The pain of everyday life

If electromagnetic waves are the new medium of city´s communication system, then our everyday life is unavoidable entwined by an invisible information cloud, built upon wireless interconnected networks. Albeit, we never experience access-restrictions by walking through the streets unless we unsolicitedly want to enter a private space. But, since the advent of wireless data networks and ubiqoutous computing, private space has been shifted into an invisible layer. Closed networks, such as WEP or WAP restrain access to this layer. Thus, being expelled from the Internet can be a painful act and harm you to a certain extend. The project “constrain city walks” let you literally, feel this pain, by tightening a worn chest strap which is embedded in an ordinary jacket. The stronger the signal of perceived restriction, the harder your breath! Alternative routes through the city are the only constrained conclusion. Thus it indicates an invisible form factor of city’s policy and at the same time it unhinges you between the decision of eluding or allowing the pain of information society.

The project “the pain of everyday life” is a city-intervention and a digital art performance addressing public and private space within the realm of everyday constraints. It resembles an urban interface for an invisible city, an architecture which is subconsciously perceived and which constantly oscillates as resonant landscape, consisting of electromagnetic waves.

A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as fetish object. The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the corset becomes. Closed network points improve the pleasurable play of tight lacing the performer‘s bustier. Thus, constituting the aether as a space of possible pregnancy, filled with potential access-points to the networks of communication. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a schizogeographic pain-map which is fetched from GoogleMaps servers with automated scripts. By wearing the straight-jacket, the artist not only writes, but is at once also able to read the city code.

The outcome of his walk provokes an emergence of a city-shaped body. The map keeps not only tracks of all wireless networks along the route, but also the wearer’s détournement when entering a very dense network place, a so called pleasurable pain zone. Therefore, the artist becomes the 21st century flaneur who balances along sensual perceived pain and the torture of everyday routes in a very special Arcades Game Project.

OneAvatar was shown at the third edition of the Milano in Digitale event.
An installation featuring a 3D game in which players could shoot the OneAvatar character,
causing electric shocks to hit the body of the player wearing the OneAvatar suit, creating
a phisical connection between our physical bodies and our identities in the digital worlds.

The installation features the results of the research coming from the OneAvatar project:
technology, emotion, identity, relational dimensions in the digital domains are some of the
fundamental topics analyzed.

For the event a complete marketing and communication strategy was produced to create a fictional,
but realistic and produceable, product to create the narrative level of the performance: the
performer was displayed as in a shopping center showcase, with the product and the related gadgets
available for sale. A further analysis on the evolution of art in the contemporary era, in its
hybridization wth communication, marketing and ethnographical practices.

more info at:
http://www.artisopensource.net/2008/11/15/oneavatar-milano-in-digitaleoneavatar-milano-in-digitale/

and here:
http://www.artisopensource.net
http://www.neorealismovirtuale.com
http://www.milanoindigitale.it

concept and installation by
Salvatore Iaconesi [xDxD.vs.xDxD]
Oriana Persico [penelope.di.pixel]

OneAvatar connects your body to your Avatar in virtual worlds.
You and your Avatar will be finally one, sharing the same experiences even at physical level.
You get hurt, you Avatar gets hurt.
Your Avatar dies, you die.

OneAvatar

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft address people’s perceptions and sensorial domains in specific ways. By using (living) these worlds users experience emotions, sensations and perceptions to which they are used to or of completely new kind. Both types are “new” in the fact that they are created in the users by means of technological devices and digital communications related practices. This is a major trend of contemporary technology. Bridges across information, architectures, prcesses and the body are constantly being created at sensorial or even physical levels. Interactive systems, wearable technologies, prosthetics, technologies that are embedded into objects and locations, domotics, robots, artificial intelligences. All of these things go towards eliminating the possible dualities intercurring between what is organic and inorganic, of what is body and what is architecture, what is thought or memory and what is external information flow, what is a physical product and what is an immaterial service.

This is a very complex subject for discussion, and it represents the full 360 degrees of background that sits behind and at the base of “OneAvatar”.

The project starts off from taking into account these new sensorialities and then brings them to an extreme to highlight frictions, possibilities and, most of all, new spaces for dialogue.

