Nonny de la Peña, a journalist and filmmaker and Peggy Weil, assistant professor in the interactive-media division of the U.S.C. film school designed a virtual simulation of Guantanamo Bay Prison in Second Life. The game is called Gone Gitmo.
De la Peña and Weil say they created the virtual torture camp to '“raise awareness [that] our government is denying the basic rights of habeas corpus to prisoners”
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-----Talking About Suffering & Freedom----
ReplyDelete"Entering into a synthetic world may not necessarily be the same as an escape from prison, but it is certainly an escape and all leaks are inherently political statements".
We find this statement by Edward Castronova absolutely fitting. Those who choose to enter into a virtual world go into a kind of exile, even if they do so unconsciously. Depending how one defines the move into this virtual world, it might be an escape from oneself or tout court.
We believe however, that it is important not to use this way as a pure search for an artificial world, as a sort of New Synthetic Drug. We must meditate deeply about the meaning of our exile, about our conditions of fugitives. The story of Merror has taught us: we can’t really escape from ourselves. Fleeing ourselves – or the attempt to do so – inevitably brings us to the point where we get closer to ourselves, even if we temporarily can leave these feelings behind us. In the end we always land aganin at the starting point. Being able to talk about Suffering and Freedom, tragedies of our history that flow blood and are part of our DNA, standig on open hands, while two hung up television sets spit pieces of brains (and, in the background, John Lindo Ferretti loop screams "Produci! Consuma! Crepa” [Products! Consume! Death]) is one of the miracles that Second Life makes possible.
On those hands met, a couple of generations later, two women: one Italian and one German. They compared two ways to live Suffering, to react to it, to find an unlikely (or likely?) way to deal with their different experiences.
And it is no coincidence. In our opinion, this has happened precisely on those hands, because they are a metapher of Art.
Art can save us.