Nothing to say really, just wanted to make a note of it.

One event – someone actually wished me a happy rezzday. Naxos. Why event? First time anyone ever did so in all this time. Not that I am fussy – I forget the day myself. I would certainly not be making this post if Naxos hadn’t reminded me. Apparently his is tomorrow (which would probably be the reason why he remembered mine). So, happy rezzday tomorrow Naxos!

Anyway, nothing whatsoever to say. Just that it is the 3rd one and I am still around – more or less. Amazing.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/alpha_auer/4296503412/

A bit of a discussion seems to be brewing on my Flickr (although I seem to be the one blabbing around the most – as per usual :-\). But I thought it might still be interesting to post it here as well. Scroll down to the comments please…
;-)

… has left Second Life.

I did not know her, had never met her or talked to her. I do not know why she has left. I know of Eshi through Bettina, and what I do know about her is that Eshi was a dedicated hardcore, longtime SL Resident. A person who had huge big stakes in her Second Life. As big as mine for sure and quite possibly even bigger. And yet, Eshi has left.

I have come within a hair’s breadth of doing the same. And not spontaneous, knee-jerk decisions either but more in the nature of long, calm deliberations which I have carried with me day in and day out over many weeks and months. In fact, I could probably say that it is an ongoing process. I am always carrying this around with me.

In the end I do not leave because I cannot face sitting here in cold isolation, pottering around in all kinds of software, making little things which no one will come and play with or wear or find any other usage for except to look at them on my RL website, as used to be the case before I started doing stuff in SL. The participatory element where others buy my outfits, visit my islands, play with my silly old rejuvenation spheres or work out in the neko gym has ended up meaning as much to me as the building of these gave me pleasure. I look at the photos posted to the alpha.tribe group on Flickr and see what others do with my stuff. And suddenly the whole effort makes sense in a way that it never had before. Is there any place else I can get this? At this particular moment in time, no there isn’t. So, I stay… And I invest more and more: I even go as far as writing papers and making presentations that all more or less relate to my experiences as a content creator whose content actually gets used by others. Second Life has altered my work process and my expectations of how I would like to have my stuff be put to use.

I do not have big pretensions when it comes to my artistic abilities. I do not think that I am an artist. I am a designer. A good one, yes. So, finding utility and function, placing the aim of what I make in “usage” is right. I did not use to have the same sense of satisfaction when I worked in advertising, which is hardly surprising, given the ultimate nature of what advertising is all about. And then after I quit that job I fumbled around with art (if one call what I did art, that is). And I always knew deep down in my heart that this wasn’t really “me”. I am just simply not cut out of the cloth that artists are made out of. So, now, after a long search I seem to have come to the one place which is right for me: I make things which others use. The process is playful and innocent. I am not robbing anybody or trying to sell them a product against their will. Yes, I suppose I could start some kind of cottage industry in RL, make jam or pillow cases or something. But, I do not have those skills and what’s more I do not like to work with my hands. So, a virtual, participatory world where I make synthetic objects which others can use seems to be the place for me.

There are a number of SL photographic artists whose work I follow on Flickr. These are people that create sensitive images carrying implications riddled in metaphor. Output which demands to be taken seriously, created by persons that are a far cry from the crowds of SL-Flickr enthusiasts whose gushes and aversions are often all too predictable. And it may be my imagination, and I may be misinterpreting what I see and read altogether; but there is deep unhappiness in some of their images and in the few lines of accompanying text and also concealed in their responses to comments left. It is the unhappiness of having become confused upon a core precept – one which to many SL Residents is something quite other than what it is to them: They misunderstood the rules of engagement. Invested emotions and formed attachments where it was probably not at all appropriate to do so.

A while ago I made body-parts. I still believe that I was onto something there when I made that and also when I wrote the statement for it, although I probably did not express it at all adequately enough. Concealed in there somewhere is my reason for wanting to leave my virtual existence behind.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, I believe it is called.

Good luck Eshi…

Something I was going to add the other night and then forgot to do. Or rather, I could have done so obviously, even after posting the thing but then chose not to after all. This seems significant enough for a separate entry: My alts.

