Last month I mentioned Avatars, an upcoming documentary on Second Life from two French filmmakers, produced in association with Paris news organization Libération. It included a link to a clip featuring an interview with an LA resident named "Carlee Cummings", who described her clothing optional experiences in-world, which the producers subsequently took down, to make sure permissions were fully secured.
It's back up now, and it's worth a watch. As I said then, "It's become a truism that the exotic dancer onstage is probably not young, gorgeous, or even a woman, in real life. Well, sometimes she's not. And sometimes, she is."
For that matter, all the several interviews on the "Avatars" page are fascinating. And as it turns out, several of the interviews include another level of unreality.
"They are actors that played just a few week or days [in] Second Life," Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita tell me by e-mail, "and they just had to tell us how they were born." In other words, actors playing people playing avatars. "It will be a strange film between documentary and fiction where the audience wouldn’t know what is going on, where is the frontier between the virtual and the real, and how is it transmuted." Reality is folded over several times. To add yet another layer, I uploaded a screenshot of the Carlee Cummings interview taken from YouTube, to create a screenshot of an avatar watching an actor talking about being an avatar.
The final film should be broadcast on French television, and hopefully, elsewhere around the world; I'll post updates as they arrive. Meantime, check out the site.
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