In my current Masters in dance and video project, 'In the Company of Strangers', one of the strands of my work has been to explore that the notion of spaces and their content be perceived as screens or surfaces which possess the potential to be activated or carry some kind of inscription or embodiment.

Here I have worked with different dancers in Real and Second Life - I am working on the notion that the act of displacing our performative presence through video re-constitutes and embodies our personna surface as real-life avatar, just as much as if we were in Second Life. The dual-reality embodiment of traces on screens enables a process of incipient, topological inscription - a temporal mark-making across the real-digital interface. My Second Life avatar, Rollo Kohime`s dialogue with the avatar Sonja, in-life is visually-edited. Her speech is cut off through indeterminant decision-making based upon, not sensible verbal inscription, but visual cues - subsequently, part of the result is mis-communication, missed dialogue and tenuous engagement across the two facets of the Real. The narrative finishes with traces visible in an otherwise empty station.

Mark Hansen, in Bodies in Code, (2006) sees the embodiment of function manifesting through the human body, acting as a kind of seismographic wand - Hansen quotes Massumi (Parables for the Virtual ... 2002:135 in Hansen, (p5-6).

He maintains that: all reality is mixed reality, Hansen talks about the existence of the analogue as a transformative entity:

''Always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought sensation is the being of the analog(sic). This is the analog(sic) in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain, Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the heart. Or outside coming in. Variable continuity across the qualitatively different: continuity of transformation.'' (Massumi 2002:135)

Through our internal analogue therefore, we possess the innate capacity to perceive, transform and combine continuously, the many real and virtual realities of which our existence is comprised. The
blended-reality paradigm can shift the fields of 'orthodox' perceptions which have, in the past, established existing modes of seeing and understanding reality. Hansen maintains that the reason why so many of us now operate in so-called virtual worlds with apparent ease, is because we have always done so - as I have maintained above, we encounter without comment, a myriad of moments which we could describe as virtual, every day in our 'real life' existence. The shift for us as analogue where the process within us as humans which recognizes and brings technological surfaces or screens like Second Life together with our natural perceptions, supports a function which expands the scope of this activity and integrates real-world and virtual realities to arrive at a more homogeonous blended-reality.

Thanks to Sonja Scorbal in Second Life for kindly giving permission for me to use this footage.
Thanks to Thomas Feiner for permission to use 'For Now' from Opiates Revised

Please see my AUT Masters blog: http://hoststranger.blogspot.com


Thank you for your time,
Best, Mike Baker