I am at the point where I am feeling them as completely separate persons. They are standalone entities with different pre-occupations and thoughts. Which is very strange. They originated from some part of me, surely they are me? But, it is definitely not how this all feels, how the game is progressing here. And, funnily enough, meeting with them, hanging out with them, is proving to be yet another incentive to stay in SL. Perhaps maybe even the strongest one?

Grapho, I am in awe of. Xiamara, I do not like. And neither, for that matter, am I too overly fond of Amina. She looks a bit like Priscilla Presley (not at all my reason for not liking her, I should add). But she is this type of flaky, droopy, overly innocent seeming female, the kind who contrary to all appearances of flakiness gets everything done exactly in the way she intends it to. In short, the type for whom I really do not have much time for at all. Devious, the word is, I suppose? And it is these two, whom I do not like, that I should probably be taking a really good close look at since according to the laws of projection in them would be embedded my deepest personality flaws. So ingrained that I probably have a hard time recognizing them in myself and mirror them onto entities whom I do not like? So, how horrifying is that? But, in all likelihood still very true…

The one that I do like is Alpho. I even like the way she stands around with her goofy chubby girl AO animations and then bursts into that freebie female power walk – so purposeful! hhh… She is the only one that I have given my own shape to amongst my alts (although I have distributed quite a few of them to customers in the shop – but that is another story…). However, Alpho is a furry and so whenever she is not making clothes she is a wolf designed by Leben Schnabel or a panther designed by a really talented furry designer, whose name I cannot remember off the top of my head. But much as I like her, she is someone else entirely. In fact, if anything, her separateness I recognize more readily than all the others. And Grapho too. He intimidates the living daylights out of me I have to admit, but I do like him as well. And I very clearly see him as his own person. A stranger, in fact. The others are separate and yet not strangers. Grapho however, is a stranger whom I have yet get to know.

I guess, this is what it was like to play with dolls? When I was a kid? I really can’t remember. grrr… What it is definitely like is hanging out with my animals. Distinctly separate entities.

It is time to talk about alpha.tribe.

I am spending a lot of time working on the output – to the extent where sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep because there is some new thingy floating around in my head and I get up in the middle of the night and fire up photoshop to do things. Wander into the shop in the early hours of the morning and start rezzing prims. It is a full fledged obsession. And not only the work but all of it. Sometimes a few days go by and no one buys anything and I feel low: Instead of checking emails  (as one does), I first look at the transaction histories of the 5 avatars on their SL accounts pages when I get up in the morning. It isn’t about money obviously: I would need to be selling thousands of items to talk about any kind of a tangible income. And, of course, I do not. I make enough to cover my day to day SL expenses and a bit above that perhaps. Maybe, in time, it will be enough to cover the fee of the new homestead. Certainly not what I pay for Syncretia as well. Not anytime soon anyway… So, the obsession is about something else.

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Bettina asked me the other day about Syncretia, that she was concerned that I was no longer so interested in “building”. I have been a multi tasker for as long as I can think; so no, I have not given up building. I will do that as well. But, the thing with Syncretia is that it is finished. And there really is no reason whatsoever for me to hang out there, to go back there even. The new sim, yes… Of course. I will be building that – eventually. It will take a couple of weeks, maybe 3 or 4, but probably not even that and then that too will be done, finished. I will be putting an alpha.tribe store there as well, I should add. I can do that, it is not educational land.

The thing about designing avatar apparel is that you can just keep on doing it, over and over and over again – infinitely. Each outfit is a novel design system which you need to tackle all over again, from scratch. And it is an imaginative process. So, on the one hand it calls all of my previous design know-how into question, but then you can use that design know-how to really take an imaginative leap of fancy. I am my own client in a way, I write my own brief and then I implement it through the 5 avatars. And while on the one hand one does need to pay a lot of attention to inherent design restrictions such as those odious avatar templates for instance, the total nightmare of getting one’s head around that little problem right there; on the other hand it is a truly liberating process. You need not worry about RL design issues such as “function” or “usability” or “specifications” or “legibility” (a very big one for the work of a graphic designer, this last one). You can play – really and truly. So, it is a designer’s paradise. No wonder I am so enthralled with it. And like I said, it is endless…

