The Human Analogue in Mixed-Reality - placing crowd screens for, 'A Murder of Crows' composition - Videos

In the Company of Strangers: This is a video from 2008. It shows my avatar, Rollo Kohime, building screens which will become simulacra of commuter crowds flowing through the station. The crowd is composed of images of real people taken in the real Wellington Railway Station. Intermixed with these images are photos taken in-life of avatars visiting the station. At this point in the development of the crowd presence in the station, I wanted to imbue into the space, a feeling of indeterminacy, of threat, a tenuous sense of discomfort in the space, where I envisioned the crowd taking on the identity of a flock of dark, flapping beings - an active expression of diaspora, of loss, of the pathos present in leaving. Rollo takes us on a walkthrough of the crowd and endeavours to demonstrate human/telepresence analogue properties of transformation. Transformation of my intent in Real Life, to imbue this virtual space with texture, colour, feeling, illusion, movement through a space, in the creation of a fully-immersive mixed-reality connection between my Second Life Wellington Railway Station and the Real Life station in Wellington NZ Aotearoa. To quote Ashley Ferro-Murray in 'Networked Performance' on Turbulence.org - Ferro-Murray is commenting on Erin`s assertion that: '... where technology is less a tool than an active assemblage of potential techniques that feed from and move with a becoming-body ...' This is an accurate description of how I perceive my avatar and station build in Second Life, not as a tool for my ideas, but as an assemblage of feeling and perception which is informed by my desires and intentions in both worlds. The human analogue in mixed-reality.

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