Part 1
on Monday the Allotment group met with cubistscarborough and risa in Second Life to look at our virtual plot on the Leeds Met Island. 2 of the diggers had already started working on the plot and turning the 'soil'? oh and finding out other potentials of the site, motorbikes and football. We persuaded cubistscarborough to give us another plot next door so that we could do a copy of the real plot - Plot 18 on Woodhouse Moor - and have an experimental one to test out ideas.
The discussion brought up lots of questions on the purpose and design of the virtual sites which reflected back onto the real plot in Hyde Park, creating an interesting two way discussion around the function of allotments and more philosophically around the purpose and function of design.
Risa told us that 2nd life people dont need to eat to exist so I wondered why we would grow anything, but then thinking about allotments and gardening, many people still participate in shows where a giant onion or a prize leek are displayed and admired but not consumed. We also wondered about the purpose of digging virtually, is there a point or does this translate into building objects and scripting so they can 'do fancy things'? So then parallels in working patterns begin to emmerge between the real and the virtual. Can building an object be a therapeutic activity like many people get out of the act of digging. An optimistic side for the immaculate gardener was that weeds will only appear if they have been programmed into the site, but perhaps for the less particular the site will look too neat. This brings up other questions around nature and the control of nature, does the extreme control the virtual gardener have remove the excitement the real gardener has in the unexpected, the crooked, the surprise, even the frustrations of battling the pests. Do pests have a purpose in the real? And if anyone knows, please tell me which is the snail to keep in your garden that eats the other snails ( or is this a rural myth?)? Brown, orange or black?
Part 2 tomorrow.
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2 comments:
Actually, it's Cubist Scarborough and Kisa Naumova, but we're not offended that you got our names wrong.
It was interesting that a debate sprang up about simulation of the real allotmment vrs a more abstract, experimental approach. I've written some stuff about this here:
http://emerge.elgg.org/mod/forum/forum_view_thread.php?post=276
Also, there is some interesting info about building communities in multiuser virtual environments here:
http://emerge.elgg.org/mod/forum/forum_view_thread.php?post=309
on a tangent from the question about snails - Nematodes are the tiny parasitic 'worms' that eat slugs
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematode)
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