The deer that got away

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I took a walk a few afternoons ago on a nature trail near my home. I’ve been on it maybe three times and figured that eventually I might see a deer in the woods. Sure enough, the third time was the charm; a rather large magnificent creature bounded before my eyes not more than fifty yards from the trail’s beginning. The camera was still in my bag.

So, this prompted a barrage of pictures of the trail itself and the surrounding land. Mostly, these are pictures of the autumn light, which is almost as pretty as a deer.

Responding to the Words

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As I’m beginning a new semester of teaching undergraduate writing, so also begins the task of responding to the written word on the page. I just saw an interesting thread on Facebook. The topic was, as usual these days, politics. The subject was an interchange between two people that knew each other in real life (which isn’t always the case on Facebook, of course) that had different political views. The embattled page owner, used to refuting political opposition, wrote a response to what the person wrote; the person felt baffled because he thought “you knew me better than that.” In other words, he felt that she’d taken the words out of the context of their long relationship, in which he was a “good guy,” not the opposition…anyway, he ended the exchange by announcing that he was going to close his Facebook account.

This is probably not an uncommon occurrence. I mention it because similar situations arise in writing classes, unfortunately. It bears understanding the position of a writing teacher, who may respect and like a student, but respond to particular passages critically. One always hopes that one can keep personal bias out of responses in a class situation, but sometimes even an unbiased assessment of a passage can sting like a personal attack. I’ve been a student; we’ve all been in that situation, too.

So, I brought up this example to a student from Facebook as a reminder that in a writing situation, we respond more to the words on the page than to the person behind them. Writing teachers develop a sort of unusual filter that allows them to do this almost continuously. If we are good, we also develop a dual sensitivity to the person behind the words, but sometimes need to be reminded.

Advertspews are cool.

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Ordinary ways of looking at argument often don’t work with new media.  For example, today I ran across this.  The link appeared in one of my “personalized” ads on my Facebook profile page.

http://www.adverspew.com/

The ad begins with a contradiction.  No transition between two completely opposite statements:  I love advertising.  I hate advertising.  This goes against the grain of “good writing” but for some reason, it’s engaging.  I realize the author might be crazy or confused, but I’m interested, so I click and it gives me the option of liking his Facebook page.  There is a link (the one above) to his website.  I see the image of a body that reminds me of the old game “Operation.”  The body is covered with images that are activated by a rollover menu, with the instruction “rollover for spews.”  You click on a spew image and a new windows opens with the “spew” and a box for reader comments.  The site strikes me as brilliant.  For one thing, I’ll go back because there is a lot to explore (there are many spews and I don’t have time to see them all now).  I’m much likely to return to this site rather than to one that lists blog posts (the “spews”) in a traditional list of links.

Avatar, the Blockbuster (spoiler alert!)

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A few nights ago I saw James Cameron’s Avatar.  Went to a theater showing it in 2-d….don’t do that.  I think the movie has certain optimum conditions that must be minimally met.  One, see it in IMAX 3-D or not at all; two, leave your brain at home, and just react.  Try to evoke the range of trigger-happy emotions that emerged when you saw Bambi or Dumbo for the first time, or maybe Billy Jack.

That was absolutely the flattest (3-D rendering nonwithstanding), least interesting movie villain I’ve seen in a long time.  My companion said that one can’t say that Colonel Miles is the villain–it’s the corporation, or Western Patriarchy, or Western Greed, or military mindset.  But let’s just say as the primary representation of these in the film, the Colonel is laughably bad.  I have to wonder what Mr. Cameron has seen, read, or discussed with other lifeforms during the last fifteen years while he was perfecting the computer-generated artistry and special effects that are without peer to date.  The Spiderman series, the Batman series, almost any sci-fi movie or TV show or even comic book of the last five years has more interesting villains.

The movie has touching qualities; you can’t help but be horrified for the fierce yet gentle Na’vi when their global network/civilization is demolished by capitalistic greed warfare machinery.  I spent the last half hour waiting anxiously for Colonel Miles to buy the farm, and was relieved when he finally did, and happy at how the deed was done and whodunit.  The female leads, played by Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana, were feisty and likable; the male lead, played by Sam Worthington, was handsome and adequate, but left me wondering why Cameron didn’t shoot for someone with a bit more charisma.  Stephen Lang played Miles Quaritch with a Terminatorlike intensity unencumbered by anything like an introspective thought.  If pure archetypal patriarchal awfulness is the desired effect, Cameron got his man.

Resurrecting the Blavatar

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carp_018

The last time I wrote in here, I was fixating on avatars.  Since then, I’ve linked up with the Diabolus group (a Ning site), initiated by CARP, a group of international artists associated with Second Life.  They are responsible for one of the most amazing builds/spectaculars ever in SL, besides maybe the King Tut’s tomb exhibit–a staged remake of Metropolis. They’ve done a beautiful, and credible, job of restaging the film in SL, and they ran this every Sunday during the summer, with avatars performing live in front of an audience of avatars.  In others words–live in SL.  The Ning social networking group, Diabolus, was begun by Velaquez Bonetto, a founding member of CARP, and is mainly a showcase for SL photographers, but also for machinima and other projects.  Debbie Trilling, a dancer and multimedia artist, is the major artistic force behind the project.

When I saw Metropolis, the star was Josina Burgess, a watercolor painter and multimedia artist whose latest exhibit is featured in this photo.

