The end of the world is happening again … and it is
happening constantly.
Almost a week after New Years Eve 2012, with my
bio-self based near Sydney Australia, I feel like everyone has already
forgotten the End of the World. More importantly people have forgotten that the
End of the World is happening constantly. The digital world meant to end with
New Years Eve 2000 with the Y2K bug not so long ago. Three years ago Wirxli Flimflam blew himself up, somehow giving way to the unnatural gestation of me, Wirixli2, over a period of twenty-seven months.
When I teleported to Haglets chat room on December
22, 4AM SLT (11pm Australian Time) my bio-self had already survived the Mayan
Apocalypse for about 25 hours ... and I my other bio-self in Vancouver, who is
not my current bio-self, had already checked in on the Second Life
performance art world to report on the general widespread awkwardness of survival
and ongoing tick tock and calendar flip of persistent worldiness. In the
immediate post-Mayan-Apocalypse-survival-afterglow, my current bio-self had
just made the last major move of stuff into her new house, so she had the sense
of the end of an old domestic world and the start of a fresh new one, with lots more space and no annoying housemate. With me being
transported a second time to Odyssey Performance Art festival highlighted the
existence of duality of identity, multiple worlds and worlds within worlds.
These worlds connect, collide and interrupt each other all the time. As an
avatar with a split personality I have a keen sense of split worlds. A good
split creates constant flow of twins, doubles, cleaves, mirrors and the wide
range of telepathic sparks that leap between all connective difference.
My other bio-self had earlier chatted with a
Buddhist via Haglet’s TV porthole to the ‘real world’, which I nor my current
bio-self have no real memory of. We only know about this by way of some
Facebook chats, and his previous blog above - which was posted in a more timely
manner almost immediately after his performance. At Haglet's chat room I found
a bit of a technical apocalypse, which Gijs and Liz Solo and perhaps another at
the Gallery in Holland were fixing. Thankfully Gijs was there in his Second
Life personage instead of on the TV screen. He had never appeared as an avatar
before, but with the TV providing no evidence of the real world in Amsterdam he
appeared in 3D social media. I was partially hypnotised by the TV screen, which
glowed white ... is this what the total End of the World might look like? Or is
it just a virtual world in which the only porthole onto the ‘real world’ is
replaced by a white ganzfeld glow? I was drinking something that rezzed like
the steamy white egg that I was born out of, before I could work out how to
download into Second Life properly. I had no idea how I had come to be drinking
this coffee ... it was Liz Solo who said I was drinking coffee ... was it
Mayan? Catching the white glow of TV and virtual coffee helped to push my
eyelids apart and focus. All this white noise cast doubt on the existence of
the ‘real world’ and suggested ghostly digital traces of telepathic
ganzfeld and apocylptic potential.
Gijs was interesting and gently charming
person/avatar to chat with, and our conversation loosely touched on the
Apocalypse quite a bit, whilst also discussing the connective gap between
virtual and real worlds and various minutae. I enjoyed communing with him post
apocalypse and the hour went very quickly. Also present were Haglet Alter, Liz
Solo, Pyewacket Kazyanenko, Jo Ellsmere, Lodro Rigdinz Wangs, Pixel Reanimator,
Isetine Heron and perhaps a few others. Apparently there were others in the
gallery including Haglet, Gijs and at least one other - these biological
persons were drinking fake chicken soup. I imagine it was cold there in
Holland. Because the TV ‘real world’ porthole link was down, Liz Solo reported
that twit pics were available, and a few pics were posted of Gijs and another
in the gallery. “Evidence!” I would exclaim. I asked about evidence of Gijs
existence in the real world, the gallery, and other parts of the world. Despite
my bio-self watching numerous TV reports about post-Apoclypse survival, I was
keen to make some independent verifications. Pye became fixated on a picture of
a sheep in gallery in the photo of Gijs ... possibly betraying the New Zealand
origins of Daniel Mounsey, and this was very reassuring somehow. Animals
own another world different to ours, even when they are in the same country.
Pye also remarked on how odd I looked, so I felt obliged to explai n to Pye and
Gijs and others that I blew myself up about three years ago and was recently
reborn through a virtual volcano. Disappeared avatars are like disappeared
worlds, they can so easily be rewritten and reborn. I like that I have two
bio-selves, and I like that my other bio-self is Jeremy, who was the original
bio-self for Wirxli Flimflam. Jeremy seems happy to have a Wirxli back in his
life and he is treating me well.
After the performance with Gijs, I spotted a cute
tiny avatar called Isetine Heron with a Santa hat. So cute!
Later I went to check out Jo Ellsmere and Pyewacket
Kazyanenko’s performance Minimal Glitch. Sca Scilova teleported me and I took
lots of photos and some video. Ze Moo, Glyphe Graves and a number of others
were there. It was a beautiful performance, with large sculpture, an even
larger Pye with enormous laptops, wonderful Jo Ellsmere Pyebots, and poetic
flows of digital code of ones and zeros that could be decrypted with a special
decoder link to reveal some profound truths about ‘the worlds’, but especially
virtual worlds. At the end of the performance Ze Moo’s enormous head exploded.
It became apparent that his enormous head had taken on the appearance of the
spherical Mayan calendar and it was exploding and sending out digital
repetitions and dissolutions. Then I had a chance to catch up with Glyph Graves and Sydney Dorkbot news.
All these memories of worlds within worlds are very
vivid today, as I return to wonder about them with a renewed sense of constant
apocalypse. Even Gijs was a world within a world! The Mayan world didn’t just
collide with modern and digital world. There are many Mayan worlds and many
digital worlds and many worlds beyond and they are all in constant in flux and
change. Even the worlds that have already ended change constantly, depending on
who performs them and with which software and hardware.
