self-fulfilling- a second life of photos

            I’ve been organizing what I hadn’t realized is an enormous archive of photos I’ve taken in Second Life, and am still adding too weekly and sometimes even daily.  It’s insane to discover they number in the thousands. Yes, thousands.  I was also shocked when I checked. 
            Luckily I have image software in which I can view and catalogue them by date or title, size, however pretty much I need too.  I am renaming them more accurately than they have been when I saved them automatically at the time, and they go back to 2009 which is the earliest photo I have though I remember taking a couple though not many before in the few months before that but I don’t seem to have those anymore, in my archive or inworld, more’s the pity as I remember distinctly taking a picture of my avatar on the second or third day in SL when I first realized I could take photos.  How basic and raw I must have looked then hardly knowing a thing about how to interact or live inworld. 
            It’s been kind of a mixed experience, which by the way I’m still doing, a little each day as it’s so vast there’s no way I could do it all at once, evoking memories and emotions of all kinds, some good, some not so good, some ugly, some maybe I’d wish to forget but then again maybe I shouldn’t as they all happened to me and are part of me however they felt at the time so there’s a place for them too. 
            I also knew I’d been through a lot, and as a consequence I think learned a lot too and hopefully gained a whole lot more perspective in SL in how to live there in conjunction with RL, real life, the real world, and basically not let it get to me in the ways it has in the past when I really should’ve perhaps just shrugged more off than I did than carry it like it was more important than what it really was. I continue to live and learn but only going back through all these photographs do I realise how much and how intense it got at time. 
            The happy times are many, but there are also sad ones too, especially when I’ve lost people to them leaving SL usually which incidentally I’ve never done and have been here since I first ever joined in February 2008.  Yes, all that time ago, though for the first maybe three months hardly spent any time here but then come the summer I started probably what I’d call my SL journey proper. 
            Most of my photos unsurprisingly have me as the prime subject, but they regularly include others I’ve known and the things we did, including portrait shots not just of myself like I say but also friends for their profiles or whatever reason they’d commissioned me to take them for, being I am a professional photographer and artist in SL too.  I do though have a record of me, as in my avatar, throughout my time here and all the physical changes I went through and something really obvious is I’ve always had blue hair, and still do, and I remember having  decided on that for some reason within my first week inworld.  I’ve accumulated many hairstyles over the years but the colour remained the same in various hues of blue. I also noticed that I haven’t actually changed that much, just updated to looking less of a newbie to something a little more individual. 
            I’ve included just the one photo here from the thousands, which as hard to choose, but this one evoked a moment in 2010 when I really felt things were collapsing around me, a very intensely emotional time and I was writing a resignation letter, not just from my vampire clan inworld but maybe even from SL.  Clearly I didn’t, though I did write the letter and think I still might have it somewhere, which has to be my next task to try some time to catalogue all my SL writings such as those for clan including vampire stuff, for my gallery also and who knows what else may be lurking there still. 
            There’s of course the other reason why sorting through all these photos takes time, seeing them arouses these very emotions, losses, fears, sadnesses and also good times, funny times, loving times too, of which there have been and still are many, and it’s a lot to feel and take in all those years at any one time. So, it’s best I spread it out over however long it takes. 
           Anyway, just thought I’d share this with you all, or anyone who even reads my blog, it’s fascinating particularly so as SL is real and it isn’t, such a strange state of being.

© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder

into the e-scape

It can be so easy to take for granted and become blasé to the virtual worlds in which some of us choose to while away some of our hours.

Of course they aren’t real as such, though they are just as real as anything else just they aren’t the real world in which we wake up at the start of every day and drift to sleep at the end, but they are real.  They are real imaginations brought to life in the same way as words in a book or drawings on a page or paintings on a canvas are, it’s just that these are done using the tools of codes and pixels.  People are so ready to accept a digital photograph taken with their phones and yet can’t see that these other worlds are imaged in pretty much the same way.

There are differences obviously but they do allow for something we can’t do outside our own heads normally, and that’s to interact with still-life, as though with a piece of artwork, in a sort of tangible way.  Not tangible as in tactile but insofar as one can ‘touch’ a world normally closed to us with our minds in a way that takes us one step beyond just imagining and provides a bridge that wasn’t there before; a place to be, to stand, to exist between worlds, a kind of insatiable limbo.

As these worlds have grown more and more sophisticated in their 3D-modelling and the degree with which one can interact it’s been incredible to look back and be surprised at how what we now see as so basic and simplistic has progressed, albeit still with so many limitations and frustrations at what can’t be done. Nevertheless what people, creators, manage to achieve despite such limitations has produced a plethora of the weird and wonderful, wacky and wayward, just as any artists does by letting their imagination master the medium at hand.  For a writer it’s a pen, for a painter it’s a brush, for an inworld avatar it’s a mouse and keyboard. The principals are the same it’s just this latter artisan and related aren’t as yet given their due in the world outside these realms.

You see, not only are these creators creating worlds within worlds they are also sculpting in some cases entire cultures, with their own histories, timelines, mores, traditions, even in some cases languages.  But what I’m talking about mostly here is some of the most inventive and immersive of inworld environments: landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, alienscapes, fantasyscapes, futurescapes, spacescapes. All of which I could call e-scapes, as in  not just electronic landscapes but also in the sense of ‘escape’, a place far removed from our real, physical world with all it that goes with it, good, bad and downright ugly things.  Inworld there’s no illness, there’s no death, no worries unless you make them for yourself.

I’m not naïve though, I do understand I’m painting quite a rosy picture here of something that is essentially just seen as a game, a toy, a frivolous and hedonistic pursuit, as such an utter waste of time and merely wishing one’s life away. It’s no Utopia, no nirvana, no moksha or heavenly realm (though you could build any of these if you wanted), and some people do have a habit of invariably bringing  their real world prejudices, angsts, fears and narrow-mindedness into these spaces, havens, but that’s their choice and they rarely last long.  These worlds aren’t to blame for people like that, they exist anyway and in the real world we have to put up with them all the time.

I think today I must be feeling particularly giving, so who knows, on another day I might just remember how one of these worlds almost buried me in so much ugly stuff, but again, that was down to people being people.  But I dug my way out and learned how to leave that for the real world and keep this one free of niggles, mostly.

Obviously there are rules and such, but that’s no different from anywhere.  Not only isn’t is a Utopia nor is it Anarchia, for better or worse.  But still I find myself visiting, spending time, discovering yet another amazing creation born of someone’s incredible skill and imaginings and appreciated the sheer amount of time, work, learning, patience and understanding that’s gone into it, sometimes just for the sheer pleasure or artistry, and where I, me, myself and I, simply at the end of a day escape into the e-scape. 

© Emma Calder/ Anan Eebus