At the opening of the RL exhibition of CONSTRUCT (11-18 May, HUMlab, Umeå Univeristy), Selavy Oh gave an artist-talk via Second Life, moderated by James Barrett at HUMlab. Below is the essence of her talk from the opening, with slight modifications for this web publication. The questions were prepared by Yoshikaze curator Sachiko Hayashi and HUMlab sim manager James Barrett.
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Jim: Would you mind beginning by introducing yourself Selavy and telling us about who/what you are and what/how you do?
Selavy: Selavy Oh has been created as an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life in 2007. She started in the same year with her first art project in Second Life. Selavy thus acts as something between a pseudonym and a representation of her creator. You can think of her as impersonating specific aspects, like a novelist may choose a pseudonym, not to hide behind it, but to express different aspects of authorship. In this sense, talking about “Selavy” and “me” is most of the times synonymous, but sometimes useful to distinguish not only between the avatar and the person, but also between the different facets of identity.
Jim: The diary-form of the construction seems to be intrinsic to CONSTRUCT. Could you explain something of how the work could be seen to function as a diary?
Selavy: What happens when you write in a diary? Of course, some people write down “got up at 7am, drank a coffee, had lunch with Jim, went to bed early”, but that’s not the type of diary I’m referring to. It is rather the idea of keeping a record of selected thoughts, feelings, moods, ideas, etc. The important part is, of course, that you do that regularly. And that is exactly what I did in CONSTRUCT: I added one room each day. Every one of the 75 days of the residency has its own room, often relating to the topic of the residency itself, a time capsule of ideas, artifacts, or reference to other work.
If you read a diary, you may get an idea about the writer and her life. If you visit CONSTRUCT, you may get an idea about Selavy Oh and her residency.
Jim: There are bots in the work and this is the first time we have worked with bots in the Yoshikaze Residency Program here at HUMlab. Could you explain something of the bots and what they do in CONSTRUCT?
Selavy: Bots are avatars, which are controlled solely by software, that is, there’s no person behind. But since they look exactly the same as an avatar with a person behind, they are an extremely interesting aspect of virtual worlds. The bots in CONSTRUCT are all called Selavy Oh, they look like Selavy Oh, but they are not, let’s say, engaging you in a conversation. Nonetheless, they are interacting with the visitor in a way: the visitor can sit inside the same day together with the Selavy-bot and perform the same movements. So, on one level of explanation, the bots are actors or dancers playing the role of the artist and performing a simple choreography, which is connected to that day.
Jim: I wonder if you could say something just to introduce the transformation/exchange of the rooms and temporal transparency of the outer shells (walls) in CONSTRUCT? How are they triggered, for example? What are the emerging patterns? Where does the material come from as I noticed very specific references to avatars when they enter the space?
Selavy: The cubic rooms, or days as I prefer to call them, have been set up one after the other just as you would when writing a diary. But the linear structure of a written diary doesn’t, except trivially as a line, translate to a spatial structure. In space, each day, i.e., each cube can have six neighbors instead of just the usual two, the before and the day after. That means that the order of days becomes somewhat arbitrary. You can start shuffling them around and permute them. There are several ways to do that, but I chose a simple one: from time to time, two days randomly exchange their positions. Thus, after a certain time, the whole structure will be different, even though its overall shape remains the same. Since each day has at least an entry and an exit - two walls are missing – the paths you can take within the structure will be different. There are even days that are inaccessible at a given moment, but maybe tomorrow they will be part of an open room. The visitor can also trigger exchanges or transformations: two of the days change position when the visitor enters, there’s a day that will cause all walls, also those of other days, to become transparent, another one is encaging the whole structure in a huge sphere, yet another one performs a Google search for the name of the avatar, etc. The visitor changes the installation by being present and, in some cases, this change is not just temporary, but affects the future of the installation.
Jim: Developing further the idea of interactivity, could you give us some of the details concerning the interactivity of CONSTRUCT- especially the chairs which automatically change the camera view of the avatars who are seated?
