The third in Draxtor’s Despres series looking inside Second Life, The Drax Files, premiered on Friday April 5th. In it, he talks with artist and creator Eshi Otawara, a six-year veteran of Second Life.
Perhaps best known for her clothing designs in SL, Eshi is also an artist in her real life, and also lends support to other SL projects as well. In what only can be serendipity, prior to watching this segment ahead of the release, I blogged on Chakryn Forest a region in which Eshi has had a hand in helping to design.
As someone who has been involved in SL for a good while, and who invests a considerable amount of time and talent in the platform, Eshi offers a considered and insightful view of Second Life, and which perfectly frames both the immersive and augmentive opportunities presented by the platform.
“At the beginning,” Eshi candidly tells us early on in the piece, “I created my avatar to be everything that I was not. She was super, super tall, super, super skinny, [and] had super long hair. When I realised that my personality and my spirit continued to experience life no matter what kind of packaging I put myself into; nowadays I’ve just kind-of become a complete shape-shifter….”
There are times when those of us involved in SL perhaps define it a little too sharply, picturing it as either augmentive or immersionist, with a distinct division between the two – a division which may well have been broadened of late by the Lab’s focus on enhancing the more immersive elements of the platform possibly at the expense of the more augmentive. This may even be a reason why some feel that SL has “failed” and so lost its appeal; because they do place themselves on one side or the other of the divide.
Eshi’s words, however, serve as a reminder that SL doesn’t have to be one or the other. It always has been, and remains, a blend of the two – and that really, so much of how we perceive and interact with the platform is really down to our own nature. Her attitude to her avatar, to me at least, is very much a reflection of this: she can both immerse herself in the world through her shape-shifting use of her avatar while simultaneously augmenting her natural talent and love of art and design in ways she notes aren’t always possible in real life and which allow much of her spirit and personality shine through her avatar. In doing so, she has a perception of Second Life which can all too easily be lost after several years of engagement with the platform, but which she has clearly managed to keep very much alive.
Her views on the creative power inherent in Second Life clearly speak to the appeal of the platform. “It’s not a non-existent universe,” she tells us later in the video, “It’s there. It exists. If you just release yourself of that prejudice towards what’s virtual; that’s it’s not real, it will make you happy.”
This is another outstanding piece examining Second Life which again, as with the first two segments (though hardly touched upon in my reports to date) speaks as much to those of us involved in SL as to those new to the virtual world. They help to remind us as to why we’re here and (possibly) reinvigorating our love of the platform.
For me, out of the segments Drax has published to date, it is the one which resonates the most – for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps it is because Eshi touches on the immersive / augmentist elements of SL (which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately) or that her enthusiasm for the platform as a means of extending her both her creativity and her ability to interact with other is so infectious; maybe it is simply that having experienced something of a pendulum attitude towards Second Life over the course of the last year, her insights into the platform as a whole resonate more strongly with me.
Whatever the reason, this another pitch-perfect exploration of Second Life and the many ways it can appeal to us and offer us something magical. Congrats to Drax on again striking precisely the right editorial balance and to Eshi for painting such a vibrant picture of Second Life and her involvement with it.
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