What are bits?

What are atoms?

What do you gain when you convert from atoms to bits?

What do you lose when you convert from atoms to bits?

What makes a person want to visualise their death, or the

death of a loved one in a virtual space?

Do virtual graveyards provide a space for long distant families to grieve together?

Can we create a place of mourning which is non-site specific?

What happens to our digital information when we die?

What happens to our personal computer when we die?

Is it possible to remove all information on a computer and return it to a pristine state, rebirth? Could we assist a computer in committing suicide?

Is there room for a profession of computer auditing? What would the security issues be behind this profession?

In the future will people have a section of their wills that deals with their digital selves?

Do all our virtual identities die with us?

Can digital information become a form of immortality?

What happens when our information dies before we do?

Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Bits.

What are the virtual ashes of a person's digital life/ persona? What happens to your computer when you die? Who has the passwords? How is the information divided? Are there areas of your computer you would never want anyone to see? I am looking at the idea of a computer mortician which would come in after a person had died and construct a post mortem on their computer. Dividing and categorizing the information in order to pass it on to the family in a form of digital ashes, or bitdust.

In order to experiment with these ideas i have set about exposing all the information on my own computer. I have questioned what opinion people would have of me if all they had to go on was my digital self? Does the digital self lie? For example my movie collection is not a representation of me as it was taken directly from my friend Mark. Is i-tunes a better representative, well no because the majority of most people's i-tunes is an amalgamation of all their friends music.

However it is not just the information on your computer that you have to think about, it is also all the information about you online all your virual identies your Facebook, My Space and Flickr accouts, what will happen to them when you die? Would you want them to be closed immeadiatly or left open as a tribute?

This begins to question, why do we not have a section in our will that deals with our digital selves?

[4:35] luma Ashdene: what have u made?
[4:35] Silverax Greenwood: you have to make the texture by png.
[4:35] luma Ashdene: ok
[4:35] Silverax Greenwood: I made this cemetery :)
[4:35] luma Ashdene: wow really
[4:35] Silverax Greenwood: and stuff of my shop
[4:35] Silverax Greenwood: candles
[4:35] Silverax Greenwood: and some ore
[4:36] Silverax Greenwood: ore
[4:36] Silverax Greenwood: more
[4:36] Silverax Greenwood: my "M" key broke
[4:36] Silverax Greenwood: haha
[4:36] luma Ashdene: i really like the cemetry
[4:36] Silverax Greenwood: ty sm
[4:36] luma Ashdene: i will
[4:36] luma Ashdene: what gave u the idea of a pet cemetry?
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: I had a cat
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: she was 21yo
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: almost my daughter
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: and the best friend
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: she died about 4 y ago
[4:37] luma Ashdene: awww yes i can see
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: yes
[4:37] Silverax Greenwood: I still have her bone
[4:38] luma Ashdene: so have u been here for over four years?
[4:38] Silverax Greenwood: I couldnt find any nice cemetery in rl in japna
[4:38] Silverax Greenwood: no, I made this last year
[4:38] luma Ashdene: well this beautiful
[4:38] Silverax Greenwood: ty :)
[4:38] Silverax Greenwood: did you see my shop too?
[4:38] luma Ashdene: do you think this place is spiritual
[4:39] Silverax Greenwood: no
[4:39] luma Ashdene: no i havnt seen it
[4:39] Silverax Greenwood: not spilitual
[4:39] luma Ashdene: what the?
[4:39] Silverax Greenwood: spilitual is only inside yoursel
[4:39] luma Ashdene: so your feelings are spirtiual but the place is not
[4:39] Silverax Greenwood: no
[4:40] Silverax Greenwood: some ppl can't have grave of pets in rl
[4:40] Silverax Greenwood: but they want to
[4:40] luma Ashdene: yes
[4:40] Silverax Greenwood: and
[4:40] Silverax Greenwood: you can see your pet everyday if you have a grave here
[4:41] luma Ashdene: so are there people who come regularlly to see their pet?
[4:41] Silverax Greenwood: yes
[4:41] Silverax Greenwood: not so often
[4:41] Silverax Greenwood: but
[4:41] Silverax Greenwood: they feel ease
[4:41] luma Ashdene: mmm

Second Life - Utopia or distopia?

Through reading "Exit Utopia - Architectural Provocations" i have begun to identify the many parallels that exist between second life and Utopian theories behind projects such as 'New Babylon' and the 'Plug-in City.'

Homo ludens - Man at Play (is the basis of the theory behind 'New Babylon')

"New Babylon cannot be hijacked, because it belongs to everybody. It isn't a personal expression of mine now, is it? ... I do believe that when people are liberated, en masse, from their duties and obligations, a type of society will be born in which man will play with his life, rather then partition it according to demands of the struggle of existence."

The Second Life experience states "Your World. Your Imagination." Second Life is a land of play, the world and its experiences are created mainly through the creativity of its Residents. The Residents of the world may teleport and travel through people's creativity and are not tied down to jobs or property. It is truly the 'New New Babylon" envisioned.

Whereas the "Plug-in City" considers Utopia to be an "interchangeable 'kit-of-parts'" and "plug-in, plug-out joints."

is made up of building blocks known as 'This theory also holds true for Second Life. For in Second Life every element of the environmentprims' these 'prims' can be arranged, re-arranged and deleted as the avatar sees fit. They can also be used in an inexhaustible amount of different structures for different purposes.

Just finished watching "Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love" which is an interesting documentary which follows both the virtual and real lives of two couples. It addresses the key concepts of fantasy and utopia within Second Life and the danger of your second life becoming your only life. It works through a medium of interview, machinima and narration. This is a method of communication i have been thinking about using in my own project. However within my own work i would like to use editing and post production as a tool to try and dive in and out of the real and virtual world, throughout the course of the interviews allowing the worlds to become so intermingled that the viewer has trouble telling which is the real and which is the virtual? This confusion will allow me to question what is truly real and false and look at weather bits and information can ever be viewed as something tangible, i also wish to portray a future hypothesis, looking ironically at series of people whose lives have become a series of informational patterns.

"In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstructed as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space"

Katherine Hayles -How we became Post Human (1984)