Place, Space, and Imagination in Second Life

Singapore.
Up next in this Second Life session at ISEA 2008 is Bjarke Liboriussen, whose interest is especially in the process of building structures in SL. How does this process reflect users' understanding of their (physical as well as online) worlds? Bjarke points to Annette Markham's idea that online technologies are seen by users generally as either tools, places, or ways of being - and historically, initially perhaps as tools, more recently as ways of being, and even more recently as actual places. This latter view asserts that places have important features that affect social interaction.

Architecture has been described by some as the art of place (and has been used and abused by various ideologies to create places reflecting their political views). Indeed, place is so integrated into daily life that it is very difficult to make it part of a scientific discourse - such processes are conducted in good part by drawing on anecdotes and other non-standard scientific data, in fact.

Online, culture and community may not be self-evidently located in place - and so, neither is the ethnography of online communities; this challenges the ethnographer's professional identity, as ethography is traditionally understood as the study of people in their place. (It is important here also to distinguish between place and space, of course.) Additionally, it is possible that boundary is no longer an organising principle in such online culture, then.

Bjarke has performed a 13-month ethnographic study of advanced Second Life user groups (users who are active in building their own environments in SL); one such group was a group of gay German users who understood themselves as a self-chosen family looking for a home in Second Life. They invested collectively in buying land and building a castle-style home, and had a first house-warming party in October 2007 (building continued afterwards, though). In April, however, for financial reasons they had to move elsewhere; in the end, they ended up buying a new island, and recreated their castle on a grander scale, now moving on to landscaping the island around the castle. (This is something of a reversal from first-life building, where buildings are more usually built to suit the landscape rather than vice versa.)

The group has now come to an understanding that "a castle is never finished, but looks complete"; this is a common view in new media design, and is a view also found amongst Web designers, for example. A building can be viewed both as an object and as an activity, in other words (and Bjarke points out that this matches Heidegger's philosophy: a dwelling is both construction and cultivation, in this view). Ultimately, this also points to the fact that a sense of place, a sense of boundary around one's own place, and a sense of having a place to dwell remain strongly central to Second Life: many users do not appear to be content simply to float free through the world without having a place of their own. Place is more than a metaphor in Second Life; it remains a concept in its own right.

Finally we move on (back) to Denise Doyle, who already presented another Second Life paper in this session. She's following on from her earlier paper by exploring some of the more theoretical themes in SL research. Her online research space in SL is Kriti Island, part of which was a venue for the exhibition she curated, and part of which is used more directly for her research. One interesting aspect here (following on from Bjarke) is now a sense of place has developed for Denise in her two-year inhabitation of this island, incidentally.

Denise has recently finished a piece of creative writing, "Embodied Narrative: The Virtual Nomad and the Meta-Dreamer", exploring her experience of inhabiting Second Life; the key question here is around the location of the imaginary in a virtual world like Second Life with its imitation of real-world aspects such as light, sound, and gravity. The imagination, Denise suggests, has been undertheorised overall; she points to the role of the imaginary in various meditation philosophies, where it is activated through extensive visualisation exercises. (Tantric meditation practice is one example for this.)

Such exercises can be understood as an attempt to leave the space of one's usual sensibilities, and Denise now draws a link between this and the way that we enter changing spaces in Second Life. Does the virtual telepresence of SL give us a glimpse of the effects of visualisation and extrasensory perception which meditation aims to achieve? How do we relate to our avatar in such spaces?

Satre suggests that the real and imaginary worlds are composed of the same objects, but that our approach to these objects varies across these worlds. In Satre's terms, objects in SL can be described as belonging to the 'existing, but elsewhere' category; perhaps they enable the imaginary to be experienced as image, allowing for the emergence of new dimensions of experience. This new imaginary is a new combination of image and presence, Denise suggests, and new theories are required to understand it.

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