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Intimate Spaces for Metaverse Avatars?



I am going to Porto in a few days to make a presentation at the Consciousness Reframed 2019 conference. It is a trip that I am looking forward to especially since I will also be getting together with CapCat Ragu (Catarina Carneiro de Sousa in RL – and we have met before). But this time I will also be meeting with her mother SL artist extraordinaire Meilo Minotaur (Sameiro Sousa in RL) – and that will be a first time encounter which I am anticipating with a lot of pleasure. I agonized quite a bit on what to write about for the conference. Normally I write about my own shenanigans, however given how confused I have lately been on what the hell I am doing, this time around this is not an option. So, I have looked elsewhere, namely into the homes and lives of Second Life residents, wondering about if such things really do exist when considered under Bachelard’s definition of the “home” as a place that “shelters day-dreaming, [] protects the dreamer, [and] allows one to dream in peace.” To this end I went to flickr where I searched for images of people’s homes in SL – and found absolute wonders that appear to validate my query. Yes, there is such a thing as poetically intimate space in the metaverse: Homes and gardens that individuals do actually live in, dream in, lovingly nurture, and appear to find a lot of solace from.


I have really enjoyed writing this, and I think it has turned out to be a fairly decent text (that you can read here), which I have ended like this:

Have some metaverse residents chosen to remain in a virtual world where daydreams can be manifestly built, where products of imagination overrule the stark reality of a pre-built super-modern world and its “loss of individual agency, producing a feeling of discomfort, of crisis, which is linked to the consciousness that each one of us can see everything and do nothing.” ?(Augé 2000: 7-12) Is the metaverse a panacea that allows us to create our own whereabouts wherein we do in fact have agency over what we surround ourselves with? Is this why, a small but telling number of individuals have persisted? And if so, will there be others who join them as super-modernity continues “to create neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude.” (Augé 1995: 103). 

So, I will be presenting this next week, meet my SL friends in what I am told is one of the prettiest cities in Europe, and then take off to Athens for a week to hang out with my beloved Greek family, before I head back home. I do not enjoy travelling all that much, but this one looks to be a nice trip – provided the presentation goes OK.

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