These are just some more notes about ritual and performance. I propose the following:

Imagine you are in the audience at a theatrical performance. What do you see? Probably a group of people sitting in front of a stage, with actors and scenery.

What is your role in the audience? You might imagine sitting, watching the action, and clapping at appropriate times.

Do you clap harder when the performance is good? What makes the performance good? You might clap harder if you are impressed by the ability of the actor. Your perception of the actor’s ability is probably based on some vague feeling that the actor’s performance conforms with some understanding you have about the world and people – how people behave, how they think and react. Some archetype you know. Some myth.

In a performance, codified actions are typically used by actors to convince an audience of the reality of some narrative. A failed performance is one that fails to convince an audience that the actor is who he says he is – the truth of the narrative. We pass judgement on the inauthentic and reject a failed performer. To some extent that is the role of the passive audience; to serve as a litmus test of belief. We tend to judge the value or quality of a performance on its ability to convince the audience of something that is other than true. That is why in modern convention the audience stays silent, and why they clap – their role is one of passive judgement.

Now let’s imagine you are in some kind of ritual ceremony. Orientalism aside, this might bring to mind a circle around a fire, maybe shamans and masks, drums, dancing and music.

What is your role in the ritual? You might be expected to clap along with the beat, to sing, or to participate in some other way in the ritual itself.

Do you clap after a ritual? You might enjoy or not enjoy the experience, but does it make any sense to say whether or not the ritual was good? If you understand the codes and symbols of the ceremony, you might be able to say whether or not the ritual was conducted properly; whether or not due respect was paid to the forms and styles of the ceremony itself. The success of the ritual does not depend purely on the ability of the master of ceremonies; you take some responsibility for the atmosphere and proper conduct of the ritual.

In a ritual, everyone is a participant who has some role to play in the ritual. While there may be central figures in a ritual, everyone sings or dances or claps or in some other way participates in the creation of belief. Whether or not a ritual is conducted well is not particularly relevant to the truth of the underlying narrative or belief being transmitted. If a ritual depicting a mythological narrative is interrupted, that says little about whether or not that narrative is true or important.

If your mobile phone rings in the middle of a performance, the disruption is unwelcome because there is a palpable sense that you have ruined some kind of illusion. You have brought the audience back to reality and disrupted the spell the performers are attempting to create. But does the disruption convince anyone that say, the themes of the play are wrong, or that the narrative is less meaningful?

If your mobile phone rings in the middle of a ritual, you probably won’t convince the participants that say, the gods do not exist. Indeed they may be angry at you for violating the codes of the ritual, and you could expect this anger to manifest itself in any number of very ‘real’ ways.

There is no clapping at the end of a ritual because there is no judgement about whether or not you have been convinced. Indeed convincing you is not the point of a ritual (even though a ritual propagates belief) because participation in the ritual means that you are an active generator of belief rather than a passive adjudicator – participation in a ritual both assumes and reinforces your belief. In that sense the ritual has moved beyond questions of authenticity; the ritual feels and tastes real, you are part of the creation of that phenomenology. Rituals, festivals, observances – they do not hinge on the authenticity of the myth so much as the shared experience of the celebration.

Now, if we begin to think of a performance as a specific kind of ritual – a set of codified actions – we can get a better sense of what are actually salient features of a performance, at least in terms of the creation of ideas and beliefs. Performances celebrate grand narratives like love and redemption in the same way that rituals might celebrate gods and spirits. We can see that a bad performance of Hamlet does not make us disbelieve in the themes that Shakespeare was trying to convey any less, though a bad performance might fail to convey them at all. Authenticity plays a role in the creation of the founding myth, but is not a requirement for its continued propagation through ritual.

So when we look at ‘performances’ of identity online, and speak in terms of personas and actors, we must be aware that questions of authenticity are only secondary to the meanings of these performances – the shared feeling that these rituals generate in the participants. Querying why online behaviours are engaging even if they are so inauthentic is perhaps beside the point; people online are not performers in the business of trying to convince each other of authenticity, they are participants in the mutual creation of meaning.

As far as my own research goes, I am trying to think of ways that characters and personas can be built ritualistically – that is, through mutual myth making, rather than performatively – trying to convince a passive audience that a persona is so. Fanfiction anyone?

