I logged in to Second Life today to discover two things: 1) My auction bid on the land in Farstone won, which means good things, and 2)
Sugar Seville clued me in to a conceptual performance piece by an avatar called MGhandi Chakrabarti, driven around by an artist called
Joseph Delappe.
MGhandi was commemorating the real Ghandi's famous walk to the sea to harvest salt. He was doing it by walking the equivalent distance on Second Life, using a treadmill hooked to his computer. Walking on the treadmill made his avatar move forward. And of course
he 'blogged about it.
To me, this sort of thing has tremendous appeal. I've been simboarding the length of roads and rights-of-way all over mainland just to see where they go. MGhandi had been walking for weeks on Second Life, and today was to be his final 7 miles.
When I showed up on Eyebeam Island at the start, many were there. We hiked around that island a little bit, and then off to Paris 1900 island, where we re-enacted Ghandi's famous base jump from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Then it was time for me to go take care of some other stuff, so I left the group.
Later, I found MGhandi all alone in a far-flung corner of the universe, and shortly after we were joined by Qyxxql Merlin, who
writes about his experience in his livejournal.
We found a virtual Kaaba, which Qyxxql was keen on visiting with Ghandi. Because we all know the story. So we went there. Nearby was a Palestinian Holocaust Museum, which was apparently still under construction. After this, I suggested we visit virtual Gitmo, in keeping with the oppression theme.
Virtual Gitmo is on a series of islands owned by the Annenberg Foundation, and as yet contain many big open spaces. And hiking through these open spaces, MGhandi said: That's the final mile!
So we stood for pictures (I'm on the left):
I was glad to have an opportunity to walk around with virtual Ghandi, and even to reach the sea with him.
And now, I'm reading about one of Joseph Delappe's other projects, called
dead-in-iraq. Which is a little heavy for this happy 'blog entry. Please go look, though.
Comments (4)
This is incredible! I loved the pictures of his manual treadmill setup with a MBP too (http://saltmarchsecondlife.wordpress.com/page/4/)
And he gave you a walking stick :P
I looked at dead-in Iraq ... moving , and admirable that the artist had this idea to turn the army's pr game into a memorial. I only hope that he was in some way able to change some people's minds.
i think that if I ever tried second life i would never come out of it.
I think I'm going to have to settle for enjoying SL vicariously via your blog... my pokey internet connection just makes the whole thing frustrating.
@BettyDoesLife - Indeed. Look what happened to me.