Chelsey’s Weblog

Diary Response from Samuel (Xolo) from Interaction #1 in SL:

(We went to Cerisyi, to buy freebie clothes at the Freebie Dungeon, to some radomn cafes, ad finally to a French dance party)

Xolo writes in his response diary:

lo primero es que es sorprendente lo que la tecnologia virtual
puede hacer, a travez delm internet, poder conocer gente, hacer amigos
es bastante entretenido primero aprender a utilizar algunos de los
botones y aprender a controlar lleva tiempo, pero como dije antes es
increible todas las funciones que se pueden manejar alli….

the first thing is how suprising it is- all that the virtual technology can do, thorugh the internet, to meet people, to make friendsit is very entertaining first to learn to use some of the buttons and to learn to control it takes time, but as I said a minute ago it is incredible how many functions and possibilities are possible there…
And my own reactions:

We began this interaction as fiances and roomies, sitting at our dining room table. Sam was rather reluctant, doing this as a favor to me, Chelsey, because I am his fiance and because I made such good leftover turkey. We used voice chat and talked, our screens next to one another as I showed Sam how to sign up, pick a name, find clothes, fly, etc.

We first went to the Kissing Booth, where I have been a lot. I showed him around, we floated in a duck floatie in the ocean thing. Together. It was the first time I had been together with someone in SL like that. Then we sat beside a fire (see picture). The we swung in a hammock, me holding him. Again, first time in SL I had “held” someone. Weird, especially sitting right next to him at the wooden table not touching him in RL, only touching him in SL. Xolo and Mina, Sam and Chels.

Then we got him some clothes from the freebie dungeon which was strange mostly because he did not want to really spend time in there getting clothes like I do. He was not into it, preferring to stay in the same old avatar clothes. Interesting, bc in RL he does not care too much about clothes, though I felt the need to tell him he “needed” to change in order to be “cool.” Pressuring him via RL voice about digital existence in SL. Whoa. So he changed, leaving on the avatar shoes and choosing all black. He paid a little more attention to appearance once he figured out how to use it.

We then moved on to a cafe. He is a musician and stumbled upon an art gallery in Kissing Booth, so then wanted to explore musical scenes. The place we went has shows sometimes, but just streaming music today.

We then moved on to the haunted house Jason took the class too, which he thought was strange. Still, we had not talked to anyone

Lastly, we searched for places to go. Sam, being a avid traveler, searched for Paris. We ended up in a french bar. Thats when Sam got a tequila, telling everyone he is Mexica and then began using his desktop translator to translate Spanish words into French in order to communicate in the french cafe….

This is an interesting collection of fragments of emergent stories of collision and force, written poetically and in a fragmented, emergent manner. Stewart defines this cultural peosis to be the creativity or generativity in thinkgs cultural. the embodied affective experience, the still life moment when things resonate with both potential and threat. She seems to allude to this idea as an idea of encounter, a moment in which forces, bodies, and global energies come together to merge momentarily before drifting and shifting into new patterns and new affectations. 

“this is a time and place in which an emergent assemblage made up of wild mix of things- technologies, sensibilities, flows of power and money, daydreams,institution, ways of experiencing time and space, battles, dreams, bodily states, and innumerable practices of everyday life- has become actively generative, producing wide ranging impacts, effects, and forms of knowledge with a life of their own. This is what I mean by cultural poesis” (1028)

“What is going on? What floating influences now travel through public routes of circulation and come to roost in the seemingly private domain of hearts, homes, and dreams?” (1028)

“As previously public spaces and dorms of expression were privatized, previously privatized arenas of dreams, anxieties, agencies, and morals were writ large on public stages as scenes of impact” (1029)

“The figure of a beefed up agency became a breeding ground for all kinds of strategies of compliant, self destruction, flight, reinvigoration, and experimentation as if the world rested on its shoulders” (1036)

“The body is both the persistant site of self recognition and the thing tht will always betray you. It dreams of its own redemotion and knows better” (1036)

“The proliferating cultures of the body spin madly around the palpable promise that fears and pleasures and forays into the world can be literally made vital all-consuming passions” (1039)

In her coda, Stewart goes on to describe her purpose in sharing these story fragments, the “arbitrary scenes of impact tracked through bodies desires, or labors and traced out of the aftermath of a passing surge registered…” 1040). She claims that these are “actual sites where forces have gathered to a point of impact, or flirtations along the outer edges of a pheneomenan, or extreme cases that sugget where a trajectory might lead if it were to go unchecked” (1040). This is a fascinating way of thinking about Tsing and Latour and the ways in which emergent encounters with forces and energies and others shape and construct moments of energy and pause. This kind of fragmented knowing, I think, has a lot to do with SL and my research project. 

It is as if one if living in vignettes, jumping from moment to moment, reality to reality, RL to SL fluidly yet with an awareness of the disconnect that forms that fluidity. Its a representation of how the RL and virtual and SL interact to shape each other. I have a moment kissing my fiance as he puts on his coat before I re-fragment into SL where I am wearing a skimpy tee and dancing with some one I never met before I teleport over to a new sim and look at art as I pull the brownies out of the oven and the scent overwhelms me. As I check my email and gmail ads orient themselves to the words I type. All of these energies and forces… collide and exist together only momentarily, fundamentally shifting the way we read the world…

Latour writes this article about the ways in which we conceive of the body (or bodies) and relate that conception or understanding into knowlege about and participation in the world. I have to be honest, I am left a bit muddled about the article as it was somewhat difficult. I would find myself thinking how good it was, then get to a certain phrase and realize I was completely lost. So, here goes on what I think about what (I think) I understood….

The idea of articulation and articulated proposition as opposed to statements seems very interesting. This idea seems to free one of stagnant knowlege and release a more fluid friction-esque kind of knowing that is more suited to our living in a network and inhabiting the posthuman. He writes, “articulation can take on both artificial and material components allowing one to pregressively have a body… through the materiality of language tools, words finally carry worlds” (210). Through articulated propositions it appears almost that things become even more confusing, more dense, more full of information and possibility as part of their very nature and existence, which seems to be an idea that releases potential. He writes that statements “do not allow one to compose a world at once solid, interpreted, controversial and meaningful. With articualted propositions, this progressive composition os a common world becomes thinkable” (212). Here we might see an application or two in SL to this nebulous idear.

SL existence would be more like an articulated statement because of its relationship to RL life and to frictious senses of fluid knowing. As he writes, “the more artificality, sensorium, bodies, affections” cultivate more relaities that can be registered, learning to be affected means exactly thatp the more you learn, the more differences exist” (213).

So, if in SL we can cultivate various bodies at once, on screens, in RL, in a variety of mediums at once- physical, cell phone, g-chat, SL, and CL all at once, then are we somehow more aware of sensorial experiences and thus the ways in which differences seem to permeate our existences?