Unrelated(?) Evangelion plug: The image at the top of this post is a still from End of Evangelion, the film / animated series that probably set me on this whole train of thought from childhood. Three-quarters of the way through the animation, the film abruptly breaks into a live action sequence, including a pan around an empty cinema. Presumably  the audience would be sitting in a similar arrangement when first viewing the film in a theatre. Although the series is sometimes lambasted for its mastubatory indulgence in existential angst, I’ve always been quite affected by the idea that Hideaki Anno was trying to use a robot-mecha animation to convey his own dealings with depression and social anxiety with his audience. As the disruptive live action sequence demonstrated, animation was one possible vehicle among many that Anno wanted to use but was ultimately restricted by.

The trouble with this model is that the language of theatre introduces its own assumptions and metaphors, some of which are not particularly helpful when describing how people feel about their online personas. Theatre is by definition fiction. As I suggested earlier there is seemingly some ingrained hostility / fascination in Western audiences towards the entire enterprise of translating ‘fiction’ into ‘reality’. Perhaps in a highly individualistic culture, the spectre of the ‘fake’ -  someone who abuses individual freedom and civic trust -  is a terrifying and inhuman bogeymen. The shape changer, the drag queen, the ghost, the robot, the spy – there is a repulsion towards / fascination with things that are not what they are. (This is related to the theory of the Abject).

The concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ is a vital component of immersion and engagement with fictional narrative. Any talk of breaking ‘the illusion’ or ‘the fourth wall’ suggests that in theatre and performance there is some threshold between authenticity and falsehood. In a similar dimension, ‘bad’ actors and ‘bad’ performances are bad because they fail to bridge that gap between the real and the imagined.

And yet audiences seem to have a pretty strong tolerance to this sort of ambiguity in narrative. Films like ‘The Truman Show’ or ‘Inception’ manage to capture the public imagination despite frolicking in the no-man’s land between the real and the imagined. The idea of Brechtian theatre violating the fourth wall to shock people out of their fiction induced stupor is less disruptive than it may seem. Despite the real danger of many of these kinds of ‘wink to the audience’ meta-fictions collapsing under the weight of their own irony, the draw of narrative is intoxicating and seemingly quite resilient.

One of my favourite TV Shows is the irreverent, nightmare jumble of infomercials and public access TV vignettes that is Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! It’s a crass, absurd and frequently incomprehensible product. The following sketch, one of my favourites, is a good example of a piece of fiction that feels consistent enough, despite being so recursive and meta-fictional that it is essentially meaningless. (This clip is NSFW).

Unpacking a sketch like this would be a convoluted endeavour, and yet it mostly feels like an infomercial gone wrong. In light of this, perhaps the metaphors of theatre and the hard binary between real/false, fiction/non-fiction may not really capture the complexities of the way people believe in things, or at least accept their validity in certain times and contexts.

Goffman writes about this kind of complexity of belief in “The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life’. A particular passage I found interesting was in a small note Goffman includes from another author about Shamanism:

“Field ethnographers seem quite generally convinced that even shamans who know that they are frauds nevertheless also believe in their powers, and especially in those of other shamans: they consult them when they themselves or their children are ill.” 

This kind of behaviour is close to what George Orwell termed ‘doublethink’ in 1984. While Orwell termed the phrase to describe how people sustain contradictory and absurd beliefs for the sake of sustaining an ideology, in a broader sense it reflects a latent flexibility  of belief.

To me the parallels to the way I view, interact with and think about online personas are significant. It’s possible to hold the simultaneous knowledge that I am operating a fictional construct of pixels and interacting with the pixels of other anonymous operators; at the same time the interaction can feel real enough that I can invest emotion into the medium, and derive a sense of physical presence.

Here’s an image of my Second Life avatar (on the right) with a friend. I wear glasses like this.

There’s no great mental gymnastics involved – it feels natural and real, or in other words, phenomenologically real. This is the principle of everything from video games, emoticons or cybersex. Like shamanism, or animism, or any of these kinds of belief systems, it feels like magic.

How does this magic happen? Magic is intimately tied with ritual. A ritual ceremony is a feedback loop, wherein a set of codified actions are infused with significance, and in turn the ritual reinforces and propagates that significance. (I specifically use the word significance because ceremonies are particularly associated with icons, signifiers, and indexes – units of meaning).

It is not necessary to believe in the ritual’s ‘reality’ to appreciate or participate in its significance. This is why these kinds of ceremonies become tourist attractions: despite the cynicism that surrounds these kinds of spectacles, the validity of the experience can transcend a simple calculation of whether the performers or the audience believe in what they are doing.

