The Porter Bureau

Below you will find a guide to abstract geographies in Second Life. Abstract geographies, as I am using the term, are places that don’t try to represent something that can be found in the physical world but instead originate from the imagination. They break the basic signifier/signified duality that defines many of the locations found in Second Life.

To understand what I mean, let’s first consider a few examples of representative geographies in Second Life.

Perhaps one of the most frequently visited places in Second Life is the recreation of the Eiffel Tower. What the designers tried to do was to recreate in a virtual environment a model or representation of the Eiffel Tower that would map directly to the physical monument that dominates the Paris skyline. Were you to log into Second Life and visit the representation of the Eiffel Tower, you would immediately recognize its iconic iron beams, its frame-like architecture, and the distinct upward sweep of its design.

Other representative geographies abound in second life and include anything from the Globe Theater in London to the Taj Mahal. These project are impressive in the artistry of their construction and carry the cultural value of these locations into the medium of virtual environments.

But what about this idea of “abstract geographies.” Unlike the recreations of the Eiffel Tower or Globe Theater, abstract geographies don’t take as their model anything that can be found in the physical world. Instead they are the product of the designer’s imagination. It is worth emphasizing here that all geographies in Second Life are constructed; they are meticulously designed (if you saw the film Inception, you might think of the role of the “architect” that Ellen Page plays). So, even the most representative geography is still a fabrication of the imagination, but the designer of an abstract geography moves beyond the need to rearticulate places found in the physical world to the places found only in the mind. William Gibson famously described cyberspace as a “collective hallucination.” If that is true, it is nowhere better articulated, in my view, than in non-representative geographies of Second Life because of their deliberate and conscious break with realism.

Almost by design such geographies are difficult to describe in text, so to give you a demonstration of what I mean, I’ve created a number of videos that take you on a tour of three abstract geographies: Immersiva, Two Fish, and Centus.

I should take a minute to explain the title of this post. “Invisible Islands” is a term I’m borrowing from a writer named Italo Calvino who, in the early 1970s, wrote a book titled Invisible Cities. Set in the 13th century palace of Kublai Khan, the book consists of a series of descriptions in which the traveler Marco Polo describes for Kublai Khan the various cities that comprise his empire. But as each city is described, it quickly becomes apparent that these cities are not to be found in the physical world, but rather in the shared, collective imaginations of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, with each city more abstract and fantastical than the last. These cities that Marco Polo describes are non-referential in that they don’t correspond to any city that actually exists outside of Marco Polo and Khan’s imaginations. They are therefore ‘invisible cities,’ because they can’t be seen with the usual visual tools, meaning the human eye; they can only be apprehended in the ephemeral space between Marco Polo’s oration and Khan’s hearing and imagination.

Likewise in Second Life we have invisible islands (the geography of Second Life as a whole is that of an archipelago, seen here: World Map of Second Life) that do not exist outside of imagination. Yes, we can see them with our eyes, but not without the mediating technologies of 3D graphics and the Second Life engine.

Check out the videos below and let me know what you think. (The first video is basically what you just read, so you can skip it if you’d like.)

Last semester I had the pleasure of TAing for an “introduction to the novel” class (as apposed to once again teaching English 101). A thoroughly enjoyable experience made much better by a very strong selection of novels by the professor, Michael Olmert. One of the final novels we read was The Life of Pi, a thoughtful, funny and engaging novel about a young Indian boy who is shipwrecked and forced to spend several months at sea sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The novel raises a good many questions, particularly in the area of how science, belief, and religion get mashed together in our contemporary world in such a way that disentangling them becomes not only impossible, but also undesirable.

During his lecture, Professor Olmert described The Life of Pi, quite rightly, as a “postmodern novel.” He then gave a brief definition of what postmodernism was and then moved on to other topics. Not surprisingly, one of the first questions my students asked during the discussion period was, “what exactly is postmodernism?” Given that I spend the better party of my undergraduate career trying to answer that same question, I demurred and told them I would prepare a short lecture on the topic for the following week.

As I considered how to make accessible this most unwieldy of terms, I decided that in order to understand postmodernism what one needs is a larger historical context, to understand why we use the word “post” in the term at all. To that end, I created a powerpoint presentation that traced the broad artistic movements in literature over the last 200 years and showed how they culminated in a postmodern aesthetic. I also built on art history discussions I’ve had with a visual artist friend of mine and paired the literary developments that lead to postmodernism to their counterparts in painting and visual art. I highly recommend this approach as the immediacy of the visual object makes apprehending the shifts in style and aesthetics over time much more accessible. Even given proper time for study, one can obviously view a number of paintings much more quickly than read, say, a series of short stories from various literary periods. This immediacy allows the viewer to more easily juxtapose the various styles against one another and see how they form a dialogue of sorts, one style building on/reacting to another.

