An abiding interest I've had in Second Life is in virtual architecture. I founded the Society for the Appreciation of Virtual Architecture about 2 years ago. It met very enthusiastically for a year, and then basically, it got destroyed for a time by a real-life invasion of some real-life architects and by the sucking away of some of the best architects of RL into large corporate projects for real money. I also personally got too busy in RL and SL to have the time for the afternoon meetings that were essential for capturing people from various time zones. I hope to get the meetings started again.
One of the RL architects who used to come to the meeting is named inworld Keystone Bouchard, and he went on to form RL Architects in SL as a professional organization, and basically eclipsed the efforts of amateurs to create an alternative to such real-life bodies. My idea -- and it was shared by some other members -- was to make an alternative to the the stifling, horrid orthodoxy of oppressive architectural schools in real life. The heavy eclipsing of SL by RL that came at that time with the huge corporative invasion and hyping of company PR campaigns with giant builds was sad for the internal society of SL, because Second Life should be all about...second life -- the ability of amateurs to soar, for somebody to learn how to build inspiring structures in SL, even if in real life, they are drugstore clerks.
Of course, Keystone is entitled to do his thing, second life is second in different ways for different people, and my God, it's "your world/your imagination" for everybody. Still, it was a sad little chapter in the History of Second Life in many ways. We watched some people who used to build for pleasure, and build grand palaces for the edification of the public and their own aesthetics get sucked off into building cement stadiums for people who made avatars with suits and ties. Pathfinder Linden was also part of what savaged the Society's efforts, coming to the meetings and insisting that people work with some university department of architecture that he was flogging at the time, trying to drive the flock under the wing of one guy's school. This, of course, has been a constant tension with the Lindens: they can't keep their paws off, they say it is user-generated, but they groom, they steer -- well, they fete an inner core...
Another factor that helped step on this fledgling indigenous element of civil society was the big revent, the drive to have huge events on four-corner sims -- or nothing. So that the last few meetings of the SVA got enormous, people got very angry that they couldn't get on the mainland sim that could only hold 40 (and often had 10 on it anyway on other parcels) and they badgered and clamoured to have it on islands like the fancy IBM archipelago. I remember how frustrating it was, moving everyone from an overflowing mainland Warmouth to the IBM sims to hear Jessica Qin speak, who is the chief inworld architect of the IBM builds. The usual insolent tekkie nastiness was on display by people who refused to just light and sit down on 2 adjoining sims and listen, and insisted on being "right" about the "necessity" of forcing everybody on 4 corners...where they all fell into the cracks. So much idiocy like that in SL by people insisting on technology taking over every. single. human. transaction.
I am hoping to find the time to restore some of these earlier forms of conversations that were in smaller groups, with less obsession about finding sponsors, and finding technology to replay it all perfectly in 6 different kinds of media. To return to the content.
Oh, I don't mean to suggest that the RL and SL gang aren't producing -- they are a beehive of activity, just of the sort that is hard to sustain involvement in if you are not accepted into the RL tribe. Keystone, who is in a metaversal company, has put on various builds, such as the Capitol Building, which I certainly critiqued heavily (as an illegitimate political exercise) -- it fell into disuse after a few very flashy events mainly to promote the sponsors, Sun Microsystems, and their favourite congressmen -- it had use for a time by the illustrious Benjamin Duranske, who loved standing bowlegged astride the floor of the congress, with the awesome symbols of American power behind him, pontificating about the Virtual Bar, no doubt imagining himself to be in a Virtual Senate some day. At one point at the SLBA, I coughed and pointed out that it was inappropriate for a bar association, merely a group of lawyers not elected by anyone, to keep occupying this government symbol, this virtual seat of power, and pronounce that they were going to things like draft and issue "a universal model contract". I wasn't the only one eager to talk them out of that particular fandango. Gradually, Benjie and company were embarassed enough to withdraw to some shiny legal build on another sim. I haven't heard of anything happening at Capitol other than the occasional desultory anti-war protest, have you? Perhaps I'm mistaken -- so much goes on in SL it's hard to keep up. Just haven't heard.
Keystone has mounted an aggressive project of "wiki build" about which I am understandably skeptical, as I am of much that is collective and feigning to be open, but really about elite networking. We had a debate about Keystone's concept on virtualworldsconnect, and I think he provided an interesting and thoughtful reply to my critique, and yet the obvious problem still stands: it seems that he could corral everyone into doing a do-good build in Nepal, and make everyone's thirdworld-helper juices flow, and only as an afterthought get some actual Nepalese involved.
What I see coming out next from this gang is something I simply cannot take seriously. They are having a contest to build "eco" -- and build out of rattan. Well, ok, sure, make everything look like a Long Island lawn-chair, that's ok. But what's so hypocritical is that the contestants only have to include *25 percent* rattan in their build. So the rest can be those awful environmental polluting materials like steel and glass I guess lol. Phony.
Sometimes, I fly around late and night and discover architectural gems and photograph them. They are a source of abiding pleasure in SL and delight. Or I will stumble upon a beautiful originally-built home by a tenant, or the delightful landscaping and decorating of an existing nice prefab -- and it is just a great pleasure. I do appreciate architecture. There is a rich appreciation of it all over SL among people, and a lot of informal discussion. Nothing people like better than TPing you in to see their build, and discuss their build. O get a half dozen or more landmarks and notecards a day asking me to come see a build. I would say after sex and shopping, the exchange of viewing builds is the greatest SL activity -- and frankly for many people, it's more important than sex or shopping. And yet, all of that happens outside the formalistic and credentialed channels of the "RL in SL" and its canon insisting on politically-correct projects like buildings made 25 percent out of rattan and projects in Nepal.