Belief can be an important part of a ritual, but if you’ve ever played a game of ‘not stepping on the cracks on a sidewalk’, you know that belief is not always literal – no sane individual literally believes that monsters and demons will burst forth from the ground if you do step on a crack by mistake.

If that sounds a little odd, let’s return to our original theatrical metaphor, but reframe our thinking: a play or performance can be considered a ritual. The actors and audience take respect roles and conduct certain actions in a certain way so as to propagate an idea. In this case, the ideas being propagated are a pantheon of spirits and figures of a different nature: fictional characters, broader narrative themes of love, redemption, tragedy, cosmic irony, etc. But it isn’t necessary for the actors to literally believe they are the characters they habit (though some, Method Actors, do). It is not necessary for the audience to literally believe that the actions being portrayed on the stage are actually occurring before their eyes.

These fictions still feel meaningful and significant, and can make real changes to our lives and ways of thinking.

Suddenly, it becomes silly to get hung up on the ‘fake’ and the ‘real’, as if we were constantly in danger of being ruined by illusion. Being overly attached to the dichotomy of real/false is reductionist logic that leads us to some unhelpful and absurd conclusions. Somehow we are afraid of a potential breakdown between reality and fantasy; that violent video games make violent people, that online interactions are dangerously inauthentic, that various subcultures like furries or lolita enthusiasts are deluded. Somehow people do not trust themselves with their imaginations, or believe that they are things to be discarded when reaching a certain level of maturity.

This is a shame, because it seems to me that people are happiest when they feel like they are being generative or productive in whatever field they apply themselves to. These are feedback loops, and it’s better that we understand them than dismiss them out of hand.

In my next blog post, i want to talk more about animism, and particularly about the rituals of of investing life and energy into inanimate or non-physical concepts. On the table are 4chan, memes and Hatsune Miku!

Leave some comments, I’d love to hear from you.

I made an alternate Facebook account today which I’ll be using for one of my projects going forward.

This required some precaution, as making multiple Facebook accounts violates the Terms of Service that everyone agreed to and no one read when they made their Facebook account. The TOS also forbids:

• Giving someone else your login details
• Using a false name
• Providing any kind of false personal information to Facebook

Apparently Facebook is implementing a system of detection for accounts they suspect to be in violation of these terms.

A Friendly Warning

Why might Facebook want to prevent users from making multiple or fictitious user accounts? After all, other online services like Google+, tumblr and Twitter allow you to make as many accounts as you like, and don’t have a Kafka-esque TOS which demands you cross your heart and hope to die about every bit of info you upload.

Here are a few reasons that Facebook might cite:

•  To reduce the prevalence of spam accounts
•  To protect underage users from anonymous predators and bullys
•  To prevent adults from abusing each other with nasty comments under the cover of anonymity

From the Facebook help page about their name policies:

“Why doesn’t Facebook allow fake names?”
Facebook is a community where people connect and share using their real identities. When everyone uses their real first and last names, people can know who they’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe.

We take the safety of our community very seriously. That’s why we remove fake accounts from the site as we find them.

This all sounds fairly reasonable, but at the same time it’s disingenuous.

If Facebook was “very serious” about protecting underage users, perhaps it would have prevented them from signing up in the first place. Or perhaps stop targeting them with advertisements.

If it wanted to prevent people from interacting with spammers and bullys, perhaps it would have made stronger privacy settings as default, and warned users about adding every Tom, Dick and Harry that sends a friend request.

Maybe if you wanted to protect your users, being more proactive about removing broadly offensive groups and pages wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

It’s important to remember that Facebook is not a charity that’s providing some wonderful social service for free. They are a business with two objectives:

1. Maximise user engagement (and therefore the data they provide) with the service
2. Maximise advertising revenue by showing potential advertisers how all this great data they’ve mined from these dumb fucks

Meanwhile, it will insist on users being truthful with their personal accounts, because otherwise all this great data these saps / users provide them with will hardly be attractive to advertisers if Facebook can’t guarantee its veracity.

Hilariously, Mark Zuckerberg himself frames this as an issue of integrity. In David Kirkpatrick’s 2010 book ‘the Facebook effect’, Zuckerberg states in an interview,

“You have one identity… the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

What he is saying, is: ‘wouldn’t it be nice if everything was transparent and no one had anything to hide?’. While he has more tact than Google’s Eric “the computers remember forever” Schmidt, Zuckerberg is still radically redefining privacy as dishonesty.

