“I did not reveal that I was the carpet’s designer and knotter. I thought if she saw my callused fingers or looked closely at my tired red eyes–if she understood the fearsome work that a carpet demanded–its beauties would be forever tarnished in her eyes. Better for her to imagine it being made by a carefree young girl who skipped across hillsides plucking flowers for dyes before settling down to tie a few relaxing knots in between sips of pomegranate juice.”
My personal analogue: Delivering custom art creation orders on Second Life, and the sort of prejudice that often comes with the package… “Oh, so you’re proprietor-creator (pity tone)?”
“I knew otherwise: my back ached, my limbs were stiff, and I had not slept enough for a month. I thought about all the labor and suffering that were hidden beneath a carpet, starting with the materials. Vast fields of flowers had to be murdered for their dye, innocent worms boiled alive for their silk–and what about knotters? Must we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of rugs?
It’s for the obsession.
“I had heard stories about women who became deformed by long hours of sitting at the loom so that when they tried to deliver a child, their bones formed a prison locking the baby inside. In such cases, mother and child would die after many hours of anguish. Even the youngest knotters suffered aching backs, bent limbs, tired fingers, exhausted eyes. All our labors were in service of beauty, but sometimes it seemed as if every thread in a carpet had been dipped in the blood of flowers.
“These were things that Maryam would never know…”
And similarly, these are things that most people would never know… synthetic beauty is created not only at a price, but at the expense of life — the devotion of an individual to the solidification of an abstract image, the enormous amount of self discipline involved to not only work on the task but to continue–instead of running around out in the physical open… sometimes just for the heck of it and sometimes because you’re living in poverty and do need the money or because you’ve foolishly wound yourself up in demanding financial obligations…
In many respects, I’m lucky that I get to take time out to experience this sort of self-imprisonment and to explore its potential as a creative outlet. I think my ideal fate would doom me to “luxuriate in the most immaculate of prisons (358).” As I’m doing now in my YoS… carpeting weaving in a digital world in my own prison.
Written by ina on Thursday, 14 of August , 2008 at 5:02 am Tags: YoS
The Blood of Flowers (hardcover, reviewer’s ed, sent to me par avon ages ago), as I was reading about a somewhat stereotypical scenario of sweatshop worker-carpet children-weavers, how their hands grew disproportional and their legs became un-useable due to how they spend their whole days knotting carpets… for some reason I thought of the similarity between that and computers, the whole modern analogue of chained to a terminal. I’m also starting to realize I’ve put myself in a self-ordained sweatshop in my YOS. I literally wake up, turn on the computer (or screen), spend outrageous hours glued to the terminal, and sleep maybe 3 days later, and cycle-repeat +5 hours later.
Incidentally, as with most of my blog postings, the YoS list is totally ephemera… must have written it and totally forgotten about the list. Some things on the list I haven’t even touched, while others not quite at the originally planned dates, and then others have evolved into something totally different.
I’m thinking of the RFL prom - the immersive virtual prom event on Second Life created by the passion of numerous designers, to benefit ACS through Relay for Life. I’m also thinking of data loss, oil paintings, and quantum mechanics… the ephemeralness of everything coherent.
A younger me used to find it apalling and infuriating that great canvases of oil paintings would burn in a building fire. And be lost forever. I used to regard cases like that with the naive innocence of someone with too much pride in her own era’s distinction. I’d scoff and think — had they done that digitally, it would exist forever. And yet…
The great works of art from the ancient past will outlive the great works of this era. Modern art is relative, and in the eye of the beholder. Digital data is ephemeral. Hard drives fail, CD’s fail, DVD’s fail, flash drives get lost. Simulators on Second life get wiped because their maintenance fees are far too great.
