The New Yorker magazine recently published a capsule review of Jason Spingarn-Koff's Second Life documentary Life 2.0, which I wrote about last year here. To my knowledge, this is the most extended coverage of Second Life ever run by the magazine, easily the media world's most influential authority on modern arts and culture. Fortunately, reviewer Richard Brody gets the movie, and by extension, the most interesting aspects of Second Life itself. Sample:
[Jason Spingarn-Koff] takes off from his own ingenious confection of a documentary-filmmaker avatar (or alter ego) whom he implants in its open-ended virtual world. He films computer screens with no borders, as if putting viewers into the graphic creations while he listens to his obsessives describe the function and emotional power of their created personae... [The interviews] suggest the porous boundaries between the fictive and the concrete, the power of role-playing in defining real identities, and the risky self-discoveries that may result.
Big congrats to Jason, very few indie movies get a review in The New Yorker, let alone one as incisive as this. Read the rest here, and check out my write-up and video interview with Jason here. (Video also embedded after the break.)
Unless you subscribe to the magazine (or can bum one off a neighbor--lucky me) you'll only get a taste of the review.
Still, glad to see The New Yorker cover SL. Cain't hurt none. NYC has been full of obsessed cultural creatives for a long time, inventing their own realities. Warhol left Pittsburgh for The Big Apple, after all.
Should not be a stretch for the magazine to get what is most interesting about SL. They get Facebook, too, as Sherman Alexie's recent "The Facebook Sonnet," published in the May 16 issue, attests:
Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let’s undervalue and unmend
The present. Why can’t we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let’s exhume, resume, and extend
Childhood. Let’s play all the games
That occupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one’s search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church
Let’s sign up, sign in, and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.
Posted by: Ignatius Onomatopoeia | Monday, June 06, 2011 at 06:09 PM
While I've not been a big fan of The New Yorker (too far removed from my cultural context to be relevant), I must say that I love that poem :)
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Tuesday, June 07, 2011 at 07:43 AM
Good find - hopefully Second Life will get more coverage in the 'creative' rather than 'sensationalist' media.
Posted by: Hitomi Tiponi | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 02:45 AM
Now that it's more than a year later, how can we see the full documentary?
Posted by: Stone Semyorka | Saturday, June 11, 2011 at 03:42 AM