Selavy: Two days contain chairs on which a visitor can seat her avatar. Upon sitting, the camera, i.e., the viewpoint of the visitor, will be taken over by the script attached to the chair and will temporarily loose control of the avatar and the user interface. The scripted camera movement takes you through all the days, but unlike a video loop it has random elements and is never completely the same.
While interactivity usually means participation of the visitor - you can click on objects to trigger an event, can bump into things and make them break, etc. – I use the chairs to temporarily take away that participatory aspect. Suddenly, the visitor is sitting again in front of the computer screen watching a moving scene instead of embodying her avatar and being inside the virtual installation.
Jim: Your work requires the visitor to have some SL skills in relation to the space where the work is operating, but at the same time you present videos of the actions of CONSTRUCT. For me this is very interesting in the sense of where the work is located. Is it a virtual work, and the videos are documents of that work, or are they each an extension of each other? If one is part of the other then I wonder about the avatar as viewer/participant. Do avatars have art also? Or are they our keys to access the work, as they cannot share in the videos?
Selavy: For me the virtual world is a medium, just like a canvas. The work is realized using the virtual world. The videos are not documents of the work, but an extension in a different medium; they are part of the work. Documenting a virtual installation such as CONSTRUCT with screenshots or video is impossible, anyway, because the participatory aspect cannot adequately be captured. Of course, just as a visitor of the gallery space needs the physical skills (and make the effort) to leave home and walk into the gallery, just as the visitor of a web site needs to know how to navigate through the pages, the SL visitor needs some basic skills to navigate a virtual space. In this case, that means also you need to know how to fly or teleport, because CONSTRUCT is not a physical space with stairs and elevators and so on, just like a web site is not a book. Thus, as a visitor of the HUMLab gallery space, you experience part of the work. As a visitor in Second Life, you experience another part. The work as such has no single location: it is distributed.
Jim: The permutations of CONSTRUCT are very interesting, you have already stated that permutation “is indeed one of the recurring themes in the installation. There are several days with permutations such as the CONSTRUCT letters, the 10 cubes inside a day, etc. the top and the bottom of the whole thing are also permuting, the chair sequence permutes days and their descriptions, the days permute, - and in the video, which takes up this theme, we have the permutations again.” Could you elaborate further on the permutations? I am particularly interested in if you attach meaning to them or if you expect the audience of the piece to do so?
Selavy: The permutation as a central motif in this work appears already in the first announcement, the little text on the Yoshikaze blog. And of course the visitor is welcome to attach a meaning to the permutations. Maybe the accidental neighborhood of temporally distant days evokes a feeling, a thought, a new association. The visitor is a participant; the permutations provide freedom of interpretation. As mentioned above, the days are created like entries in a diary, but then transferred into a three-dimensional structure like a stack of boxes. But is that initial order the most meaningful? Was it meaningful at all except for its occurrence in time? Instead of understanding the diary as a storyline, we can read it differently. The nine letters, which may by chance again form the word CONSTRUCT at some moment, certainly do have a preferred order. But what if we try to imagine all the possible configurations of days, to look at them at once, instead of looking for the one, which maybe doesn’t happen or which we just missed?
Jim: As you say the permutations are days, and I notice in the exhibition space, each day is represented or replaced by a code sequence. It is as if time and space have joined in action. Could you comment on this?
Selavy: As I mentioned above, time and space are indeed in a way equated in CONSTRUCT. The code – one page of code per day – is the instruction for what happens in each of the rooms, each day. Some days need lots of code. Others do not require specific code, because they contain only a static texture or a specific shape. You can see the code as a reduced form of the work – the code as concept.
Jim: What is the future of CONSTRUCT?
Selavy: CONSTRUCT will continue to change. With 75 cubes and one exchange per minute, the chance that you see the same configuration again until the end of the solar system is almost zero. CONSTRUCT will be transferred to one of the Soup Sims owned by Mab MacMoragh. Thanks, Mab!
