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The
state of the world I know: A growing populous in
America, BRIC, Europe, and increasingly in some
other countries inside Asia, Africa, and South America,
live vicariously through digital avatars in flourishing,
sumptuously rendered virtual environments. It could
be said that in order to function, we will rely
more and more on the digital metaverse as an escape
from our physical space. Baudrillard, in his new
book, The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity
Pact, restates the point that since a great
loss of belief in the transcendental world (with
the onset of the Age of Reason) we have
begun the giant undertaking of eliminating the natural
world in all of its forms. He suggests an everyday
embrace of digital tools but a deep-seeded denial
of change. The countryside has become "landscape"
in our vocabulary and in our thoughts, which is,
in our heads, a duplication of itself. We first
acknowledge a media-generated version of countryside
called landscape. Augmented Reality: denCity,
Dodgeball,
google earth, blogjects
and participatory media. Virtual worlds: Second
Life, Project
Entropia, World of Warcraft. Simulations: pilot
training flight simulators, Nintendogs,
etc. What happens to physicality? Right now in China
3,600 sq. km of former grass/farmland is being overtaken
by desert conditions yearly (by Chinese statistics
while remote sensing statistics report this figure
at around 15,500 sq. mi.- roughly the size of Holland!)
with the Chinese "Green Wall" project
proving to be overall, unsuccessful. As these three
spaces have a greater importance in our everyday
meeting, tasking, playing, breathing, what is the
iReality of this? ? As we help solve the plight
of the ever-growing number of environmental refugees
(prediction by 2010 United Nations University estimates
50 mil. worldwide) due to large disasters like Katrina
in New Orleans, the tsunami in Sri Lanka and slow-motion
disasters like drought, famine, disease, sea-level
rising, we have at our disposal virtual, open-source
game models like "Bordergames" out of
Lauapres/Madrid, as well as groups like "Burners
Without Borders" who are continuing to
work magic with wifi, rebuilding, getting donations,
etc. after Katrina. They are so interesting because
Burning Man, where the group originated and gets
its communal gifting inspiration, is in a sense
a physical-virtual community. It exists physically
for about a week yearly and virtually for the remainder
of the year, it physically practices what has fundamentally
begun as a technological, economic, and political
movement referred to as open-source, which I like
to describe as the contributions of a community
of contributors for the good of the whole (and perhaps
the recognition), for the freedom from top-down
ontologies, for progress, results, and strength
of a mass-mind. Now, in some ways, the community
of Burning
Man parallels the community of Michael Griffin's
wiki-like space develoment of "Ancient
Spaces". "Ancient Spaces" is
an online experiment which, when it is built to
the "game stage" players will be able
to earn points by contributing historically accurate
structures to places like Mesopotamia or Egypt,
"adventure down the Nile or fight in the Peloponnesian
War." It is a learning and a community tool
depicting places that once existed in that state
and now are online. The further coalesce of these
many spaces are games like World
of Warcraft or Project
Entropia, where the actor John
Jacobs spent $1000,000.00 on an online space resort
that he now plans to rent rooms, storage, mall space,
etc. to other players. Wired Magazine this month
makes a parallel between online games and Disneyworld
(which I LOVE, as I am such a fan of Disney's ability
to encroach on every corner of economic policy,
life, thought, dreams). Wired also writes about
the fusion of games, platforms, and individual creation
within these interfaces. One of the main points
of the article was to offer a positive light to
all of the gamers who "learn to treat the world
as a place for creation - not consumption (as possibility-space)".
The frightening thing about this is that as we create
a world that last year was the hottest recorded
year on the planet in the history of recording (145
yrs) and using Bore Hole Measurements (boring into
the earth's surface), the hottest in 500 years,
and with proxy-data (tree rings and coral growths)
we are looking at the warmest time on earth, and
as Antartica loses 36 cubic miles/yr. in freshwater
(L.A. uses approximately 1/5 cubic mile of freshwater
yearly), are we going to want to live in reality?
Are we going to want to distinguish between our
simulated, virtual, and integral realities, or are
we going to care about real-life creation - something
we are getting further and further from daily?
- MARY
MATTINGLY
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