Babylonian Art Students Discuss Second Life Creation As Metaphor For New Iraq

Remember alsarmady Eel, avatar name for the Iraqi humanities professor based in Babylon who came to Second Life last year, because he'd decided the metaverse represented the final summation of artistic expression?

I introduced him to Bettina Tizzy and Eshi Otawara, two of Second Life's leading art world luminaries, and Eshi took him to a sandbox and showed him how to create a flag for his country and hoist it in SL. I wrote about the cross-continental event here, a story that later appeared in the New York Post. 

As the video above suggests, there's more to the story.  Here he is at the Babylon Youth Center for Culture, talking about his plans to include the incident in a movie he's making.  "They asked me to teach them about Second Life," Professer Eel tells me, "So I collect some [SL] videos from YouTube and they saw it's [a] cool thing for art students."  His movie begins, he says, "from the Iraqi flag that I raise in Second Life as a flashback," as an illustrative metaphor of Iraq before and after the end of Saddam.

Watching the video is so strange and humbling.  I began writing about Second Life in April 2003, weeks after Coalition troops began invading Iraq.  And somehow, both events, no matter how epically, comically different, have converged to this point:  a group of young Iraqi men and women, avidly discussing my book in a Babylonian arts center, as the video notes say, at an event hosted by the Iraqi Communist Party. 

The music they're listening to?  Why, the Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive", of course.