Postmodern Artist?

“we do not live in a world of postmodernism but rather in a world in which tensions of modernity and postmodernity are active and present” (PL 343)

I wish I were aware enough to have come to the above conclusion myself. After reading it I see it as plainly as the nose on my face. The matrix created as a result of this tension is something I have been unknowingly trying to navigate through out my grad studies in pursuit of explaining my thoughts and ideas about the MMORPG. Chapter eight of Practices of Looking has fleshed out this necessary understanding of what I am doing for me.

This MMORPG thing for me is a contestation of the meaning of “reality”. At the heart of my argument is the idea that MMORPGs are not meeting the needs of users sufficiently. There is a lack of substantial user generated narrative in MMORPGs. There is a lack of user determinism in MMORPGs. There is a lack of life and living in MMORPGs. In the frame of postmodernism my proposition of changing these things, of making these things sharper and more prevalent, is the suggestion that MMORPGs need to realize their simulacra nature rather than continue to wallow in their postindustrial premodern static.

An irony for me in this is the root of postmodernity is essentially Neo Enlightenment. This is ironic because the Providence Project, the model MMORPG I and others have been laying out for a few years now, is a steampunk world. it is wrought from a romantic notion of an alternate reality in which The Enlightenment continues to be. Often, when I am thinking about how I see the MMORPG can evolve the images in my mind are that of a steampunk dynotopia, of a world filled with technology and people much like our reality but nestled in the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries.

Many of the ideas that orbit my MMORPG argument are challenges to how it is we “know” and how we experience. I plunge forward with the battle cry “there needs to be a more meaningful meaning making experience”! I declare that rather than having MMORPGs exist as game-play oriented worlds of overwrought yet loose narrative that they need to become more life like, that they need to be an offered enhancement of living. I say they need to allow for a blurring of the real and the simulated. In essence, I am suggesting that they should further fracture humanities sense of the self to reform the self as a postmodern body of transcending personal reality.

I put forward the idea that  the avatar, the simulacra of the self, is as important as the material physical self, and on occasion, i also suggest that the avatar is more important than the physical material self. I say this because I have the post modern attitude that the mind, the metaphysical essence of being, needs to be engaged. I challenge notions of the meaning of “the real”. Like Nikki S. Lee and Orlan I shove around Modern notions of how we are and what we can or cannot be.

My influences are cultural artifacts that mainly reside in the genre of science fiction, most prevalent are Akira, Bladerunner, and the Matrix movies in their questioning of the condition or state of the modern and postmodern in a kind of adversarial interaction. The very substance of Providence is that of a remix of reality. I take the current state of the world and stir in a romantic past, a nostalgic longing, for things that never were. And, admittedly, my argument’s existence relies on the suspension of  a common knowing in favor of a romantic future.

Even the method by which i hope to deploy the ideas that are Providence are steeped in postmodern sensibilities. I wish to circumvent the status quo. I want to bring it into existence by challenging the conventions of entertainment software development. I wish to not be hemmed in by the large development studios to evade their control of intellectual property; I don’t want to be tainted by those purveyors of mediocrity and insistence on doing only what works and not take a risk. I do not want to be touched by the entities who bad, tag, and tame creativity so it can be marketed to a target audience.

Years ago when I put my brushes, pens, and pencils away in a drawer I felt that I was walking away from my first love, visual and physical art. I felt I was abandoning my work in favor of being more viable in the job market. Now I realize that in that i have transformed the hand that made representations of world and mind with the tools of applied art into a hand that paints with theory, sketches with idea, and sculpts with metaphysical constructs. In essence I have reemerged as a even purer postmodern artist. I make art with only my mind. My canvas apparently is the concept of reality.

It seems, according to chapter eight, I have some how become a near perfect representative of the post modern. An identity which includes my distained for an insistence that the third and forth world can only be saved with technology.