[Air-L] second life workshop with Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin

[Charles Baldwin]

The workshop below is being held on Saturday, December 8, 2pm London time
as part of _Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance_, at Goldsmith's College, 
University of London. If you are interested in more information or in participating, 
email Sandy Baldwin at charles.baldwin at mail.wvu.edu.

SECOND LIFE WORKSHOP: AVATAR PASTE AND CODE SOUP IN FIRST AND SECOND LIFE
Leaders: SANDY BALDWIN, West Virginia University & ALAN SONDHEIM 

This workshop will take place in the virtual world Second Life, and
 will be conducted by Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin, with participation
 by other artists and performers in Second Life. 

Participants from the Intimacy conference will be supplied with
 location and others details within Second Life. The workshop emerges from
 Sondheim and Baldwin's ongoing exploration of analog and digital bodies,
 using a range of technologies to remap the solid and obdurate real of
 bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital, and then back
 again into real physical spaces. The "avatar paste" of the title means
 at least three things. 

Firstly, the pasting of viewpoints together, the suturing of the
 subject into the avatar. Secondly, paste as glue, as half-liquid and half
 solid, as a materiality of renewable and infinite pliability. This is the
 chora of the avatar, the body matrix that is less a framework than a
 smearing of paste. And thirdly, paste as pasty and dis/comfortable
 substance, paste as slimy and dripping. While this abjection is already
 implicit in paste as glue, the pastiness of paste involves the projection
 and dreaming through of the avatar, the inhabitation of avatar bodies and
 the emptying of real bodies into the avatar. 

"Avatar paste" comes out in avatar motions and behaviors. Firstly,
 these are formed by symbolic orders, presenting surfaces to read in terms
 of sexuality, power, emotion, and other projections. At the same time,
 the pasty avatar body tends towards collapse and abjection. Work on the
 avatar becomes a choreography of exposure and rupture, modeling and
 presenting inconceivable and untenable data, within which tensions and
 relationships are immediate and intimate. One might imagine, then, this
 inconceivable data as a form of organism itself: as part of a natural
 world or a world already given; out of this we might think through new
 ideas of landscape, wilderness, hard ecology, the earth itself.

The workshop will theorize and demonstrate these topics. The first part
 discusses theoretical frameworks.Alan Sondheim will discuss topics of
 dismemberment, telepresence, and abjection in relation to the motion
 and behavior of Second Life avatars. Sandy Baldwin will discuss the
 topography of limits in Second Life, both body limits and spatial limits, an
 connect this to issues of the hunt and animal display. 

He will also discuss the dynamics of performance and audience in Second
 Life. The second part of the workshop will show off Sondheim and
 Baldwin's approach to re-mapping live bodies into Second Life performances,
 including: video and other examples of motion capture and scanning;
 intermediate processing of files (e.g. editing .bvh data or working with
 Blender); and then the resulting works, including documents of Second
 Life performances and re-mappings back into "first life" spaces with
 dancers and other live performers. The final part of the workshop will
 include avatar performance by Sondheim, Baldwin, and other participants in
 Second Life.