Fuck SL photography

Jay from Brooklyn Is Watching recently discovered a piece I had impulsively thrown together at BIW last week:

Unfortunately, the full meaning of the piece was lost -- there had been another box there, placed by someone else, when I created mine; but it had been either returned, deleted, or taken down.

Jay had this to say on the BIW blog in response to my piece:

Thanks for coming back nebulosis (sic). I would agree with you generally speaking. And I would also say… um… so? There are a hellovalot more of what i call “blah blah blah blah” galleries out there than there are galleries showing anything interesting. ( these are galleries that have their hands over their ears and are saying “blah blah blah, im not listening to you… its still 1865 its still 1865 its still 1865″ — then down the street is another one that is saying “its still 1945, its still 1945″ etc etc. ).

Most of the stuff in the world is crap. always was always will be… what was it that drove you to particularly point this one out? And do you have any awesomely bad examples to point to that we can all enjoy?

To which I responded:

I definitely agree, Jay, that most of the world is crap. But what drove me to rez this particular piece was a box that isn’t there anymore.

Sometime last week I had been strolling through the grounds of BIW and came across a box with a mosaic of generic avatar portraits all over it, with the hover-text “Touch/Click me for invitation to a gallery of SL Photography” — and it just annoyed the shit out of me to see it — so I rezzed the box that you are sitting on in the above picture.

Fortunately, I took a picture of the two side-by-side; I’ve just posted it to Flickr (and I expect it will piss off some people):

Below the pic I added a caption, elaborating a bit further:

The box on the left is something I rezzed at Brooklyn Is Watching last week, in response to the box on the right.

(The box on the right has floating text which reads:
"Touch/Click me for invitation to a gallery of SL Photography"

The box I rezzed also has floating text, which reads: "Touch/click me for no apparent reason -- SL photography is fucking bullshit")

While SL snapshots/photos can be interesting to look at, I don't consider 99.9% of them to be anything more than mere snapshots -- I don't care how much Photoshopping went into it.

There are & have been a rare few individuals who can elevate it to an art form, but SL snapshots do not equal "instant-art" any more than random real-life snapshots do.

Perhaps the thing that irks me the most about SL photography -- and what has put me off about it as a medium altogether -- is the bandwagon mentality. It's trendy; it's a "me-too" hobby; it appeals to the 15-seconds-of-fame seekers. Most people who get into it never before had an artistic urge in their lives; and once they get bored with Second Life, they most likely will never do anything creative again. It's just a passing fascination for them.

ART is not a fucking hobby or a trend or a fad, it's a fucking way of LIFE, it IS life; and if you don't feel that way about your art, then you're NOT a fucking artist, you're a hobbyist at best & a phony at worst, so don't CALL yourself an artist simply because it sounds cool.

And, as I said -- I find many SL snapshots to be interesting to look at, but I don't consider them to be art. I don't take my SL pics seriously, either. They're fun to take, fun to play around with, and a cool way to document what I've been up to in SL, but in no way does come NEAR to calling upon my emotions and efforts in the the ways my REAL artwork does.

These statements & observations might piss you off, but I don't really care. You don't have to agree with me; it's simply my opinion.

So there you have it.

As far as awesomely bad examples — you can’t throw a rock in Second Life and not hit half-ass SL photography. How I wish I could throw it all into a fucking blender and just hit Purée.

Tag search in Flickr for Second Life (plenty of lacquered up tits & ass - *yawn*):

http://flickr.com/search/?s=int&ss=2&ct=6&w=all&q=%22second+Life%22&m=tags

Article: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality.

(All of the following excerpts were taken from the article "The Creative Personality" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. My thoughts/comments about the posted excerpts are italicized in brackets. The article can be read in its entirety here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19960701-000033.html)

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest...The important thing is that they control their energy; it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work...

[Absolutely true for me -- 'focus like a laser beam' is a very accurate analogy for it. And I DEFINITELY need that idle time to recharge. A casual observer might mistake it for laziness, but intense focusing like that does take a LOT out of me.]

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time...Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind...

[Wisdom and childishness... haha. Yep, I can identify with this, too.]

