Matthew Sloly Portfolio CD Transite Series 2001 virtual performance-sculpture, executed in a number of worlds in the Activeworlds universe Continuing with my work in ActiveWorlds, I embarked on a series of projects in which I used a version of the "Shimmer" cube, but with multiple nested semitransparent layers. However, in these new configurations a webcam is pointed at my computer screen, and its output was periodically updating the image-texture you see mapped onto the cube's nested transparent surfaces. Using a crude (superim)positioning of camera (means of production), and its display (means of distribution), the personal/physical space of my studio comes to bear on virtual space in very interesting ways. My point of view, or one that is very close to my POV, is loosened up, and reconstituted as space that multiplies my and your potential positions within it. The structure of the work plays upon its own surfaces, metonymically, and metaphorically, in that it alludes to multiple surfaces, both physical and virtual. Within the space of the work, which is coextensive with, and in turn extends, the dialogue that it facilitates, the “where” of its “(t)here” is not resolvable. If I gesture to one of these objects that I have made, to what, or more precisely, where, am I pointing? Am I pointing to the object or the screen? Can the reality of the object and the world of which it is constituent be definitively explained by any technical description, however detailed, of its construction? No. This would be like confusing a corpse for a person! But not to acknowledge the screen would also lead to a gross de-realization of what is going on as well. However, definitions aside, it is possible to talk through the process, or in and equally valid sense, it is possible for the process to speak through its transcendence of interpretation. There is the screen, which is the site of access for all (human) participants in the world. This frames the work, or so it might seem, until one considers that upon the screen is the application window, through which one accesses the world, and which is of variable size, a superficial variable, but this is only the beginning. Through this variable window “into” and frame “around”, both the differences of point of view, and similarities of topology, that constitute the world have the potential to be contested and/or consented to. Upon first encountering the Transite cube, a shift of focus occurs, wherein participants can readily perceive that it is somehow refracting aspects of the virtual world on its surfaces. Yet there is an added artifact, from the physical surface of the computer monitor being shot by the webcam. This artifact is twofold: there is the screen, which we have already acknowledged. That screen does not vanish, with the shift of perception from it to what is played across it, but rather serves as the metaphor through which virtual objects may draw, along which they interject themselves into to the structure of our physical domain, coupling with it. There is the virtual surface active participant, immersed in a world, moving around the surface of an object, who fluctuates between positions, both virtual and physical, and in setting up a virtual screen , many of them, this positional multiplicity is magnified exponentially, even as all positions that are realized within its matrix are made questionable. But at the height of greatest absorption in and consent to the illusion of the world, the viewer is brought in to, and thrown back upon, its constructedness, creating the need to narrate the situation, using language that takes one tantalizingly close to, but which simultaneously distances us from, the phenomenon. Thus language also appears as a screen, semi-transparent (neither transparent nor opaque), echoing the nested transparent structure of the cube, which in turn echoes the physical structure of the screen, so that notions of proximity, distance and convergence, become problematized. Here, implicitly, whatever is named evokes its opposite, comes up against it, couples with and folds back into ambiguity, into “from-both-sidedness”, affecting a subtle transformation. We watch (or at lest we have the potential to watch) ourselves move between these states. At least this perception is akin to vision, but vision from where, of what? Where are we watching from? Where are we looking to? Where is this watching constituted, and likewise, where is the-one-being-watched constituted? Where ever [t]here is, it is nowhere without the other points of view that allow such narration(s) to be multiplied and aggregated, and through this collective labor of cognition to startle thought, rendering it indiscrete, in the sense of disclosure within public space of the world, and in the sense of its translocality. Something is disclosed, delimited, through the circumstances that confound subjectivity, something finds its character in its questionability. When the “is” and the “is-not” of our being are at their highest contrast with each other, the greatest uncertainty, and potentiality, is (t)here, is seen to engender and energize this vacillation between irresolvable ambiguities. Ambiguity as engine, is seen to be an apparatus of vision, and a vision of an apparatus, that through this dialectical play, moves reciprocally between past perceptions and extrapolations of possible futures, to form the fabric of the present. Such ambiguity, like justice, has a tangible, public dimension, and so “must be seen to be done.” By so doing, it joins the implicate with the explicate, that which appears and is present with that which remains resolutely absent, and in ever increasing complexly, joins the absent in that which is present to the present in that which is absent, ad infinitum. I see this as an activation of space, in which the architecture itself, rather than the discreet avatar-body only, becomes an extension or projection of our embodiedness. However, this does not negate the discreetness of the avatar-body, as agent of a particular being, nor does it prevent the 3D metaphor upon which the world is constituted from functioning. This is important because I am trying to deepen the experience of being-in-the-world, (as) both real and virtual, as an energizing ambiguity, as a means of endowing the question it begs with an agency that is seen in the questioning to lie beyond the implicit position of the questioner, and within the fathomless world in which it (question and questioner, conjoined) encounters its own perplexity, rather than to obliterate or occlude it. I am therefore not trying to "deconstruct" virtual reality. The space itself becomes avatar, an agent of disclosure, weaving its own cloak. As avatar the body can construct a return to the element in which it appeared, and thereby proliferates appearances. The work gives form to the irresolvable yet urgent question that I believe is, like Morphological Pump, an ambiguity engine. This ambiguity engine, rather than the graphics engine or multi-user server of the Activeworlds browser per se, is what produces virtual reality, is its primary driving force. So through proximity with this object, in the midst of the irresolvable where of the ‘(t)here’ that it constitutes, we are pushed up against the event horizon of language, which is where meaning is obliterated, and around which meaning assembles in our conversation which is challenged forth by this simultaneous action of revealing and veiling of the ‘where of (t)here’. So, in our being with each other, in the machinations (of which my artwork is but an instance) of this kind of reasoning, we are not “ghosts in the machine.” Rather, we are given to each other, and thus most vividly embodied, as such. So a virtual world is a world by virtue of a phenomenological ambiguity that calls its being into question, and thus summons our dwelling within it (materially), and our dwelling upon the question (metaphysically), resonating with our own being, and setting itself into correspondence with our world as a whole. As a result of these investigations, I have become increasingly concerned with the phenomenology of virtual worlds, in terms of how they constitute a world. While the means of inhabiting virtual worlds, within the framework of today’s technology, may necessarily rely on the visual, as mediated by the textual, their meaningfulness, or world-ness, is not derived merely from their opticality. Rather, the primary and founding value of virtual worlds lies in their distributedness, but what does this mean? Thus conceived, a virtual world, is not an object that can be deconstructed, but rather, (pro/re)poses (however ascetically or minimally) in the encounter that it fosters, a transcendental intimacy. 1. The most recent one in this series of performance-sculptures was executed last April on invitation by Miltos Manetas, of The Electronic Orphanage, in China Town.