I’m Catarina Carneiro de Sousa, I teach at Escola Superior de Educação de Viseu and I collaborated, as visual artist, with Heidi Dahlsveen, a storyteller from Oslo University, in this project entitled Kromosomer.
Kromosomer was a storytelling performance that interacted with digital, virtual and social media, using characters from Norwegian legends as a motto to raise questions on alterety. Several artists participated in a "distributed" dramaturgy, where different participants contributed equally, but creatively independent, as I’ll describe later. The performance happened both in the actual and virtual worlds.
The background material for the project was collected from traditional oral Norwegian legends, Avatars were created on Second Life, based on their characters, an encounter with the supernatural, the unseen, the “other”, the not normal, the one that looks "different", which we want to distance ourselves from.
Folklorist Linda Dégh states that “legend contextualizes and interprets belief”. Belief is the core of the legend, but science or knowledge are a necessary counterweight when the legend occurs. It is as if life stumbles along the way, discovers something and moves on.
In Julia Kristeva’s concept of "abjection", the abject is located outside both subject and object, it is something else. CLICK!!!! The logic, the meaning is broken down because we lose distinction between subject and object, "I" and "the others".
Abject, as Julia Kristeva discribes it, is prior to the subconscious, it is an encounter with something primitive that has not yet manifested itself symbolically. Legends are already a way of trying to assimilate and give symbolic value to the meaningless. ?If meeting a character from folk legends can correspond to a meeting with avatars, can we infer that this meeting provides a tool to extend the language that can handle the feeling of meaninglessness? Often the legends portray the meeting with "the other" as a physical one, but by using avatars in the metaverse one can experience the embodiment of “the other”, thus creating a process of actually inhabiting alterity, possibly providing new tools to extend the language that can handle the feeling of meaninglessness.
Second Life avatars not only enable this meeting, they actually allow the embodiment of the uncanny. One can become “the other”. The Kromosomer avatars resulted from free interpretation of Norwegian legends characters through avatar design. Heidi Dahlsveen, the initiator of this project, commissioned me and Sameiro Oliveira Martins to build these avatars together. We were given a document where a number of characters were briefly described. We were inspired by this document but had total creative freedom for their reinterpretation. Three groups of avatars were built in articulation with virtual installations in which they were to be distributed. The Surekallen installation and avatars were based on the myth of a grain spirit associated with the fear of being the last to cut the grain. If this was the case, one had to accommodate Skurekallen through the winter, or even worse, one could be forced to sacrifice oneself and continue life as a grain spirit, in order to ensure the spirit’s existence. For this a harvested cornfield was created, where an old peasant, realizing he was the last to crop his corn, transfigures into Surekallen. This scene presented the whole concept of these avatars, the possibility of embodying “the other”, the legends became a pretext for the exploration of a different kind of body.
Through avatar manipulation in virtual environments, one can actually experience the embodiment of “the other”. Yee and Bailenson, who studied this process of inhabiting alterity, argue that “immersive virtual environments provide the unique opportunity to allow individuals to directly take the perspective of another”, and even suggest the possibility of this embodied perspective-taking having an impact on the reduction of negative stereotyping.
Here we can see the avatars distributed in the Surekellen instalation: the Peasant and Surekellen.
Two more installations were created in order to distribute other avatars: the Attganger installation sheltered four avatars, the ghost (here depicted) and its earthly family. Attganger means “walking back” – or to be more precise, it means ghost.
However, what inspired this group of avatars was the tale from a valley in Norway, the story of a child who dies and comes back. The child plays with her sisters and brothers, and the family grows so accustomed to the dead child that they forget she is really dead. We can see here the avatars of the ghost’s family and her self before passing away.
To create these avatars we imagined our own story, about the tragic death of a little girl on her birthday.
Her mother becomes so consumed with grieve, that she neglects her other daughter. The girl’s loneliness becomes unbearable, because she lost her mother as well as her sister. And that’s why her sibling comes back. To ease her sister’s sorrow.
The installation consisted of a dream-like children’s room, resting on a cloud, where one could hear the continuous sound of a music box.
On the walls one could see the old photographs of a mother and her two little girls.
“ The Ocean Avatars” gathered some of the water characters. Five avatars were given in the eggs of an enormous Sea Monster.
Lindorm was a big serpent that guarded a treasure and was able to take people down in the water to eat them.
Kraken was a horror from the sea. If the fishing was good, one should beware because Kraken could be around, one had to be ready to move the boat in a hurry.
Draugen was a drowned man who was never buried. He howled terribly at the sea as awarning. His scream sounded like that of someone in distress. Often he rolled himself up in a boat and made himself so heavy that the boat would sink.
Havfrue was a mermaid, half human and half fish. She was primarily seen at sunrise. Her face was beautiful and down her back, she had long, wavy hair, which she would braid while sitting on a rock.
Melusina was quite similar, but with a more tragic perspective. She was unloved because every Saturday half of her turned into a fish, and she was evicted from her home after giving birth to nine children.
With the free distribution of the Kromosomer modifiable avatars we aimed to promote Second Life residents’ disposition to have an active and creative part in the process of their own avatar design, as well as in the embodiment of the story itself as a character. Here we see Eupalinos remixing the Attganger avatar with artifacts of his own creation.
Instead of expecting a solely contemplative audience to an artistic performance, we proposed a shared creative process. Once the avatars were distributed they became avatars of others, inhabited by different identities that could take them literally as the legends’ avatars or radically transform them and use them to perform entirely new stories. Here is an interpretation of the Attganger by Podenga, in the form of a virtual photograph.
Here is another by Lanie Dupin…
Harbor Galaxy mixed the Surekallen and the Attganger stories…
And here is Draugen seen by Maloe Vansant.
Meanwhile Heidi was sharing her own photographs in her storytelling blog where she challenged users to write new stories.
Scoop.it is a publishing platform that enables one to curate galleries of links displayed in this “magazine like” way. Everything that was shared through social media, flickr, youtube, facebook, etc., was gathered in a scoop.it gallery. There is a machinima from youtube.
Issuu is a platform for electronic books and magazines. A booklet was published there, with stories, pictures and reflections on the process of the project.
And this process culminated in the storytelling performance, of course.
To summarize, we made avatars and animations that were distributed in Second Life, along with the description of the characters in Norwegian legends. We were producers of this content and gave it to users in a sharable and modifiable way. From that, those users created new content They became producers and we became their users. We used that content to create new things as producers. We can say that we were all Produsers. A conventional sense of production can no longer apply to this kind of distributed collaborations, constantly changing. Axel Bruns developed the concept of produsage to describe this new arising reality in which the participants easily shift from users to producers and vice versa, originating a hybrid role in between – as produsers.
By offering the avatars copy enabled and modifiable, we became more than authors, creators or artists: we were partners in a shared creative flux. Kromosomer generated a completely different way of working within artistic production, one in which the frontiers between artist and public are blurred, thus revealing new possibilities.
