“Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a
factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time
produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that
meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the
empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life
(identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private
property).”
- Anti-Capital Projects, The Necrosocial
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will –
we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study
too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . .
and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
- Presidental Aide to George Bush, New York Times
Institutionalized Reality is currently cracking, splitting and multiplying. In the last few days, students across California appear to have transformed from apathetic alienated youth (seemingly in search of a grade and an exit) into a powerful force occupying university buildings cross the state. A few months ago, the University of California seemed an unlikely avenue for genuine social upheaval. The geophysical actions of many in the last few days have substantially altered that.
The student unrest presently occuring at the University of California prompts the question: can the gaps between geophysical and virtual realities actualize as spaces of liberation and transformation? If Augmented Reality is going to manifest simply as a better way to find real estate, then I would say no. However, if people can create uses for Augmented Technologies that move beyond the demands of capital and corporate interests, then maybe so. Projects such as Can You See Me Now (Blast Theory) illustrate how Mixed Reality can unleash latent potential found in urban spaces, as well as operating as distracting forms of entertainment.
Ricardo Dominguez describes some of my recent collaborations as Minor Simulation. One such collaboration between myself, Ricardo Dominguez and Elle Mehrmand is http://ucop.cc, a project that presents hacktivist-modified website copy of the University of California Office of the President. The ucop.cc project was created as a protest against the recent University budget cuts, layoffs and tuition increases (totaling 44 percent this year alone). The main difference between the hacktivist and original websites is that in our version, President Mark Yudof announces a new $0 Tuition program with the tagline “A return to core values – a fresh start”. In an interview with the UCSD Guardian, Dominguez comments on the ucop.cc project: “For at least a moment, the circuit was disrupted. It allowed another possibility to occur — and that’s to reimagine what the university can be.”
The goal of the ucop.cc project was to create a space of disruptive possibility and to use cracks in mainstream understanding of net protocols to present a truly free University of California. Perhaps this can be seen as a way of using the space between “traditional” reality versions, between truth and fiction, and as a way of inspiring action and imagination. Part 3 will offer conclusions regarding using Mixed/Augmented Reality as a strategy for finding and creating liberating spaces.
“There are many worlds and many realities in our universe. When one reality, or one world-view is superimposed on another, it is inevitable that social, economic and cultural problems arise. Hierarchies of worlds are constructs of a bygone era. Ecologies of worlds should guide us in considering our future… We can begin by designing environments that can respond to physical, environmental, or social needs. Not only the needs of human beings, but also of the organisms and elements with whom we share the Biosphere.” – fo.am
Rezzing occurs in the space in-between worlds. Rezzing happens in the moment we switch from one reality to another: where the structure of synthetic worlds is unveiled. We see these spaces appear gradually – textures, alpha channels and audio appear in layers. Forms start as simple grey patterns that morph and evolve via emergent detail. These patterns resolve as final forms that adhere to in-game physics and flop into “place”.
When I begin rezzing – and am between avatars – my body disappears. Then, the simple basic shape beneath is exposed with pitch black skin and bizarre proportions. Finally, my body parts materialise.
I stand naked: staring ahead as my clothes begin to appear, one piece at a time. As the textures of my skin are downloaded, my blurry body is redrawn in photorealistic detail. In Second Life, Linden Labs has added a feature where rezzing avatars are surrounded by a cloud whilst forming. This cloud presumably covers the moments of nakedness while an avatar’s clothes are appearing and bare pixel genitalia are exposed.
There is no geophysical equivalent to the act of rezzing. The closest phenomenon is the act of awakening from – or falling into – dreams. When an object or avatar is rezzed in a synthetic environment, its data representation is downloaded from the database into the local client. On screen, a visual “something” is created from synthetic “nothing” – an ontological novelty out of the pure void. This act reveals a flaw in the materiality and persistence of these worlds or a type of virtual ontology similar to Deleuze’s Spinozan plenty without void.