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But is that it? It is quite a bit of it, true. I really am preoccupied with the creative process. But that is certainly not what makes me run and check my transaction pages every morning. What it is is that alpha.tribe is giving me a purpose. It is giving me the illusion of having a valid reason for carrying on my existence in SL. That I am needed somehow. The illusion that I have clients who look forward to my producing something new. It is, like I said, a huge illusion and of course I know that it is anything but true. No one needs me or particularly wants me or cares if I am around or not. But, when I click on the transactions page and see the names of avatars that have bought this or that, that have valued the stuff that I make enough to actually pay me for it, it gives me that illusion of being needed. And, I need that sense of purpose to carry on. To justify my continued existence in SL. To myself.

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And no, even though it may sound like it, I am not sad. Just trying to formulate an explanation to an obsession, that’s all.

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Just thought I would write down what I am doing these days.

So, summer is here, which means vacations for people in my line of work. Not so this year for me: They have offered us a week in mid-August at the museum which is affiliated with my university and so we are supposed to be exhibiting our student’s work there. The fact that Istanbul is dead (and I mean dead!) at that time and that a week is a joke to begin with doesn’t seem to faze anyone and so we are all working for that. I have done a lot of this type of stuff in the past and told everyone that I would be keeping clear of the grunt work this time around. But of course, in the event it doesn’t quite work out that way and so I have been trecking out to the uni every then and again. grrr…

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It was very hot earlier in July, but right now it is actually OK. We somehow seem to be getting a bit of the northerly summer wind which this place was famous for until about 20 years ago when the greenhouse effect put an end to it. But, in any case, the past 10 days it has been very pleasant.

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I have a new sim next door to Syncretia called Syncretia Annex. I got it last month when they had that reduced offer for homesteads going and so this is, in fact, a homestead with only 3750 prims. I have not really done anything substantial there yet. I just dug some underwater canyons (the big idea is that almost the entire sim will be underwater) and piled a few things on this underwater plateau where the canyons meet up. I have a few ideas but I am letting them simmer on the back burner for a while, which as I remember, is what I did with Syncretia also. That place too sat around for a couple of months before I really started the big work there.

wolfie and me testing the canyons for submarine access at Syncretia Annex

On the other hand I have been very busy with alpha.tribe. I really enjoying making the stuff. And although we are not breaking the bank or anything like that, for a new business I guess we are doing OK. Obviously, the stuff is mostly totally bizarre and wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste. In fact, I have gotten some hilarious comments, like people telling me that although our things are quite well made they are totally impractical! What exactly are they thinking of doing whilst wearing them, I wonder? Wash the windows? Do their ironing? Run up some Excel charts? hhh… Well, at least they tell me that the clothes are well crafted. Something too I suppose.

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Other than that? No, I am not doing the cruise! What was I thinking even? Me and a ship-full of fat-cat types? Thank you, but no thank you! So, I am not really sure what I should be doing in the way of a vacation – if anything… I will be going to a conference to present a paper in England in September. Cyberworlds. Good conference, tough to get in, so I am pleased about that.

Oh and I am getting the house painted. Work is to commence next week. And then I am still dieting my hiny off. Almost all of it is gone at this point but I am not giving up until my favorite jeans are a perfect fit – again! And that is probably another couple of pounds away…

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I have decided to embark on an absolutely dreaded task – yet again, I might add: Inventory cleanup! However, this time around not only cleanup but also organization and creating some kind of a system to easily identify what I have and where I may find it… A dire necessity at this stage since I am at the point where I am running around in the same pair of cruddy old jeans and t-shirt, not to mention the same old moth-eaten ears and tail, simply because I have so much stuff that I no longer know what I have, where it is or what it looks like.

I am two things: A hardcore builder and a hardcore shopper. So, inevitably I have a lot of stuff which I hang on to because I assume that it will come in handy at some point when I am constructing something. And then I buy other peoples output like it’s going out of style: I love the stuff that so many of my fellow designers churn out and so I am keeping an archive of Second Life design output. Anything from hair to avatar attachments to clothes to cars and hoverpods and spaceship. These last I am not even remotely skilled at manipulating, but no matter, I get them anyway.

