The end of the world is happening again …

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.