Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Second Life Dumpster (2008) by eteam at the Sculpture Center. (via Sixteen Miles of String)
Does anyone actually use Second Life who isn’t an artist or grad student writing a thesis on it? Anyway, eteam, New York-based German artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger have a Rhizome Commission-winning project, Second Life Dumpster. An installation, as part of their work, is now on view at Long Island City’s Sculpture Center, in the exhibit “Degrees of Remove: Landscape and Affect.” (Here’s a review on Inhabitat.)
Previously, the artists purchased a 10-acre piece of land in rural Nevada for under $500 on eBay. The International Airport Montello “operates like a perpetuum mobile,
an impossible machine, which is perpetually in motion and sometimes on strike.” In other words, residents of Montello (population 67) playact, with a convenience store temporarily selling IAM gifts and bars masquerading as airport bars. The town organizes a culture about the nonexistent airport. More from the website. Moderegger said he wanted to “create something emerging temporarily—that is what a town is. There is nothing here, but in a way there is everything here.” (Video.)
For Second Life Dumpster (located here on SL) eteam wrote a script to collect items from Second Life users would otherwise trash, which shows the decay. (This month there are a lot of Obama and Palin posters.) Here is their activity log. Part of the project includes real life rebuilding of decaying Second Life objects. From their statement:
- Is there a need for avatars to get rid of their trash in some other way, then just clicking the delete button?
- What kind of waste will be disposed (objects, viruses, messages, behaviors, avatars, cache, histories, programs, etc.),
and how will this effect the appearance and “inner life” of our land and the dumpster?- Will the disposal site be a heap that builds up and grows bigger, or will it transform into compost, where “matter” decomposes and turns into new material?
Will we have to program “worms” to initiate this process? And, what will we do with the new substances?- In which way will we (or Second Life management) be able to control the potential directions of growth?
- Will we be able to create an aesthetically filthy area that sticks out from its artificially clean surroundings?
- What kind of reactions will the dumpster provoke in avatars that own land adjacent to our land?
- How will we be able to get rid of the land and the trash on it after the duration of one year?
“When we heard about Second Life for the first time, we imagined it to be a kind of utopia, where people would create things that are impossible to even think of in the Real World. But, even after SL replaced our first life for a while, we could not permeate the top layer. There is no shovel around to dig that ground, no way to go beyond the surface. Maybe that’s why we are currently investigating the possibilities of our SL land as a public dumpster — to fill the place with some kind of history by leaving traces, to introduce the decay script,” eteam said in a recent interview with Rhizome’s Marisa Olsen:
There is often an element of field work or research, which can involve performance, followed by videos, and installations. Does your take on virtuality apply to your take on documentation?
We are constantly trying to figure out this problem: If virtuality is the inherent ability or potential of something to come into existence, how do we picture this potential, how do we document it, what do we call it and how do we protect it from turning into a reality that will be fenced-in by its practicalities?
Until we worked in Second Life, we called physical access to a site “facing reality”. When we went out West and visited our property, we had to wear boots, hats, sun lotion and drink water. Despite the fact that we tried to stay as abstract as possible, we still had to deal with facts, listen to people, and stay around long enough to find out if a certain reality was present at the site, one that was waiting to be identified so it could temporarily emerge with a name, like “International Airport Montello,” for example. Now we are asking ourselves: Was this a reality, because it was based on two abandoned landing strips behind the town of Montello and therefore connected to the land? Did this reality temporarily manifest itself, because it had been innate to the air around this place anyway, or were we lucky, because we proposed our concept to a group of people who believed that “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve!,” as Dr. Ron, our airport manager, said.
And, how do we compare this experience to working on a piece of land in Second Life? A real invention versus an invented reality? Take this conversation we had recently with someone who visited the dumpster:
[12:50] eteam: mmhh, I am just trying to figure out what this whole world is about
[12:50] Rolando Ember: i noticed
[12:50] eteam: and on what level it operates. I get stuck a lot and in the end it’s just a relief that I can clean up this dump in order to make space for new stuff. How do you spend most of your time?