I have this idea that SL design is a hugely important endeavor which will have considerable ramifications on design output as well as design theory in the future, affecting the design of RL objects and even more importantly the underlying design strategies: I do believe the effects are already felt in fashion design but I am fairly certain that the fundamental tenet of SL design, which, as far as I can make out, is “playful creativity” will find its way into core design strategies regardless of what the thing to be designed may turn out to be.

So, it is isn’t (only) blatant, unabashed, shameless, in-your-face consumerism when I rush out and purchase every conceivable object rezzed under the virtual sun, I really do have a professional interest here.

But interest, shminterest – I am stuck here with an inventory that is pretty much unmanageable. The funny thing is this: It turns out that I do not even have that much! I consulted Truthseeker on this little matter, wanted to know how many items were in his/her inventory which led to a general discussion during which I was informed that there were people out there with as many as 30000 items to their name! Me? I only have around 7000? And I am groaning under what I have? What do those people do for goodness sakes!? What do I do? Unless I really like something or think it will be really useful I have no compunction whatsoever at tossing it out on its virtual ear. Regardless of who gave it to me, I might add. I toss most (if not indeed all) notecards after I have read them, keep all LM’s in one notecard, do not collect calling cards (I have never understood their purpose or significance anyway?!) and I do periodically stow not-totally-unwanted stuff in boxes which I keep as meta folders so to speak…

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hhh…

Spoke too soon didn’t I, back then when I called old Xia anal-retentive? But! I am so going to be teaching her highness how it is really done! I had followed up on Ravenelle’s advice on one of her flickr posts about putting an image of the outfit into the folder for easy recall as to what the thing actually looks like. However, it seems to end up taking too long to render the image when one is actually in SL and extremely impatient to see it. And also, in my case, this seems to be a bit of a wasted effort since I usually cannot remember what a particular item was called to begin with and am thus stuck finding the image to look at. So, I have decided to develop this new system based upon spreadsheets (I am not a designer for nothing you know? They teach us this sort of stuff!) which will actually reside in my harddrive where I can access it with an image viewer. So, each spread contains thumbnails/names of the contents of a particular folder and also each spread is exactly 1920×1200 pixels, which is my screen resolution, so I can see the whole thing all at once. Naturally, it will go without saying that not all of the contents of a particular folder will fit into one spread, in which case there will be several named …01, …02, etc.

I have started where attention is the most needed: My hair. This is the partial content of my so called “object hair” folder, by which I mean hair which has some kind of an object embedded into it. I am packing away the ones that I am not quite ready to toss yet, but do not like so terribly much and everything that stays immediately accessible gets photographed and named. Once the object hair is cleared up, I will be proceeding to mohawks and so forth… And then to avatar attachments, of which I have tons – the ears and tails alone probably add up to gigabytes! And, needless to say, one does live in total dread of the boots folder(s)…

teeee heeee…

And once I am done in SL, I may even go and tackle my RL closet… Hmmmm, there’s a thought… Would spreadsheets help there as well, I wonder?

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Good job I have the outfit to do justice to the occasion! Made it myself and everything! Even my tail is a perfect match…

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http://npirl.blogspot.com/2009/01/work-of-art-in-age-of-computational.html

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Not that I believe in these types of summations all that much. However I still want to do one today, since this year has been an important one in my life I think.

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I suffered two big losses this year. The first was my mother, who passed away on October 24th, after a prolonged illness. As a young girl she had gotten tuberculosis and apparently once you get that it never ever goes away but only goes into remission to strike back as soon as the organism is at a weak point. Until 7 years ago she was an active, vital, great looking, young/old woman who amongst much else took care of a huge garden single handedly. Then the illness came back with a vengeance and what used to be a strong, willful life gradually faded away in front of our very eyes. The massive quantities of antibiotics she had to take to combat the TB completely deteriorated her liver, causing a cirrhosis from which she died very painfully at the age of 82.

My relationship with my mother has always been very complex. She was a Professor of Law, an academic. Highly intelligent as well as headstrong. She was also very introverted, a recluse who much preferred the company of animals and plants to that of humans. Thus her passing has caused a lot of introspection and coming to terms with much unresolved matter from our past – all of it still very much an ongoing process.

