Howard Barker’s 13 Objects — global performance October 20 and 21
Posted on October 15th, 2009 — permalink
Howard Barker is a celebrated British playwright. On October 21st, there will be an international celebration of his works entitled 21 for 21. Participating in this celebration will be Avatar Repertory Theater, the virtual theater company of which I am a part. We’ll be putting up a production of his play 13 Objects: Studies in Servitude.
This is one of those things that makes it very clear that virtual worlds are not just computer games. These 13 short plays are all interesting and challenging, and vary all over the place in tone. Some of them are funny, some of them are grim, some of them are surreal, and all of them give you various different things to think about. It’s being directed by Joff Chafer, a faculty member at Coventry University. The cast is a sundry group of people from all of the USA, the UK, Austrailia, and New Zealand. It includes at least three former professors (two of whom were English professors, one of whom was perversely a professor of physics & astronomy…), a former Opera singer, and a couple of people who have performed and continue to perform professional theater in real life.
The design of the sets for all 13 plays follows a run-down, semi-post-apocalyptic theme. The objects in the sets were all constructed by famed former Second Life builder Arcadia Asylum, famous for her “hobo” type builds. Near the stage, there will also be “installations” for each of the 13 short plays, present through October 20 and 21 (and probably available even before then). You’ll see the sets, and hear recordings of the voices of the actors who will be performing on those sets.
This play will be free to attend. If you have a Second Life account, drop by; the show will at this spot in the Coventry University sim, at 4PM PDT (23:00 UT) on Tuesday October 20, and 2PM PDT (21:00 UT) on Wednesday, October 21. If you don’t have a Second Life account, consider getting one! They’re free; visit www.secondlife.com, ignore the gratuitously flash-heavy front page, and click on the big orange “Join Now” button to create an account.
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Living La Vida Ludic
Posted on September 24th, 2008 — permalink
I was at SLCC a couple of weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that most of the most interesting and exciting stuff going on was related to education. Some of that was self-filtering– that’s where I went– but there’s no denying there was quite an education buzz.
One of my favorite talks was given by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, and was entitled Why second Life Can’t Tip: the Power and Perils of Living La Vida Ludic. I suspect that the whole not-tipping business was in the title to get people to want to come to the talk, but I have to admit that I found that part of the talk less interesting, and perhaps even borderline irrelevant.
However, the concept of La Vida Ludic is something that really grabbed me, partly because I hadn’t seen it layed out clearly and definitively before… yet, in the concepts, I recognized something in the way that I live my life.
Briefly speaking, “ludic” is derived from a latin (I think) word for games. As such, “La Vida Ludic” is the “game life”, or “playing at life.” Barry Joseph talks about how in our culture, we tend to have a very strict separation between work and play. One great example he gave was elemetary school. There’s a place for work– the classroom– and a place for play– recess. If you try to play in the work context, you get in trouble (he showed an image of a kid sitting in the corner wearing a dunce cap). Likewise, if you try to work in the play context, you also get in trouble (other kids harass for being a nerd and bringing boring work stuff into the play environment).
He went on to describe Global Kids’ way of educating kids leaning heavily on work in Second Life, and showed how a lot of the activites they do have serious mixing of work and play… and yet, because of that mixing, the learning may perhaps be stronger than it would have if we were too serious to be willing to include play in it.
I think I have long lived, or tried to live, my life with the philosophy that my work should feel like play. This is why I majored in physics when I was in college; I was going to major in engineering, but physics was just more fun to me. As I became a professional astronomer, I also picked up a hobby as an amateur astronomer. (I didn’t do any telescope observing before my last couple years of college, and only got my amateur telescope after graduating from college.) I’ve always wanted to be doing something that I enjoyed doing, so that at least some fraction of my work would feel like play. (I know it’s inevitable that some of work won’t… but, then again, some of my play (hobbies, etc.) feels like drudgery too!))