We are all, more or less, influenced by the emotional and processual practices connected to the use of networks and, specifically, by virtual worlds. Checking for new emails every 10 seconds; clicking on the “StumbleUpon” button to randomly see a new website for 3 seconds, then passing to the next one; the way in which we scan texts instead of reading them; the use of search engines; the ways in which we identify people on the internet; the way in which we read news and blogs and information. These are all things that are similar to other things that we experienced in “life_without_the_internet”, but this resemblance is truly a partial one, as they can be characterized in ways that are dramatically different, and studied specifically. So much that they are being called “new tactilities”, “digital senses”, “augmented sensoriality” etcetera.

This is obviously true with regards to Virtual Worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. When we go to places, chat, interact, buy, visit, dance, have sex in these worlds we have experiences that we define by using names that are pertinent to the analog world, but that are totally different.

Two clear differences lay in the areas of the perception of the physical body and on the notion of identity.

We cannot get physically hurt in Second Life or on World of Warcraft, nor can we physically feel the sensations that we feel when we touch something/someone, when we lift things, move things, when we are hit, caressed, when there is wind or direct sunlight, when we dive int the water or when we fall down from the skateboard or get a papercut. These missing degrees of sensoriality are one of the main distinctive characteristics of the way we experience Virtual Worlds and centrally define such experiences and the ways in which we perceive them. The fact that it is not possible to get hurt and, eventually, die in a Virtual World creates a physical and perceptive distance from that experience, shaping social relations, interactions, world use, economics. This missing body, this sense of being freed from the responsibility of having a body that can get hurt, fall sick, break, die, suffer from pollution, bring a whole plethora of concepts to low levels of attention.

The ways in whch we define our identities in digital and virtual worlds enhances this scenario. To be able to freely define our identity represents a form of freedom, that is for sure, but it also “disconnects” us from the Avatar that we impersonate. Experience becomes real (as it can bear real efefcts that are relational, economic, political…) but theatrical, fictional. It is narrative, more than it is real.

OneAvatar doesn’t have a moral/ethical approach to these issues. The project is aimed at establishing real connections running between the virtual worlds and the physical body, to examine the possibilities arising from these practices.

In the first production of OneAvatar, part of the NeRVi (Neo Realismo Virtuale) theories, a video shows a person during a session in the Second Life virtual world. The person wears a set of electrodes that are connected to the USB port of hs laptop. The device is controlled by a software that uses the libsecondlife software libraries to intercept and interpret the status of his avatar’s virtual body, trasforming it into stimulations of the physical body.

When the user jumps off with his avatar beyond the edge of a tall building in the virtual world without turning on the “fly” mode, the software interprets this great fall as a traumatic event, and sends a high voltage shock to the player, that is, to all effects, electrocuted.

While this is a fictional setup, as the actual device only uses low voltage stimulations, such as the ones found in sport-related appliances and massage machinery, it creates a shocking representation of what could easily become reality: a deep connection running between analog and virtual bodies. With all of its positive and negative sides.

2 part article on DigiCult Magazine by xdxd.vs.xdxd and penelope.di.pixel

It deals with identity, body, artificial intelligence, avatars, cyborgs, and digital ecosystems.

It’s the first article in which they spoke about NeoRealismo Virtuale [NeRVi]

feel a bit less alone by reading the article at DigiCult magazine:

> Part 1

> Part 2

Did Your Really Want a Second Life?

The performances explore the aesthetics of code, systems overload and crash, lag.

Places get invaded, filled with art – or enclosed in art – sounds and virtually physical objects that change the characteristics of the space.

Did You Really Want a Second Life?

Issues such as copyright, the role of art in the contemporary world, the idea of identity and of its definition, the analisys of relational models are confronted through irony, de-structuring, and a bit of damage

> website

also seen at:

> Domenico Quaranta’s

> VideoLudica

> Odyssey

> rhizome.org

> nettime

> NetBehaviour

originally from [ Art is Open Source ]

Talker Performance

A latex cyborg suit is created to connect a dancer’s body to the interaction of the live and internet audience.

All of the dancer’s senses are replaced by user-generated ones, and all of the sensations and movement of her body are used as sound and video feedback to the live environment and to the web interfaces.

A body transformed into an user-operated audio/visual instrument, to explore the concepts of identity, of perception and of the role of the audience in art.

more info:

> website

> videos on YouTube

also seen at:

> PEAM 2006

> Intelligenza Polimorfa

> Noema Labs

> Marita Cosma

> Perpetual Art Machine

> TEDance

> MyMedia magazine

> DigiCult magazine

> Bruno Menei