This approach, and particularly my slides, may offend certain theoretical sensibilities, and is probably antithetical to the very project of postmodernism itself. After all, by creating a timeline of aesthetic theories, what am I doing other than re-inscribing the “grand narrative” of artistic development that postmodernist theory would have us interrogate? Such concerns are all well and good for the English major or graduate student, but keep in mind that this was a class for non-English majors who were encountering these terms for the first time. So, with apologies to the many artistic movements that get flattened out in my overly simplistic narrative of art and literary history, I give you: What is Postmodernism.

I would welcome any thoughts on either the slides themselves or the method of introducing students to the concept of postmodernism.

So when we drove out here to Maryland, a good fried of mine, Ike, drove one of our cars so that I could drive the moving van. After Ike and I arrived, we took the opportunity to visit the National Gallery of Art, which was great. We wandered through museum, enjoying the impressive but expected displays of the names you learn in middle-school art history class. But where things really got interesting was in the “modern” art section. Ike is a painter and print maker who recently earned his MFA, so he made the ideal museum perusing companion. Ike’s work builds on the tradition of the abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollack

and Mark Rothko

I admit, I have a hard time interpreting abstract art. On the one hand, I feel sure that the impulse to identify some mimetic referant for the work is a mistake, or misses the point all together. On the other hand, if you don’t judge a work of art based on its ability to capture effectively that which it seeks to represent, how do you judge it? Trained artists might talk about elements of composition like the use of colors, shapes, blank space, or whatever, but the uninitiated would be at a loss if asked to interpret a work of art based on those criteria. But if only trained artists can understand or appreciate abstract art, then that would suggest that abstract art is simply a mind game for the elite, those who have nothing better to do than wait for their trust fund money to come in and dribble pain on canvas.

I don’t know how to resolve these conflicting feelings about abstract art. For my part, I approach it with three ideas in mind. First, I recognize that the historical context for this art is as a reaction to the realist movement that preceded it and that abstract art is pointing out the failure of realist representations–or at least the failure of the artist to achieve via paint what the photo can do better, even in the hands of an amateur. This recognition that even the most “realistic” paintings fail to actually capture “the thing in itself” helps me get past my impulse to think of abstract art as simply random.

Second, I think of Poe’s argument that the aim of literature (and by extension other arts) is to generate an effect. He writes:

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view- for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest- I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone- whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone- afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

While I may dispute his treatment of the artist as a fully autonomous actor, I think he is exactly right to point the reader/viewer away from what a poem/painting may represent and towards what a poem/painting does. In fact, I imagine that even traditional, representational artists would appreciate this shift in a viewer’s perspective.

Third, and finally, I consider an abstract painting in terms of piercing. (See Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida.) I begin by observing the piece as expansively and as passively as I can, and then I “allow” some element to reach across the distance between the image and me (sorry for the metaphysical language here) and “pierce” me (again, I’m using Barthes’ language). Said another way, I let some element of the work stick out for me and draw my attention to it. I then consider why and how that particular element affected me and what that might say about myself and the work.

Let me give you an example using one of Ike’s prints (since showing off his stuff was the point of this post in the first place). Consider Rontgen III, an Digital print, Acrylic on Masonite:

This is a photo of a wire sculpture printed onto a piece of masonite with addition painting added to the print by the artist. What strikes me (pierces me) in this piece is the plastic tube that circles the sculpture. The wire sculpture is a three dimensional object, but by being photographed it has been turned into a two dimensional object. To be sure, it retains many of its three dimensional elements, but not all of them. The tube, on the other hand, exudes its three dimensionality in spite of the process that now renders it a two dimensional object. It is as if possesses some essence which refuses to be flattened, which resists the (perhaps) excessive processing of the sculpture that seeks to reconstruct it from one type of media to something else.

Anyway, that’s just me. Here are a few more of Ike Bushman’s pieces. You can also see his online gallery here, which I highly recommend. In the mean time, give my method of approaching abstract art a shot and let me know what you come up with. I’m curious to know if my method is useful for other viewers who, like me, are not art historians.

Higgsboson- The God Particle, 2009

Rontgen IV, 2009

Higgsboson – The God Particle V, 2009

Gods will be Gods I, 2007