Visit Diabolus here:

http://diabolus.ning.com/

More about AVATAR

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Tom Boellstorff also mentions the Hindu origin of avatar in Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton UP, 2008).  He cites Neal Stephenson’s use of it in Snow Crash (1993) and its use in the virtual worlds Ultima IV and Habitat (128).  He sees it as a reverse  incarnation, a movement from actual to virtual, and so a mirror of the original term.

I think it might be more complicated than that.  Avatar in the religious sense designates an emissary as well as an embodiment of the creator.  The higher order creates the lower order or avatar, which carries out the wishes or will of the higher order being.  Is the higher order “virtual” and the avatar the “actual” in that sense?  Only if embodiment is comensurate with actuality; then only what is embodied can be actual. To the originators of the term avatar, the higher order being was not less actual than the avatar.

Doesn’t it all just depend on how embodiment is constructed in our thinking?  If we think of biology, we think in terms of cells, blood, flesh, but bodies are also constructed of information–just like the virtual bodies we construct for our avatars, although on a much more complicated scale.  What if we think of avatar in terms of its function as bearer of the creator’s information rather than its materiality or lack thereof?

I think eventually the term virtual is going to be replaced with something else–but what is up for grabs. How about auxilliary reality?  Or to recall Doctor Who, how about E-Space?  Get rid of “reality” altogether and drop the connotation of inferior or secondary.

Avatar, a brief and inconclusive investigation

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Two definitions of avatar courtesy of Wikipedia follow.

  • An avatar is a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games,[1] a two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and other communities,[2][3] or a text construct found on early systems such as MUDs. It is an “object” representing the embodiment of the user. The term “avatar” can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user.[4]  )http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(computing))
  • Avatar or Avatara (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST Avatāra), often translated into English as incarnation, literally means descent (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent from higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special purposes. Descents that are of importance are mainly those of the Supreme Being which are plenary and marked with superhuman qualities. Other types of descents are limited expansions of Ishvara, and some that are descents of lesser empowered divinities. The term is used primarily in Hinduism for descents of Vishnu whom Vaishnava Hindus (one of the largest branches of Hinduism)[1] worship as the Supreme God, a distinctive feature of Vaishnavism. While Shiva and Ganesha are also described as descending in the form of avatars, with the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana detailing Ganesha’s avatars specifically, the avatars of Vishnu carry a greater theological prominence than those of Shiva or Ganesha and upon examination relevant passages are directly imitative of the Vaishnava avatara lists.[2  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar)

I see a connection or relationship between the two versions of the word.  And no doubt there is a web of meaning dancing between them. So (let’s jump right into sacreligious area here) does that mean Jesus was God’s avatar? Can’t you just see the parallels:  video game, major religion?

I’m just starting to get into Rosanne Stone’s book The War of Desire and Technology at the End of the Close of the Mechanical Age, but her discussions of multiple personality disorder are going to be very interesting, I can see.  MPD is a brilliant disease….and a terrible one for many…but you have to wonder at the ingenuity of those who can develop themselves by breaking themselves into fragments.  It is indeed like turning yourself into either a)  a religion or b) a video game, each being a very potent metaphor for self-expansion.  The problem with MPD is that the primary subject expands without self-awareness unless an interventionist can facilitate it (think Sybil).  It’s like creating avatars that you don’t know about, and they’re off doing stuff that you haven’t authorized.  (Now if a video game does that, I’m not aware of it.  But I’m not aware of a lot of things.)

So now the Internet allows us to essentially experience a state somewhat like MPD without losing self-awareness (ideally, anyway).  It allows us to develop fragments of ourselves independently of each other.  This might be to the benefit of the whole personality, or not, depending on whether the selves complement each other or work against each other.  It is possible to imagine someone with multiple avatars in an online game or virtual world that plot and scheme against each other, although it’s not the norm as far as I can tell.  Ultimately, though, this could lead to a benefit to the whole personality, the same way that children, playing with dolls, act out conflicts.

Blavatars, favicons, and gravitars–oh my

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When I opened this account, I decided to upload an image of my experimental “teacher” avatar from Second Life.  (I got cold feet and took it down, but I’ll probably get it up here at some point soon.)  After I uploaded it, I got the message about my “blavatar.”  Wow!  I thought how did they know?  But of course, a blavatar is just an image that follows your blog around, and it was just a coincidence that my blavatar was, actually, a blogging avatar.  I got interested in the lexicon that is opening up around these various technologies of social networking and found that there seem to be two terms arriving for more or less the same thing–favicon and gravitar both seem to identify the little images that accompany some URLs, such as the one you see now at the top of your browser for WordPress, a W encased in a blue sphere.  What’s really amazing to me is the term avatar and how it is taking the world by storm.  Tomorrow (it’s late, zzzz) I’m going to do some more research on the word avatar itself and try to track its evolution…..probably someone has already done that, but I’m curious.

It reminds me of a conversation I overheard in graduate school.  (A great deal of memorable experiences from my grad school years were overheard conversations in the fishbowl of offices in the tower in which we were stacked.  I was a creative writing major, always on the search for fresh material, and I found it there.)  This prof was trying to get out of a meeting and wanted to send “one of his emissaries” in his place.  It was the first time I had every heard anyone talk like that in real life–I had never known anyone who had an emissary, let alone admit it aloud–and I knew then that my life was headed in some really radical new direction.  Oh yeah.