural representation of my avatar as a shining, fetishized object.
I’ve also created a 6000+ frame stop action video created from screenshots recorded automatically every 60 seconds documenting the entirety of the reenactment in SL. The 9 minute long piece is compiled at 12 frames per second. I showed this piece at Eyebeam in an installation featuring the original treadmill; it includes an LCD panel laid upon the treadmill showing a looping segment shot from above, and in front of, my legs walking during the reenactment. For the exhibition, the re-installation of the treadmill, the 17’ Gandhi and the 8” Gandhi were complimented by six screen shots shown as large formatted prints. Also included was a mural size print of my recreation of the famous image of Gandhi making the salt at the beach at Dandhi.
The entirety of the Gandhi work is to be featured as part of the Guangzhou Triennial 2008, entitled Farewell to Post-Colonialism in China this fall. For this exhibition, the museum will be working with me to build a second 17’ Gandhi – a way of having a local connection to the creation of the works for the show. The first Gandhi was, btw, designed to allow for disassembly into parts for shipping – he is now on his way home to me in Reno in two very large cardboard containers, big and bulky but very light 
.
What pleases me most about the entirety of the reenactment experience, and ongoing exploration or processing of this Mixed Reality performance, is that through this work I have, for the first time, unified what have previously have been two different threads of my artistic practice. For years, my work in physical installation, sculpture and kinetic art has been separate from my work performing in computer games and online communities. The synthesis of the real and the virtual during the reenactment, and the resulting physical explorations post-reenactment have proven to be a revelation to my creative process that will surely inform my activities for years to come.