One of the reasons moving to Linden as a system engineer was appealing to me was that sometimes I would use adminstering my machines and writing code as a way of procrastinating “real work” when I was an astronomer. Mind you, this was still real work, as it was stuff that needed to be done, but I was more of a computer nerd than one really needs to be as an astronomer. Just as I enjoyed playing with data, as I enjoyed playing with the science in my classes and going on stage to teach, I also enjoyed playing around with computers.
A few months ago, I was at a “MoonLab” meeting in-world (”MoonLab” being the “lab” where those of us who are remote work). Some people were saying how they’ve set aside specific workspace in their homes– some computers dedicated to working, and when they’re at that computer, they’re “at work”. They have other comptuers they play with. To me, this has always seemed unnatural. First of all, maintaining all those extra computers seems like a lot of effort, not to mention costing space. But, beyond that, it just seems unnatural to me.
I’ve long mixed work and play, in my mind, with my time, and in my approach to life. And, it feels more human, more natural, to me to do it this way. When I’ve heard IT policies that strictly prohibit personal use of work comptuers, I think, are these people in touch with real people? I was told that once at LBNL, you weren’t allowed to make even local personal calls from desk phones; you had to go out to a payphone. Hello? Not only is that dehumanizing, it’s inefficient (people spend more time making their local calls). (When I was there, LBNL had a more human personal use policy for comptuers– do as thou wilt as long as (a) you don’t do anything naughty (e.g. porn), and (b) you don’t put an undue load on LBNL resources.) On the flip side, before I moved the Supernova Cosmology Project database from a very creaky and problematic flat file system to a PostGreSQL database, I installed and played with PostGreSQL on my machine at home to understand how it worked. I’ve done data reduction and work on my own computers. To force myself to keep it all separate would be especially hard now that I work from home, but was unnatural even when I worked at LBNL or Vanderbilt.
In Joseph’s talk, he talked about how doing things in Second Life naturally leads to a Ludic life. After all, Second Life does use technology that you primarily see only in a gaming environment. Many people are still under the misapprehension that Second Life is in fact a game. But even though it’s not, there’s no doubt that there are playful aspects to it. I sometimes go around as a dinosaur…. Sometime soon I’ll post some photos I’ve taken here of work meetings, and the morphologies with which people show up to those meetings.
The sad thing is, our culture and legal system is fundamentally hostile to the ludic life. I suppose I could write some fraction of my computer, laptop, office space, etc., off of my taxes, but I never will do so… for to do so legally, I would have to strictly use it for work and not also play, and that would put more of a damper on my lifestyle than any tax break I would get would be worth. I got into trouble because the first time I did a play in-world, I billed myself as Prospero Linden– figuring that since we’re all encouraged to be in-world and interact in-world, this could only be good press. Besides, it was just me doing stuff. But, alas, I got reprimanded for that, because it’s a work account and when I’m using it I’m representing the lab. And they’re right; the business could be held responsible for things I do in that form… but, unfortunately, it also means that one has to keep one’s work and one’s play separate.
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The art of Light Waves in Second Life
Posted on December 28th, 2007 — permalink
One of the mottos of Second Life is “your world, your imagination.” Second Life has very little content developed or built by anybody employed by Linden Lab. Nearly everything you see in Second Life is built by the residents– that is, people like you who have accounts, and who do creative things with them.
Angel by Light Waves
Click for a larger version
Light Waves is a sculptor in Second Life, and an amazing artist. You can find his pieces here and there (including older pieces created under an earlier name, Starax Statosky) about Second Life. His own region is called Black Swan. I encourage anybody in Second Life to visit it and take a look. The Search result I’ve linked to is at the beginning of a path around the perimeter of that region. You pass by a handful of Light Waves’ sculptures, as well as the occasional pitfall, hole in the path you have to jump over (or, fly– heck, this is Second Life after all), the occasional spike trap, and a lot of atmosphere. At the center is a huge sculpture, enhanced by particle effects that would be difficult to achieve fully in real life.
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