After encountering the whooshing sound that indicates teleporting, I am dropped into an incomplete world. Often during this phase, my avatar manifests in a falling animation. First, all is sky and water which faithfully glistens with the sun (according to environment settings). Then, distant objects appear. In complex areas this can take minutes as particle scripts initialise and begin to swirl and glow before the details of architecture appear.
555 KUBIK | facade projection |
During the rezzing process, as a user’s body begins to form they step into a swirl of affect. This affect may induce feelings of identification with the avatar or a revulsion from it. This emotional polarisation may produce a sense of pleasure in seeing or a sense of disjunctive discomfort. The activity of the database creates its own unreproducable order dependant on the speed of the bytes transferred. Hair or pants/skirt may take minutes to download, with the avatar blinking into space with a bald head or exposed thong in the meantime. At this juncture, the avatar hover-stands in an unfolding environment and waits for the expected transactions of the “normal” synthetic world to begin.
How do we come to understand the resonances, affects and effects of rezzing into synthetic environments? With augmented reality making headline news, can we think of other ways of entering other realities which are not limited to visual modes? What about pain? Sound? Smell? Can Mixed Reality Performances be used to develop and explore these methods of realityshifting? If we can think of ways of finding spaces between realities, then can we think of the space between realities as similar to the space between genders and sexualities? Could entering a space between realities free us of certain rules, be a strategy of liberation and transformation? Part 2 will explore these questions.
Don Woods famously added the more “Tolkienised” aspects of the Colossal Cave Adventure game after rewriting it in 1977. Woods’ rewriting/recoding/versioning of the game is another [TGOTT] inspirational treasure: Woods and others who have remixed and rewritten Adventure have opened this game to a constant flow of imaginative reinterpretations.
When immersed in Sidequest!, players may sometimes find themselves following an Ancient Path to a city inside the Hollow earth called Agartha. We members of [TGOTT] found an entrance at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. As we crawled through the portal we passed through – and became – Will Crowther, crafting his computer-mediated memory of the present moment to share with his daughters. With Admiral Richard E. Byrd flying overhead (in a story told to us by Dr. Raymond Bernard in 1969) and 2,300 miles beyond the South Pole through a hole in Antarctica, we/he began watching the sky mirror reflect the sky below as he went inside the Hollow Earth. UFOs and Governmental Secrecy? December, 1929? February, 1947? November, 1955? January, 1956? February, 2009? Many unanswered player questions can be found frozen in the Arctic ice.
There are more Sidequest! entries buried underground than the Library of the Mystic Arts. Since 1969, the ARPANET has run on dedicated cables which were themselves buried underground. This internet backbone stretched across the United States and now has (obviously) expanded to an international and ubiquitous scale. ARPANET, that early military-industrial-academic-complex of only a few nodes, literally lay the underground network for us to crawl through. We (as William Crowther) were instrumental in the original ARPANET development team when we worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman building core technologies. In Sidequest! there is an option to begin at this starting point and crawl into lower levels of the military-industrial-academic-operating-system. This point resides closer to the kernel beside a datastream tumbling along a Classical Von Neumann machine.
Sometimes we drift out of this datastream, sailing upstream against assumptions to the The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab: another Sidequest! story starting place. We surface in the warm Californian sun at the end of Arastradero Road. This road sits before the D.C. Power Building in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Californian foothills roll across the view with scattered trees underneath. Graduate Computer Science students run through these trees in infinite loops while attempting to decode the possibilities of playing chess with a majikal machine. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully and you, William Crowther, can remember when it was made of pure data and flowing along underneath the cave floor at 56K.
Sidequest! is written in Python with entries authored by jonCates and programmed by Tamas Kemenczy and Jake Elliott: metaphors are mixed and transcendentally transposed over unstable timespaces. As we crawl closer to the center of the game, the connections are more random and fleeting, and flirt with more self-reflective recursions. This is what we mean when we say Sidequest! is “cyberpsychedelic” through combining the effects of mixing Cybernetics and Psychedelics as cultural influences, technologies and aesthetic principles.