LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the More

LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the Text”), created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. The title of the project, “La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,” alludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation “distributed authorship”, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a number of human storytellers positioned around the globe; in the three dimensionally embodied metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: An emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous “bot” avatars which dwell inside this bizarre literary landscape are pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale: The persistent distributed authorship is now accomplished by many writers throughout the ages: A text generator telling a non-linear, multi-faceted, often times poetic, story harvested from the famous online Gutenberg Project is now distributing its output amongst architecture and its inhabitants, generating dialogues and iterations taking their trajectories from masterworks of classical literature. The pleating resembles musical sampling, the connection between the sentences fades, text becomes noise, from which the audience generates meaning. The structure on the simulator adds yet another layer of pleating by visually mixing the different sources of text, while yet another layer of textual input will be provided through a contribution by i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK, by means of which Real Life visitors will be able to contact the LPDT2 by sending SMS messages. Thus all pleated text - the generated, the contributed, and the stored - is simultaneously visible as a massive, ever evolving literary conglomeration. LPDT2 will be projected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea during the INDAF new media art festival held at Tomorrow City, Songdo, Incheon, throughout September 2010. The project will also be open to visitors in Second Life during this month, starting from September 1st. Roy Ascott’s project has been co-authored in Second Life by Selavy Oh (programming and architecture), MosMax Hax, aka. Max Moswitzer (architecture and terrain) and Alpha Auer + Alpho Fullstop, aka. Elif Ayiter (avatars and soundscape). Further associates are Frigg Ragu, aka. Heidi Dahlsveen (avatar animations) and i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK (Real Life SMS input). Special thanks go to the University of Applied Fine Arts, Vienna, who have made the project come to life through the provision of their Second Life island for the duration of the show.
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digital skin 220208 The real world turned into digital data, transferred to communication networks, that is, cyberspace. The new arrangement More

digital skin 220208 The real world turned into digital data, transferred to communication networks, that is, cyberspace. The new arrangement transformed the traveling experiment and its results drastically. The traveler (Cyber Flâneur), and the terrain, abandoned their real, slow surroundings in favor of new, fast digital space containing numerous fast trajectories. These trajectories written and distributed electronically at the speed of light, and within seconds reach any surfer worldwide. This activity equalized the speed of the Cyber Flâneur and the Cyberspace . The cyberspace is monitored by search engines such as Google Earth and Sky, involving hundreds of thousands of computers servers that store in their memories the addresses of around ten billion WWW pages of Global and Galactic data. Connecting to the cyberspace by a central hub that links all the references in the network, for example, GPS, Google and cell phone, resemble reading information stored at the event horizon of a black hole by connecting its singularity. Every Cyber Flâneur connected to the cyberspace "downloads" the data stored in its singularity. The act of reading the map from the network simulates the cyberspace information wave function collapsing by means of the reader's submitted trajectory. The data that was in a state of superposition throughout the network, or in Roland Barthes' definition "multi-dimensional space in which many and varied writings are combined and meet, and none are foremost" becomes a single peak wave function that appears on the Cyber Flâneur's display or part of his expanded digital skin. The Cyber Flâneur in cyberspace is an "isolated" item among many FlâneurS, who together create the Super Cyber Flâneur. The Cyber Flâneur is equipped with electronic gadgets (cell phone, PDA, PC, VR headset, data gloves etc. that connect him to cyberspace. Similar to someone using a Scanning Electron Microscope, the Cyber Flâneur moves within the electronic hypertext that changes while reading. The Cyber Flâneur while reading becomes an universe creator, thanks to the technical ability to alter the location of the observed data. The Universe familiar to us becomes a link to every Cyber Flâneur. Cyberspace electronically compresses the events in the Universe into the singularity of the electronic cathedral. Man is situated in this singularity, while a finger (The digital finger Icon in the video that navigates and spins the universe) of his hand extends to almost touch the finger of God opposite him. He discovers that he is enclosed inside a spherical structure lined with membrane mirrors reflecting the images of everything around him. It resembles a scene from the movie "Matrix 3", in which the hero "Neo" confronts the creator of the matrix (the image of an aging man resembling God as pictured by Michelangelo) in a spherical cathedral covered with flat video screens displaying the image of Neo throughout his entire life. For a minute, it seems to him that he has returned to Pythagoras' world, where man is the center of a flat-Universe, with planets and spheres circling him, and the whole enveloped in God's embrace, as in the medieval illustration described previously. The surfer's finger is trying to reach God's finger. To his amazement he discovers that the Heavenly embrace and the finger of God that he is trying to reach, and almost touches, is not God's finger, but his own. Life is carried in an electronic Panopticon, in which the subject looking out from the center sees around him a flat world circumscribed by his own body extensions. In cyber art the human image appears on silicon, implanted under the subjects' (Digital) skin, which enables the global membrane extension of his body and consciousness. Existence in this ultimate cathedral is the continuous artistic act of a self-reflective hyper-subject.
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