This week there was a story on Motherboard entitled ‘Avatar IRL’, by Cecilia D’Anastasio, about a transwoman, Veronica Sidwell. Following her experiences in Second Life, Veronica decided to transition in real life. Below the article lies the tagline: ‘Goodbye, Meatbags is a series on Motherboard about the waning relevance of the human physical form’. Why […]
The Rituals of Relationships, and the Ordinariness of being Online In this post, I’m looking at a couple of quotes that made me think about how relationships online and offline compare. The first is by the writer, Daniel Blythe: The problem for the contemporary writer is that virtual life is not set aside from the […]
Book of the Week a couple of weeks ago on Radio 4 was from Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, and Friday’s edition drew from the chapter on children. It told about Deb Wilenski’s experiences with children who were given the chance to freely explore the natural world. It struck me that the two predominant features that […]
This post has an addendum responding to comments by Bryn Oh on her blog made during June. In response I staged an art intervention on Lobby Cam, which seemed appropriate in the circumstances. Bryn Oh opened her new exhibition on Immersiva today, Lobby Cam. I remember her once talking about how Second Life art was […]
Start the Week, a programme on BBC Radio 4 staged an interesting conversation on Monday (now on iplayer 1) based around a book by Susan Pinker; The Village Effect: Why Face-to-Face Contact Matters 2. In it, she argues that social isolation – measured in absolute terms and not how people perceive their own position – […]
I’m looking at ‘Sacrifice’ by Osferatus Haven, at Morpheus. It’s a set piece diorama; flickering flames, but otherwise it’s a static installation. A couple of blood-lusty creatures face each other while desperate hands reach up from the ground and corpses lie round and about. By coincidence, I’d come across a journal article1 a little earlier […]
‘All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. . . ‘What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. . . . ‘And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken […]
The enchantment is in the meeting of minds over distance, the imagined physical, aware of but not seen. The caress through the whisper of ether – the touch of an idea, the merest flicker, a response that is mediated, intrigued, curious. The details we wish to share is what is important, a gift given freely. […]
Earlier this month, the garden designer, Dan Pearson, was the guest on Desert Island Discs 1 on Radio 4. Early on he spoke about what he thought of gardens: I think they are a place of escape, and a place of immersion. They are somewhere where you can be yourself, completely. I think they provide you […]
