“Orientation” by Nebulosus Severine and Arahan Claveau

This is the first piece I referred to on the broadcast I taped tonight:

Just thinking about it some more – I think one of the things I was struggling to say is how the piece so successfully incorporated camp and this sort of over-the-top ridiculousness in a way that wound up being so much a comment on the absurdity of Second Life as much as a critique of consumer culture or the pressures to conform that one encounters in real life.

And there is something inherently campy about Second Life – something that we barely acknowledge and go on to pretend isn’t there in our usual encounters in the environment. Such that, by the end of Orientation, when you are lead to the room with the meat grinder and the boxes of soilent green, it seems perfectly in line with everything else you encounter there, and it implicates you. Here you are, you’ve accepted this world entirely on its terms – you’re at peace with the “fact” that the person you’re talking to has green skin or a tail or can fly; you’re ok with the idea that you can be rocking out at the bottom of the sea one moment and then next, be 300 meters in the air at a house that floats on nothing; so if you’ve accepted all that, don’t you also have to accept that you’re in a room that’s turning your fellow man into food? No? Well, then – why the hell did you blindly suck up all that other stuff that’s been passed your way since you’ve been here?

Anyway, here are some of the references I made in describing it:

EBN, a sorely missed industrial group.

This is Spaghetti Man by Paul McCarthy:

~ by amyfreelunch on October 6, 2008.