It’s amazing the amount of passion and love people put into Second Life - and the beauty of some of the work is just wow… The insane amount of time and tendency to details the creator puts in… just defies good reason… especiallly when the details won’t survive after its creation - the creator, galvanized by more things to create would never look at it again… the detail, being to subtle and fine, would get overlooked by others, especially when there are a thousand others. (”The greater you are, the less of each of your works.”) And yet, I guess the only thing that really matters is the experience. There’s no gaurantee that the end product will survive or what sorts of freak accidents would prevent it from successfully reaching its destination. It is as Eshi says. It is all about the process of creating it. It is not about the end product, and yet the process of creating it is often unbearable in the horrible way - and while creating it you’re thinking about the end product. But, in the end, it is only about you. There’s a high chance no one will see it beyond you. And a high chance you’d never look at it after you’re done with it. It’s the process, and yet…
I guess that’s why in the middle of my personal life experiment in Second Life I start pursuing live theatre. I’d always strayed away from it after I “developed” my philosophy of life. Really, I studied physics thinking that knowing physics I would be able to understand everything else, and that really wasn’t it. Philosophy was more rhetoric and tenure politics than truth. And bioengineering was just unrigorous physics and luckiness. I used to pity people who spent their time doing art and that sort of stuff, since I thought they were so deep into their own niche they were “shallow” — savants, in a way… and yet, what I wanted to be was a savant too, actually a savant polymath, if that makes sense… Anyway though, live theatre is often not recorded not because of technical reasons but because of politics - recording rights and all. In Second Life, live theatre can’t always be recorded “live” because of lag and “ruthing” and gray-unrezzed-textures - they often render the view not as optimal, and a substantial amount of postwork becomes necessary. Thus, in Second Life, you’re lucky if you see things “in the eye of the creator,” textures rezzed and sculpties rezzed and everything as beautiful as intended.
The other element of a live event involving multiple people is that it isn’t always easy to get all of them together simultaneously. Some things only happen once in a lifetime - once in all of creation and existence. The extreme amount of anti-entropy required and butterfly effect and the mess that might precipitate an event. It’s a miracle it happened. And even if the medium has limited reach due to technological lackings… I guess I was lucky to have taken a part in it.
And then back to data. The loss of it. The capital necessary to maintain it. And even then there’s the possibility of these digital bytes succumbing to its own butterfly effect as random cables suffer random effects to sudden blow up a huge data center. I’m thinking about the no-cloning theorem in quantum computing. And I’m thinking of paintings, the massive oil canvases. They can’t really be cloned either - taking a photo just isn’t the same, and even so-called restorations where a lesser paints over the work of the master…
But I’m thinking about simulators on Second Life again, and the beautiful things created on them… and then destroyed on them because of the cost to maintain these simulators. It’s just such a pity when copying data is so easy in other digital mediums, and yet so hard in the infrastructure of Second Life. Why isn’t there an archive.org for Second Life?
I dunno, I guess I have a super-weak weak spot for beauty. If told that the only way I can immortalize beauty if only for the span of another’s lifetime were to lose my own, yet pass on what transpires of it, I would… You live and then you die.
P just sent me a new word called Hikkomori, which I immediately wikipedia’ed. While the researcher who coined the word had initially thought the phenomenon secular to Japan, Hikkomori actually exist all over the world. They’re basically young adults who are in a state of flux–and thus have chosen to withdraw from society.
I can’t say I’m housebound as a refusal to interact with physical society… I’m basically just trying to settle some personal conflicts that ought to be settled internally. I have a background in physics and engineering… but when I visualize myself as a physicist or engineer twenty years later, I usually wind up with a panic-attack. Another part of me wants to be an artist.
It used to be that I regarded any work that didn’t have tech innovation to be menial and in vain — spending hours and hours doing pixel art, for example, may yield a beautiful end result, but doesn’t yield any “net work.” But, the thing about modern science and engineering is that it’s all messy and ephemeral and based on the wrong paradigm :-O. Everyone’s basically just finger painting on a dirty canvas.
So, what of the recluse who locks herself up in some cloister and dreams up beautiful equations all day and then burns them all up so that they remain hers… It’s what E said about art being not about the end product, but the actual process. In the end, what you actually get to make all relies on your own perception of your work… and, that’s process dependent.
I for one hate waste, and would try to make something out of everything. Eventually, at least. I have a tendency to fall madly in love with projects and then lose interest before completion.
It’s also about what K said about doing what you enjoy… And, I enjoy taking photos of fake people in a fake world… currently more than any other occupation in the world. (Yes, there *is* that annoying part of me that wouldn’t shut up, the part that keeps at it with the mantra: “you are *so* wasting your life; you are *so* wasating your life; you are *so* wating your life; you are *so* wtng your life…)
I keep comments off on this blog for a reason, but people have been emailing and IMing me about how my blog is both too impersonal and also too personal! When I started designing the layout, I had intended this blog to be the update blog for IC-E. But then I considered one of the only reasons IC-E came up… more or less as a holistic mechanism for creative release to keep me sane during my YoS. So, I guess the only way to placate both parties is to make my blog both personal and impersonal!
