In the Company of Strangers

In The Company of Strangers



No need to watch the entire video, but I've posted it because I was intrigued by the way that Second Life avatars and environments were mixed with real life scenes, sometimes actually within Second Life through television sets. Other scenes were combined with Second Life through editing software techniques so that various layers were created.

Also, I took at look at the blog associated with this video. The master's student who made this video was concerned with indeterminacy and how it acts "as a significant governing factor in the articulation of our relations with others, reinforcing our description as time-based entities traversing the passage of the everyday". Mike Baker, the master's student, also talks of the "Roaming Body" and how "our meetings and encounters with people frequently manifest as disjunct mis-communiqués and dis-engagements".

I think this is especially true in the parts of the world that have access to computers and cellphones etc. We always seem to be on the go with something else to attend to. But, in other countries that I've been, people have related in entirely different ways. In the countryside of Northern India men would sit under a tree for hours and drink chi tea and talk. In Quito, Ecuador parks were filled with men in the middle of the day playing soccer and chess. Granted, this was largely due to the economic situation at the time due to the dollarization of the country, but the fact remains that people were relating differently. It was not a quick hi and by or a few words, but afternoons passed together on a regular basis.

So as I think about us as "time-based entities", I wonder how the concept of this has changed over the generations. How was time experienced 15,000 years ago, 5,000years ago, 300 years ago, 50 years ago, 10 years ago? What factors have contributed to the ways in which we experience time? How will multi-user virtual environments or chips implanted in the brain capable of downloading information change how we experience time and space? How is time experienced in the same moment by different people in different countries with differnt cultural and social values? Well, these are just some questions and thoughts that arose from watching this video and reading Baker's blog.