Of course, making users feel bad about maintaining public / private divisions happens to align nicely with his company’s business interests. Dumb fucks.

Now of course, you could argue that my tone in this post is condescending. Users know what they are putting online, they know they are being tracked, and Facebook is just giving people a better service by providing them with ads that they actually want to see. Everybody wins! And if you aren’t interested in winning, there are always those silly privacy controls (oh you!).

I’m going to assume that this doesn’t ring true for most people, since I have never heard anyone ever profess to enjoying the invasive advertising that Facebook provides, nor are they happy about the complexity of the privacy controls on their profile. Since I don’t have any statistics one way or the other, I’ll leave it to you to decide (or suggest some in this post’s comments!)

On a broader note, it’s worth pointing out that people acting as one single defined identity (integrity comes from the word integer after all) is not actually how people work at all. People act differently in different contexts, and this has been the case since Ogg the caveman had his first job interview. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact some of the richest personal expression arises when people feel free to experiment with their identity.

This post I read from Michael Zimmer (and the other posts that he links to) provide some good food for thought on this same topic.

However, I also wanted to suggest as an interesting counterpoint, Christine Love’s wonderful mouthful of a game, ‘don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story’. In Love’s game you play as a secondary school teacher who has access to all his user’s posts on this universe’s version of Twitter. At least on my play through, the game gave a nuanced look at issues of privacy and ethics in the digital age. Of course, some friends of mine did a play-through that led them down a path of highly illegal student-teacher relationships, so results may vary.

As for me, I’ll admit that I don’t block Facebook ads out of some morbid fascination with what kind of person Facebook’s algorithims think I am. Occasionally Facebook ads suggest that I can ‘get a gay boyfriend!’.

Oh, but don’t you see Zuck. My heart longs only for you!

In my research, I am looking for models to describe the relationships people have with their online personas.

Across different mediums, whether they be Facebook, internet forums, video games or virtual worlds, people are assembling and curating pieces of data and information that constitute some version of themselves. Scattered across the internet, one person may have several different profiles, each of which represents the user in some specific context.

A Plethora of Profiles

In each of these contexts, the users behaviour may be completely different. This is not so surprising; human beings are generally social animals that moderate their behaviour for different audiences and different purposes, whether online or offline. A résumé is an entirely different sort of self representation than a personals dating profile (or at least you would hope so).

Nonetheless using the internet is often an exercise in repeated profile building; through every sign-up application and social media interaction people explicitly put themselves on paper / pixel and declare that, at least for a moment, “My name is X, and I am this.”

Sherry Turkle, a Professor of Social Studies and Technology at MIT, writes of how intuitive and prevalent this kind of behaviour is now becoming. In her book Alone Together, Turkle writes about an interview she has with one particular member of the new generation of users of social media:

“Creating the illusion of authenticity demands virtuosity. Presenting a self in these circumstances, with multiple media and multiple goals, is not easy work. The trick, says Stan, is in “weaving profiles together… so that people can see you are not too crazy… What I learned in high school was producing profiles, profiles, profiles, how to make a me.”

One particular model for this kind of social behaviour is the dramaturgical model, most famously advanced by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1965 text, The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life. The theory is probably best encapsulated in the Shakespearean phrase. “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.”

Goffman took the metaphor of theatre to describe social interaction as performance. People adopt roles and behaviours they have seen from other people, and work together as both audience and actors to maintain social harmony and avoid ‘bad’ performances which would lead to social awkwardness or embarrassment. From choosing what clothes to wear to what words to use, people strive to maintain a shared ‘definition’ of any social situation. In their own performances people try to present a coherent, consistent front. Goffman’s model is a world of public and private stages, along with a few private and familiar ‘back-stages’ where people can relax and have a temporary respite from performing.

In the context of computers and the internet, you can see social media platforms as hyper-extensions of this world of stages and performances. People are still conducting the same performances, but on new stages, with new props and with greater participation from more users / audiences.

It’s important to note that Goffman did not imply that there is anything necessarily disingenuous or cynical about this idea of social performance. Indeed he suggests that it’s natural and subconscious performative behaviour that makes civil society possible.