[12:52] Rolando Ember: either at my military base or exploring. I don’t take this seriously at all. How about you?
[12:53] eteam: I sort through trash and attach the decay script to objects
[12:54] Rolando Ember: is this all you do on here?
[12:54] eteam: what?
[12:54] Rolando Ember: tend to the dumpster
[12:54] eteam: yes, mostly. sometimes I go to freebie places and get some more trash
[12:55] Rolando Ember: what’s the fascination with trash?
[12:55] eteam: that it does not look like trash. that it always looks brand new, never looks used or worn-out. that’s why I asked you earlier how you decide what’s trash and what not. I can not get over that…
[12:56] Rolando Ember: why can you not get over it? It’s really not that deep.
“it always looks brand new, never looks used or worn-out.” That describes everything on the Internet. Design trends change but nothing fades or rips apart. There’s no reason to ever delete anything online. Even Treehugger says the environmental benefit from trimming your gmail account is negligible.
Think of a box of old photographs. There’s usually one mistake per roll — someone’s head is cropped out or yellow spots ruined another. At 30 or 40 years old, it seems wrong to throw out those photos now. But we think nothing of deleting digital images that come out poorly, as it doesn’t cost anything more to take several extra frames per shot.
Similarly, there is no reason to junk personal email except for peace of mind. All past billets doux courriel is in an eight-year old email account I only use for social network logins. I so infrequently need to check it, I sometimes wonder if Yahoo hasn’t just deleted the account by now. And if they did, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
The funny thing about romantic internet correspondence is at some point, one person or the other will say how much he or she wishes the text were instead on paper. It’s sort of like the inevitability of talking about 9/11 on a first date. But only in special circumstances will anyone send a letter by mail and it wouldn’t be the same. It would be formal, maybe less romantic. Writing email accesses different emotions than pen and paper. No drafts. No rewriting, as the delete key is intrinsic to the process (more on this here.)
If you’ve ever been a college student instant messaging someone who is just down the hall, you know just how easily secrets spill out with technology to mediate. We don’t record our conversations over drinks. That would be creepy. We shouldn’t. But we tend automatically save all of our instant message chat files. Is it worth it to hold on to these memories?
There’s a company called BigString that sends email as html, which they claim the average user can’t detect. This means you can edit or delete a message after it’s sent. It’s been around a couple of years, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone actually use it. So few circumstances would call for it.
What I like about eteam’s project is this idea of rather than throwing something out entirely, you’re handing discarded items to someone else. Handing over the responsibility of thinking about them. In practice, this is abused. Rather than activating the decay script, some avatars are simply leaving their trash on the SL lot, (in case, they get dumper’s remorse?)
A smart start-up might create a kind of time capsule for all of our “oh, do I really want to get rid of this?” e-clutter. Those images where you are smiling but your friend isn’t. There is some guy in the background. Five years later, he’s a famous actor. Don’t you wish you never deleted that picture?
Wrap up all of those personal emails from someone right now too painful to remember. Shove it in someone else’s storage with the promise it won’t be deleted and can be accessed whenever forever. It could be a physical place, a library of our unwanted digital things. He or she could save all of these things on disks. Maybe even activate some kind of “decay” like the eteam’s SL project: turn the letter into pdfs, yellow the paper year by year, and within five years the text might bleed into itself a little, in ten years, it’s even less legible.
Much is said about the need for curators in the digital world. Why, for example, link blogs will never go away, they’ll just grow more specialized. Much is also made about the search for permanence in a world of ephemera. Quite naturally, things go missing and they break and we can never wear or play with them again. The natural process of losing and forgetting is missing here.
Gmail has that wonderful grey area between save and delete — “archive.” What are needed are more diverse tools which help us deal with abundance in similar ways. Methods to keep things completely out of sight while never running the risk of losing that which we might want to see later… eventually.
Images by eteam from their website and Second Life log.
Previously:
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital
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