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance...

[This one and #2 are pretty closely related -- kinda ties the first two together, actually. I am typically very laid-back and childish, I goof off and stuff, but I am dead fucking serious when it comes down to working on creative projects.]

...Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not...

[I can't count the number of nights I have spent working for hours at a time until I am ready to drop dead from exhaustion, and even then, I won't go to sleep til I finish what I'm working on.]

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality...But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this "escape" is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true...

[Part of an artist's gift, I think, is the ability to connect imagination/fantasy to reality in a way that makes sense to a more general audience.]

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted...In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

[FUCK YES -- this is very, very much me. I didn't figure I was the only one like this or anything, but I had no idea this was actually a common trait of artistic people. Wow.]

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time...Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective...

[Yes, definitely.]

...And they're usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them.

[Yes, DEFINITELY. I am usually bored with something the moment I finish it, haha.]

...At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

[Indeed. While I feel DO feel pretty non-egotistically proud about all the things I have accomplished, and though I DO appreciate positive feedback about my work, I STILL have trouble accepting compliments. Part of me loves that time in the spotlight, part of me feels totally under-the-microscope and almost squirmy uncomfortable.]

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping... psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

[YES, absolutely YES. I have felt psychologically androgynous since I was a child; I was very much aware of it for about as long as I can remember.]

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture.

[Besides, you have to know the rules before you can break 'em. :P]

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility.

[Of course passion is essential to art, but in order to be a serious artist, one MUST be able to accept criticism - which is where the objective part comes in; one should always try to see the work from an outside perspective. Positive AND negative feedback about one's work is part of what helps one to evolve and improve, and to be an artist -- and indeed, an intelligent being -- is to NEVER stop evolving, in my opinion.]

10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

["The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." -- Khalil Gibran]

...Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.

[Story of my fucking life!]

...Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

["You do not know how paralyzing that staring at a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can't do anything." - Vincent Van Gogh, Letter #378 (to his brother Theo), October 1884]

...Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake.

[And it really IS bliss. I swear to christ, if I didn't have art, I'd be fucking dead. Creating art is literally what keeps me alive sometimes. Art is my god.]

A thought on the non-permanence of art

Have been thinking lately about Sabine Stonebender and the loss of her huge, amazing installation, Zero Point. [I'm glad I got to see it before it disappeared; I wasn't able to visit prior to upgrading my video card which I did only a few months ago.]

ArtWorld Market wrote about it on his blog and in SLArt (r) Magazine and had this to say about it:

"...Whatever your opinion of Zero Point, or of the system in general, if you want to create in Second Life then you need to protect your investment. What happened to Sabine could happen to almost anybody. Your build can disappear and your inventory can be wiped out, whether from a technical glitch or an accounting error..."

He has also raised the question:

"...What can I say to the readers--artists, collectors, gallery owners, curators, writers, business owners and institutional leaders--who now doubt whether they should continue creating, collecting and investing in a virtual world where years of work can disappear irrecoverably?..."

Well, here are my thoughts on the subject.

The disappearance of Sabine's Zero Point is definitely a huge loss and will be missed; that goes without saying.

However, in virtual worlds as well as in the "real" world, nothing is ever permanent.

[I am in no way making excuses for Linden Labs; they should make every effort to restore what was lost; and to take measures to prevent these sort of things from happening in the first place, of course.]

A lot of people have expressed sentiments to the tune of, "Why should I create/buy anything in SL when it could disappear tomorrow because of technical issues?"

In that sense, why do anything in RL either? Why paint a picture, or make a sculpture, or build an installation, or knit a sweater, or make a sandcastle, or buy a home, or collect stamps, or do anything? Anything you create or own can be broken, burned down, washed away, torn, used up, worn out, stolen, lost, destroyed...

There is ALWAYS the risk. Second Life is no different from First Life in that sense.

Take precautions to preserve what's valuable to you, certainly; but NOTHING lasts forever; enjoy it while you can. Part of what makes ANYTHING valuable, in ANY life, is its impermanence.

And I'm not about to let that stop me.