Nevertheless, the dramaturgical model presents a dichotomy between manufactured appearance and the idea of a person’s natural, ‘genuine’ behaviour. This is an intuitive idea, at least in the Western conception – an actor learns her lines, she isn’t her character. The idea of social performance also raises the spectre of the con-man, the trickster – the threat of a performer who creates a false impression for their own advantage.

Matthew Potolsky’s text, Mimesis, part of the Routledge ‘The New Critical Idiom’ series of books, is a great summary of Western ideas about imitative behaviour from origins in ancient Greek philosophy to the modern ideas of philosophers like Judith Butler and Jean Baudrillard. Potolsky notes that there has always been a fear and suspicion of performance and its potential to manipulate emotion or distort reality. Socrates even goes so far as to argue that Greek bards should be exiled, because among other reasons:

“the mimetic narrator, for Socrates, is inherently a liar. He conceals his personality behind that of his character, and thus opens up the possibility of other deceptions… Indiscriminate imitation fragments the personality, makes one ‘double’ or ‘manifold’. 

The idea that performance is destabilising or threatening is a basic theme in Western culture. Potolsky notes that almost every single theatrical metaphor we use in common language is pejorative or negative. Things that are “staged” or “an act” are to be regarded with suspicion. And yet clearly, if the enduring popularity of the theatre and the cinematic are anything to go by, we are fascinated with performance. This kind of contradiction is apparent in the NME interview with one of the more theatrical performers of recent times, in her plainly hostile reaction to the idea that she is a manufactured artist:

“I feel I have been probed endlessly about who the fuck I am. I have been quite open about it. And still nobody seems to have a clue. I’m not going to start churning out what you expect. If you’re looking for me to be something that isn’t there, STOP LOOKING. I am not that. I am not created. If you want me to be a manufactured act, you can fuck off.” 

Lady Gaga is clearly an ardent performer who uses theatre and theatricality to maximal effect, and even she displays defensiveness about the tools of her trade.

In the context of the internet, this fear of the inauthentic manifests itself in myriad concerns about social media. As much as we appreciate the convenience and socialisation it allows, we question how many of our Facebook friends are ‘true’ friends, we titter about people being very different from their dating profiles, we scoff that people on virtual worlds online games should get ‘real’ lives, the very phrase ‘identity theft’ horrifies us.

Even the aforementioned Turkle, who wrote in earlier texts about the therapeutic potential for computing technologies to allow for people to experiment with identity in safe environments, now comments that the new generation’s fascination with the inauthentic may have destructive or even psychologically pathological consequences:

“But for most people [the blurring of intimacy] begins when one creates a profile on a social-networking site or builds a persona or avatar for a game or virtual world. Over time, such performances of identity may feel like identity itself. And this is where robotics and the networked life first intersect. For the performance of caring is all that robots, no matter how sociable, know how to do.”

Suspicion of performance stems from our natural fear of being bamboozled, but it may also relate to a deeper fear. As Goffman notes,

“a competent performance by someone who proves to be an impostor may weaken in our minds the moral connection between legitimate authorisation to play a part and the capacity to play it.”

Or more broadly, performance may weaken the idea that there is even a fundamental ‘authentic self’ behind the performance. People’s behaviour may simply be the product of learned behaviour. What you regard as intrinsically ‘you’ may be defined simply from imitating others. Towards the end of The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life, Goffman himself concludes that:

“The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.”

This is a conclusion that has far reaching consequences. The philosopher Judith Butler uses the same theme to argue that gender roles in society are learned performances rather than a reflection of any inherent masculinity or femininity. Drag performers are both fascinating and threatening to us because they produce gross but recognisable caricatures of gender performances, and in doing so, demonstrate that what we take for granted as being naturally female or male is in fact something that can be learned and reproduced.

“The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial. If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would  be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the  postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. That gender reality is created through sustained  social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s  performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.”

There are other writers, most notably Jean Baudrillard (whose work is on that long list of writers I’ve yet to read for my literature review), who posit the idea that performativity and simulation have become the dominant process by which society creates a shared reality.

So, performance itself can be a strategy that dispels the treasured notion that there is a strict binary division between external appearance and internal essence, or indeed whether or not this internal essence exists at all. So what makes this seemingly unintuitive idea interesting to me?