While I have very close friends in far away places, I had two best friends located in close proximity right here in Istanbul, with whom I hung out with all the time, had hour long phone conversations with on a daily basis. Nukhet, a brilliant woman, a jazz singer, I lost to Leukemia almost 2 years ago . And this year the other member of this close-knit triad of 37 years, a wonderfully funny, warm, talented man named Ragip, passed away from a very rare illness which was wrought upon him as the result of careless/cavalier habits in his professional life as a very successful industrial designer working in metals – a total horror called Miner’s Disease which completely devastated his lungs. Ragip died exactly one month after my mother on November 24th. Nukhet, Ragip and I: We met on the first day of art college in 1971. Three little opinionated, fledgling, wanna-be designers. Ultra big mouths, little to show in the way of knowledge. Very very very naughty, living somewhat dangerously… Need I elaborate?

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During the whole year Second Life was very much in the foreground.

Until July I was busy building Syncretia. Syncretia seems to have become something of a success – which startles me quite a bit since it is so very private. I built the place as a playground and not really as an artistic environment -  or rather I have come to re-examine what artistic activity means to me and built it by these new playful/narrative tenets. I met Hack, Mossy and wolfie in 2007 and it is their joint influence that has changed my perception of creative activity throughout 2008. The outcome is Syncretia.

Due to exhibition commitments coming up in the Fall I had to stop building Syncretia and leave it exactly as it was after July. Compounding this was the worsening condition of my mother’s and Ragip’s health in Real Life. But not to beat any further about the bush or to come up with more excuses, the bottomline is that I have been suffering from quite a substantial creative block over the past 6 months or so. However, although I have not built anything as such, I have become engaged in another kind of creative activity which seems to me to have considerable implications when it comes to self discovery – the creation of alts in Second Life. Through them I have begun to realize that my holistic self-perception simply does not hold water, that there is far more than meets the eye in the composition of my psyche. That I am made up of many personalities, many selves – and often not even very harmoniously at that. Again, I would not have embarked upon this road had it not been for the example that Mossy has set me.

I have always played dress-up games in Second Life, however the second half of this past year has been practically one prolonged dress-up game. I freely acknowledge that I am very superficial in that way: I love clothes to excess in both lives. Not expensive clothes, certainly not designer labels, but just quirky eccentric clothes. These days I seem to be slowly coming out of my creative block and have started to design my own line of apparel which I intend to sell. I should probably mention that I had designed some clothes in my very early SL days, however in the interim not only has my perception of creativity changed but also my self-perception; thus these old clothes are not going to be part of any of this. They belong to another life, another self. There is as yet very little that is completed from the ones that I am putting together now, however when I get to the point I will be displaying them on my little plot at Klein, which I have already re-built as a shop. Whether it will be for money or as give-aways in the way that four Yip does, I am not yet entirely sure…

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One new thing that has come into my life in 2008 is blogging. This has led me to blogging on the NPIRL blog, which in it’s turn has led me to give quite a bit of thought as to what the the distinctive attributes of metaverse creative content might be; how best to define it and what would set it apart from Real Life creative output. The conclusion that I have been coming to is that the uniqueness of metaverse creativity lies in its ability to induce behavioral change and the consequent re-examination of the self, the definition of new persona and selves, the assuming of ever new characters and roles which carry the potential of leading us into convoluted journeys of self-discovery.

Bettina Tizzy has been massively supportive during the emotionally very difficult period of the past 2 – 3 months, particularly just around the times of the deaths of my mother and Ragip – so, many thanks are due to her for that alone. Added to which should be huge thanks for all of her wonderful efforts at getting the name of Syncretia out and about – at which juncture I would definitely need to mention Hamlet Au and Aleister Kronos as well…

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And finally… There are other things. Confusing, hard to define states and emotions, still appearing to be unresolved; the nature and details of which I have no inclination to discuss here. However, they do need to be mentioned in this summation since they have been hugely important, if not indeed paramount, in how this entire year progressed and how it is now seemingly transitioning into a new one.

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So hello, 2009.

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