People find it disrespectful of me not to be genuflecting to all these folks, but, I feel the vision of your world/your imagination is significantly betrayed by them. Not only by the RL profit motive or the RL commissions and the augmentationalist exploitation of SL, But by the reiteration and persistence of the RL memes about what is beautiful, and what is good architecture, without any significantly new debate. What passes for "new" are these dreadfully hackneyed faux noveau discussions of "rethinking public space" are the most awful rewarmed "From Bauhaus to Your House" stuff on the planet. And as I've pointed out in the past, and been interested to see that even Lordfly said in his own way, the wackier the SL outworlder architecture stuff gets, the more it seems to be art, not architecture -- legitimate in its way, but not something that is really being used and lived in and accessed and helpful to avatars, the representations of humans in world. This isn't a cry for utilitarianism versus aesthetics; it's a cry for a frank recognition that the aesthetics suck, and we can do better, if we have all of virtuality before us.
Every once in a while, you see a new build in world, like Scope Cleaver's awesome new build publicized by Grace McDunnough (and now I can't find the link, drat, but will soon), and you realize how some people just go on quietly doing excellent work, not carried away by the cliches of "RL in SL".
I mentioned that this Society was eclipsed. Nevertheless, the Society kept growing, more and more new people joined it just to have a place to hang out and send out notices. It's interesting to me how people will stay in a group and work it passively or actively in different ways to suit their needs. The Society has a building with notecards for people to get landmarks to interesting builds and leave landmarks of their own projects, and smaller groups of people meet there from time to time. I keep hoping to re-start the meetings and discussions there because it seems to me that the appearance of the Linden Department of Public Works prompts some new problems for the world.
As I found my collection of Xenon Linden's slides of the explanation behind the Linden builds in the atoll continent, I hope to have an event very soon to discuss old and new Linden builds and their implication for the grid -- that is, the grid where people live and move and have their being, as distinct from this platformist use of it.
I used to be far more agnostic to the platformist augmentationalist professional architect than I am these days. I had only the best of will for Keystone, who I certainly couldn't hope to keep happy merely by convening amateurs or even real-lifers, if the main vector was inworld, and not out. I appreciated also what Chip Poutine was doing, but he gave up his excellent Suburbia blog after awhile, Too Busy in Real Life.
But now comes a guy for whom I have absolutely no appreciation, and I sounded off on SLNN about this. Here's the cross-post. Somebody has to do the ranting around here:
I find this article absolutely infuriating. I hate, hate, hate when some credentialed arrogant architect like this parachutes in from real life and begins to pronounce on the natives. And I can't believe that the SLNN reporters are so supine as not to ask a single question of a subject like this, rather than just presenting his "rethinking of space" as a fait accompli.
What is it with these out-of-touch creatures that imagine SL is an overdeveloped wasteland crying out to be worked on by *them* as a blank canvas to rework?
Yankee go home.
Go on your own damn island and see if you can make it work there -- and any one in the land, real estate and development business can see immediately what is completely wrong and stupid about a plan attempting to mix so much multi-use when residences can never go on a club or meeting sim due to avatar slots being overloaded with more than 70 and lag and texture loading issues. You need at least 2 islands or 1 and some voids to accommodate such a multi-use ambitious environment. And...no one needs all that stuff, there's enough of it already.
Truly, SL doesn't need ersatz public spaces designed top down (or for that matter, by phony elitist wikis) by architects stuffed with theoretical and aesthetic ideas completely removed from people's needs and uses -- like real life!.
My God, why do we have to suffer the SAME stuff we suffer in real life all over again here!
And SL *has* plenty of public spaces! My God, we don't need fancy RL architects to parachute in here with their little Annenberg set-asides and build our world. *It's been built. It goes on being built -- without you.*
There are many of us here who have gone to a lot of trouble to make and sustain public spaces of all kinds -- and paid the tier the hard way, penny by penny, earning it, and getting tips one avatar by one avatar. It's just an outrage to have someone like this step on it.
And read up a little bit on the history, for God's sake. Do you imagine there are ignorant natives here who didn't think up the same architectural examples that Denton is promoting, straight out of the Jane Jacobs canon? The Lindens already had a telehub system that forced people to stop at hubs on route to destinations, and that caused serendipitous meetings.
But people wanted to get rid of them and wanted point-to-point teleporting. Actually, it's a more complicated political story than that, as some people wanted p2p and others felt the malls that sprang up around telehubs were an important democratic form of free enterprise, more accessible than the boutiques in the hinterlands owned by oldbies and grudgingly opened up to newbies in a harsh apprenticeship system.
But the Lindens took out the telehubs for their own ideological reasons -- they wanted SL to be used by search more -- and today they
It really torques me to read an indictment of the people here for any kind of "overdevelopment" when it's the Lindens one must indict for failing to zone even in the most minimal way and control blight and extortionist ads (they've only just begun to deal with this after years of complaints and protests).
The corporate silos and tumbleweed towns are a small percentage of Second Life by contrast with the many other kinds of builds. It's a newspaper cliche by now to keep harping on these few firms that left, after not getting it. I have no doubt that this Denton didn't really fly around and explore all this -- he's just spouting the media meme. There are plenty more corporations that *do* get it that have thriving event-filled and content-rich islands, like Orange (mobile phone company), CMP, Reuters, and a new Intel Inside build, for example, with a sunflower planting interactive game.
My God, SL already has vital urban places! I had 20 people sitting in my cafe just on the spur of the moment this evening, with plenty of window shopping and even an artist and a street performer, and I'm just one of gadzillions on the grid!
SL is already a credible medium, thank you very much.
It is David Denton that is not a credible virtual architect.