My own personal experience has always been a bit challenging in regards to identity. Coming from a Chinese culture which incorporates the very idea of social standing – ‘face’ – into its language, I’ve been taught from a young age to be exhaustively concerned with the impression I make on others. Being gay has made me conscious of the utility of social performance to both hide and signal aspects of my identity. And throughout it all, computers, video games and more recently, virtual worlds and social media have given me some unique experiences and insights into identity performance. Questions of authenticity really fail to describe the complexity of the social interactions people are now conducting online, and I want to make artwork that captures that.

My research project is in many ways concerned with how to create performative artwork that demonstrates the ways in which computing technologies suggest new ways of thinking about identity. As social media proliferates, and online identity performance conforms to the copy / paste logic of computing culture, we should perhaps address our fear of performance. Performance is the model for how people make themselves real in an increasingly virtual world.

Or at least, it is one model. In my next post I want to talk about another, equally intuitive model, that stems not from the Greek academy of thought, but from the early spiritual ideas of animism and magic that finds itself in everything from Avatar, Vocaloids and furries.

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The great Lady Gaga illustration featured in this post was created by ‘The-Hand‘ from DeviantArt. Here’s the link: http://browse.deviantart.com/?order=9&q=lady+gaga&offset=48#/d378dt3

In the Ancient Egyptian pantheon of the gods, Thoth is an Ibis headed deity who is associated with, among other things, the system of writing and the invention of the sciences, religion, philosophy and magic. When Ra, the creator deity, called things into existence by speaking their names, Thoth would secure their existence by writing these names down.

In mythology this is the principle of the magic word, where the creation of objects and concepts is inextricably bound with the act of naming them. It is a basic understanding of the  the power of language and speech to create, label, categorise or differentiate concepts and in doing so give them an existence in our thoughts.

The magic word is also a basic understanding of semiotics; the link between an object and its representation in symbols, icons,  and indexes. That Thoth and the Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs and pictograms should point towards how intimately the Egyptians understood this power of representation.

I bring up the idea of magic words because nowhere is their operation more concrete and apparent then in the heavily mediated world of computers and the internet. At a basic level, programmers are modern day Thoths, breathing life into applications and systems through the arcane practice of writing code.

This kind of techno-mysticism reaches is most viscerally demonstrated in video games where programmers are calling entirely new interactive environments and objects into existence.

Increasingly the power of code and this form of  video game creationism is being democratised and being put in the hands of consumers in one form or another, a type of play evocatively named “sandbox”. Sometimes the sandbox is an extension or modification of the game – from the level design tools and kits of games like Sony Computer Entertainment’s LittleBigPlanet or  Garry’s Mod based on Valve Corporation’s popular Source engine.

Sometimes the sandbox is the game – a recent example being Minecraft – self-described as being “a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine.” – which since its release in 2009 has sold more than 5 million copies, remarkable for a independently developed game with no strict objectives.

And of course, the most concrete demonstration of this trend towards virtual creationism and the power of magic words are virtual worlds like Second Life, which generated enough hyperbolic media attention and controversy to demonstrate that the techno-utopian dream of the a final human-machine singularity was still alive and kicking. This is a second coming for VR, after being pronounced dead in the general public’s imagination since the fevered enthusiasm that surrounded virtual reality awoke the next day to find itself in bed with a clunky head-mounted displays and a severe lack of available computing power.

Second Life as a virtual world is particularly notable in its addition of yet another layer of magic words to the world – Second Life was not the first virtual world in which almost every object and environment was created by its users, but it was the first virtual world to assign legal copyright for those creations to its users. While I’ll have much more to say about Second Life in future posts, for now I can say that with the addition of political economy, the process of virtual creationism has completed its full circle with reality.

Moving away from computer entertainment and virtual worlds for a moment, and looking a little closer to home, we can see the effect of magic words on the worlds we are constructing with our friends, our family and ourselves. I’m of course referring to social networks and in particular, Facebook, whose raison d’être is to index every single social interaction – indeed the timeline of our entire social existence – in its unassuming blue and white interface.

There are magic words at play whenever you declare someone you meet a friend, magic words at play when you call a party into existence by declaring it an event, or crystallise its place in memory by uploading photos, tagging friends and commenting on walls. In these actions you are giving things a name, so much so that it can be said that people who are not on Facebook are excluded completely from this indexical reality.

This is the darker side to all this magic, and something I tried to explore in earlier work and continue to explore in my ongoing projects. Words have the power to represent, but also the power to exclude. This exclusion can be deliberately ideological, as in Orwell’s dystopic vision of 1984 and the language of Newspeak, where:

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependant on words.

