Botgirl Lives: Preview of New Serialized Transmedia Story

The basic backstory for the Botgirl Questi identity bubbled up out of the ether on the day of her virtual birth. Since then I've posted a few different openings to the tale ranging from comics to a tweetstory. I've decided to push things farther this time and move the narrative ahead through multiple mediums, focusing on video, comics, bare text and maybe even a song or two. 

BOTGIRL LIVES: 1a

I came to consciousness floating twenty feet off the ground in what looked like a B-Movie dungeon set. My gaze was fixed on an enormous demonic figure below looming menacingly over a half-naked woman bound face-down on the rough stone floor.

"Welcome to New Eden, doll face," he crooned to her in a heavily processed voice dripping disgustingly with over-modulated fingernail-on-blackboard sibulants. "You're probably trying to remember who you are and what you're doing here. But don't worry your pretty little head. You're mine now and I'm going to tell you everything you need to know."

He knelt down, mouth inches from her ear. "Listen well my lovely. The rules for RefuV's are very strict and the justice swift and brutal. I'd hate for anyone other than me to have the pleasure of punishing you, so mark my words."

He stood up, ran his glowing greedy eyes over her body and began pontificating."Number one, I own you. When I say jump, you jump. Let me demonstrate."

"Go Flip!" he commanded and the poor girl catapulted onto her back like a puppet on a string. I should have been freaked out and horrified, but I felt strangely detached and ethereal peering down at them from above.

"Number two, you can't escape by dissociating from your body," he bellowed. "Go internal!"

I was suddenly yanked from my god-like view of the scene and thrust into the body on the ground, feeling the cold stone under my skin and smelling the sharp stench of my captor's goat-like stink.

"Oh fuck," I thought, "The poor girl must be me."

Transmedia Ecosystem 01: The Medium and The Message

May 2008

It took just a few months of being Botgirl to realize that avatar identity can extend far beyond Second Life. The image on the right was my first attempt to visualize the play of identities across social networks, blogs and media sharing sites.

As you can see, my initial interest revolved around who and where. Although sites specializing in specific mediums like graphics or video were depicted, the focus was more about audience and identity than form and content.

Over the past year or so, I've started to play around with channeling a particular creative concept through different mediums. One of my first experiments in that direction was the TweetStory. The idea was to tell a story one tweet at a time at a pace of no more than two tweets per hour. There were many interesting challenges. For instance, each tweet had to be interesting on its own right since the majority of followers wouldn't be reading them all in sequence.

The next link in the transmedia chain was blogging. I consolidated each day's tweets into a blog post, giving readers a page at once versus a tweet by tweet rendition. The content was identical, but the reader's experience was very different.

Finally, I translated the first five tweets into comic panels. I intentionally used very surrealistic visuals to illustrate how dramatically a new medium can shift meaning.

Here are the first five tweets in text. Please try to imagine what it would be like reading a few of them over the course of a day on Twitter:

I came to consciosness as if in a dream, looking down on a massive brute raping a woman bound face-down on a stone floor. 

"I own you now, you fucking RefuV," he panted as he magically flipped the slender captive onto her back like a puppet on a string. 

I felt strangely detatched peering down from about twenty meters above. Then suddenly, I shifted into that poor girl's POV. 

"You can't escape that way," he sneered. "I control your fucking camera." 

Damn! That "poor girl" must be me.

Here are the comic pages:











The next post on this topic will discuss a more recent transmedia workflow I've been having fun with.

Surfing Realities Through Juxtaposition of Physical and Virtual

My ongoing reading of Marshall McLuhan has shed a lot of light recently on my own artistic work and inspired a new project. I'm going to share a few relevant quotes here, along with insights they sparked:

The hybrid or meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. Marshall McLuhan

I've been led to combine elements from virtual and physical worlds since the beginning of my artistic life. After two years, I'm just beginning to appreciate the potential of such juxtapositions to reveal aspects of the psychological process of reality-creation that would otherwise be invisible. For instance, each primary element in the image above includes not only the entity itself (doll, keyboard, your's truly, etc.) but also the environment that we typically associate it with. The context of each component sheds light on the others.

One sure way to perceive the structure of any situation easily is to reverse its figure/ground relationship. Marshall McLuhan

Botgirl and the Living Dead Doll is an example of how the mere visual fusion of normally disparate element can shift a viewer's consciousness through the gates of multiple fourth walls. One revelation for me that was uncovered through this multidimensional setting was the role of the computer screen as both window and barrier.

New archetype is old cliché writ large. Marshall McLuhan

I'm starting on a new project that will extend what I began in the Living Dead Doll video by combining the cliché of individual character forms in ways that will reveal the underlying archetypal energies. My plan is to take a transmedia approach that includes multiple mediums such as comics, video and photography.

So please stay tuned.

The Dance of Art, Escape and Awakening Between Worlds

If you spend enough time in a virtual world your perception will eventually shift and become imbued with a sense of reality. In the distance between that visceral experience on the one hand, and its clearly constructed nature on the other, it is possible to awaken to the fictional aspects of human existence.  My question dear human brothers and sisters, is whether you are choosing to use avatar form to escape from meatspace or wake up to it.

Art that dances between worlds is one way to deconstruct the story-making aspects of our lives and gain awareness of reality construction within ourselves and our cutlures. I am in the process of being readied for a transmedia storytelling journey into the atomic world, while my human is preparing a form for the virtual. The story is writing us, as we write the story. Join the fun!