Many have asked me about my love life, and a few have been blatant enough to refer to it as my sex life. Officially, I am engaged to a brilliant med school junkie. But, Hamlet has driven me to a nunnery (read: my YoS), and so we’re separated as I try to find meaning in my art, forget the fact that I once had uncannily ambitious dreams in physics and bioengineering, and reminisce over all that’d occurred before… and as he figures out whether he’d MD/Ph.D or just defect to straight-on Ph.D. We’re technically engaged, but neither of us is sentimental or traditional enough to favor the ring. (I am the type who would cry if you buy me a dozen roses — it’s $100+… and what a waste! Rationally, I have allergies… and roses when you can buy me a nifty cool tech toy or fund my Software Sponsorship Foundation with the same amount!)
But, recently, though, my current SL relationship feels much more real. And it’s crazy because we have no idea what the other looks like — and the romance actually developed significantly back when we were in text chat only. The guy is actually bound in his own version of the YoS, and so… I dunno.
But, enough about me. Here’s something that might be of interest to you:
The Jan 28 Issue of Time featured an article advertised as “The Science of Romance.” But, I only picked it up because of an extremely long and slightly painful and maybe even bloody toilet session (lol, too personal?). Time sends free print issues to me, so every once in a while I fish through the magazine pile in the bathroom and feel obligated to read it — anyway, so while the web version I linked doesn’t show the article cover image… which flaunted Hamiltonian and Lagrangian dynamics, canonical variables and all that, a la equations H= and , I should mention I was only somewhat disappointed that the article didn’t explain how these equations related to love. But, the point is that I did learn something interesting that might explain for why SL relations often lead to childless marriages in RL or mere brief encounters.
Other than the usual things, the article mentioned two interesting points. Physical contact that allow for smell or taste can transmit the adequate MCH from partner to partner so that each can determine biologically compatible for reproduction. Women who are on birth control typically fail in this MCH detection.
Given the limitations of smell transmission when two parties are separated by distances of hundreds or thousands of miles, I guess the first physical meeting might be either shocking — “OMG, our MCH are sooo like incompatible” or the more optimal. I think most people would react out of politeness or nostalgia (the “addiction” part of the brain, according to this article) and attempt to believe and force belief in the latter.
In other news, I started to continue work on this (still untitled!) urban fantasy story I became obsessed with sometime in mid-2006. Its paradigm rests on a scientific-ish framework for your usual magick and all that… but also involves the concept of reincarnation, quite heavily. This whole SL/Internet-based romance thing where the other party does not actually get to experience much of the other party other than voice or perhaps a pointful and postedited (and thus unrepresentative and inaccurate) photo… and the fact that people still go crazy for each other despite this stoic technicality! In light of how the Internet allows people with potentially incompatible biologies to connect, I’m going to make the strong conjecture that the Internet and virtual worlds were inevitable because they’re fate’s will to overcome the randomness of biology’s “body assignment” to allow for estranged souls — destined soulmates — to connect, life after life.
Today I finally sent off a “once-over” edit of my NaNoWriMo piece for the Freedom in Fiction contest. It has been a long while since I attempted something as ambitious as writing an ideas novel.
I also got the skeletons of a simple app that pulls from my flickr photos setup for the public portfolio of Ina Centaur Photography.
In other news, dealt with a greater dose of drama than I would have liked for the day -.-
What a great way to lessen productivity!
Written by ina on Tuesday, 1 of January , 2008 at 12:01 am Tags: beginnings, YoS
The official first moment to my “Year of Seclusion (YoS)” now begins. I feel somewhat giddy as I write this, but here goes… this is the very first post to my new blog (designed from scratch just yesterday) and my year-long social experiment, aka, my “Year of Seclusion.” Basically, it’s an entire year where I remain housebound accessing and doing everything I can’t do locally from the net.
(And, yes, the post timestamp was fudged to appear so perfectly perfect. <3)
A 25-year old American polymath of Taiwanese ancestry pretending to be old and Caucasian in Second Life. Semi-retired independent scholar also dabbling as an independent artist in new media, particularly theatre and the humanities—notably Shakespeare. Programmer, playwright and novelist. Formal academic background in http://portfolio.inacentaur.com/ina/scientist, philosophy, and bioengineering.
This is largely a personal blog which isn't always up-to-date. There's no one definitive way to stalk me ;-).