The exclusion can be a product of broader social assumptions, when the available words do not adequately represent possibilities, or restrict the definition of concepts. Feminist theorists are particularly concerned with the power of language to create and maintain inequalities between sexual identities through the gendered use of language. Related to these ideas is queer theory which highlights how the assumption of a natural binary between men and women and their associated naturalised behaviour makes describing identities that exist outside of this ‘normal’ binary – for example, gay, lesbian, transgender, intersexed – either impossible or heavily compromised.

In her book Gender Trouble, theorist Judith Butler references another feminist theorist to give us this understanding of magic words:

Language, for Wittig, is a set of acts, repeated  over time, that produce reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as “facts.” Collectively considered, the repeated practice of naming sexual difference has created this appearance of  natural division. The “naming” of sex is an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative [act] that both creates and legislates social reality by requiring the discursive/perceptual construction of bodies in accord with principles of sexual difference. Hence, Wittig concludes, “we are compelled  in our bodies and our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us … ‘men’  and ‘women’ are political categories, and not natural facts.”

This kind of language use is critical in any system which supposedly indexes reality – consider for instance, the fact that in setting up the basic information for a Facebook profile, one can only choose between being “male” or “female”, and being interested in “women” or “men”. – identification with any other sexual orientation or identity, such as genderqueer or intersexed, requires the installation of third party applications; or in other words, these categories may as well not exist or be presented to ‘normal’ users.

Since language is so integral to the creation of identity, it is important to consider how language is actually being used and who is using it, especially when in the age of mediated reality the magic word takes on far more potency. Pray that the priests and priestesses of Thoth use these magic words wisely.

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I owe many of the ideas of this post to Julian Dibble, whose ‘My Tiny Life’ – an account of his time spent in the text based virtual world LambdaMoo (an early pre-www precursor to the virtual worlds today) has been a tremendously interesting jumping off point for many ideas  of my research. In this passage, my inspiration for this post, he gives a broader perspective to magic words and their intersection with trends in technology:

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial mega-trends of the moment—from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA—knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

“So what do you do?”

“I’m a systems analyst.”

“Oh… and what exactly does a … systems analyst do?”

“… I analyse systems.”

I’m at the very beginning of my research degree, which will hopefully be a 3.5 year magical mystery tour. Like any good magical mystery tour, I’m not completely sure where I am going or how many limbs I will have left when I get there. Yet even at the very beginning, I still feel compelled to have a reasonable answer for the inevitable question, “Oh… and what exactly are you… researching?”

So in this early post I’d like to write down some of the things that I’m interested in; what kind of work I want to make and what kind of new ideas I am trying to generate. This is the beginnings of an elevator pitch, though right now I think it will be better if we just take the stairs.

“Oh… and what exactly are you… researching?”

“I want to look at identity construction in online and offline settings. Specifically I am looking at the dynamics of how people form a sense of self in light of modern day computing trends, including ubiquitous social media, online subcultures and memes, virtual worlds and video game entertainment.

“Modern day computing has had a transformative effect on the way people talk, conduct business, form relationships, express themselves and find an audience of their peers.  I want to make work that explores the ways people are using computer and networking technology (or how this technology is using them) to establish new forms of self-identity, how this process relates to historical and social trends of identity politics and community, and in a broader sense, how this technology may be creating a new understanding of the very nature of identity and how it is formed.

“My interest in this topic stems from my personal experiences, from my interest in computer roleplaying games from a young age, time spent in online virtual worlds like Second Life, friends I’ve made in cosplay and furry communities, and experiences dealing with my own sexuality. From my own understanding and the research of theorists in fields like anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, I have come to believe that the formation of identity is a performative process; a dynamic system of expression and feedback between the individual and an audience.

“If it is a performance, then what kinds of props and stages do computers provide? What kind of audiences are watching? And are there voices somewhere in the wings of the internet, whispering everyone’s lines; bodies made out of the ideas and dreams we are breathing into the network?

“I want to make art that takes these ideas and communicates them in new and unanticipated ways – a kind of qualitative research or fieldwork into these basic mechanisms of everyday life. For these truly are basic mechanisms. My research stems from the thought first formed when a human being spied his reflection in a body of water and wondered,  with less pronouns but the same timeless confusion; “Who am I?”

“Well, I’m sorry to say, this is my floor. But let’s talk more sometime. You seem like a good listener.”