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Remediating the Stars: Rob Wright’s ‘Watch the World(s)’ Machinima.
Abstract
See: http://prezi.com/44-dhy-opmx4.
The natural systems that humans value and upon which we depend are under pressure.
Yet too often humans appear trapped in denial, continuing to engage in harmful and
unsustainable practices. Capitalism’s necessary components of commodification and continual
growth are primary drivers of both environmental degradation and our ability to blind ourselves
to it or depict it as an inevitable “price of progress.” This opens our economic system and the
ideologies of consumption and commodification that underlie it to critical challenge.
The mechanism by which this system reproduces itself is an obvious focus of critics, who
have pointed out that capitalism uses our informational and entertainment media as a “culture
industry” (Jhally, 1989) to reproduce itself, thereby shaping our thinking and constraining our
choices. Yet, as Jenkins and others have shown, this is not a one-way, hypodermic model of
influence.
The multiuser virtual world Second Life represents the emergence of a somewhat new
medium that is groundbreaking in its presentation of an immersively convincing world that
visitors can inhabit and even co-create. SL tends to reproduce the ideologies of its builders and
users, and its convincing nature creates a powerful presumption of reality and truth; it tends to be
experienced as something as natural and inevitable as the real world. Because it is largely user-
created, however, it is a place where ideologically-founded depictions of the natural world can be
deconstructed regularly and habitually in the act of consuming them. It also offers a relatively
democratized public sphere in which competing visions of reality can be experienced.
I begin with a review of critical theory about the role of media in the formation and
reproduction of ideologies about the natural world. Following an explanation of Remediation
Theory—which provides insight into the way something as clearly artificial as a virtual world
can be enthusiastically engaged as real—I also discuss the rhetorical power of images, followed
by a discussion of “virtual nature” as it has been presented in various forms up to and including
Second Life. I conclude a detailed study that entails both close readings of SL “builds” as well as
interviews with its users and an examination of the way descriptions of these virtual
constructions circulate out in other media.
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