An early guide to SL officially supported by Linden Lab refers to SL as "representative of the world as we know it. This is certainly the view offered by SL's development company, Linden Lab. I have chosen SL because it is, in many ways, another version of real life, but one rendered in pixels and contained within a computer screen.
I shall take Second Life (SL) as a MUVE example and examine ways in which operational dynamics there represent wider social changes in how we "see" and what that might mean for the user. Whereas Berger concentrates his ideas on works of art, however, I apply those ideas to what occurs within the frame of a computer screen opening onto the specific context of Second Life.
Not all the ideas he presents in Ways of Seeing, or elsewhere, are relevant to my discussion. I have been relatively selective in the ideas chosen due to my desire to focus primarily on how ways of seeing in Second Life can be understood from a perspective based on Berger's ideas.
I draw primarily on Berger's Ways of Seeing because I believe it to be the work through which he is better known beyond the discipline of Art History/Art Criticism. Enmeshed digital and internet cultural practices contribute to "the new urgency of the visual" (Mirzoeff 6). As the expanding impact of digital technologies accompanies an iconic turn where the image's logic increasingly influences our meaning-making (Bayne), it becomes increasingly complicated to analyse the dynamics and consequences of image-saturation for individuals' everyday lived experiences. During my discussion, I use the word "image" to refer to all that we see, whether that is static or moving because both types of image are present in MUVEs, often simultaneously. As Gallagher argues, our image consumption has become automatic and increasingly tied to how relationships between identity and contemporary social climates are formed. He also provides insights into the power images have and into their ability to reflect social dynamics. In Ways of Seeing, Berger offers a starting point from which to understand the crucial importance of viewpoint and seeing. In the era of the visual screen, your viewpoint is crucial" (1). "Modern life," Mirzoeff notes, "takes place onscreen" and " experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before. What has changed is the complexity of individuals' visual experiences in an age where visuality and cyberspace are intimately bound up with each other and where the visual becomes a place for meaning creation and contestation (Mirzoeff 6). While distribution methods for these messages have changed, Berger notes, the inherent messages themselves have not. The visual effectively circulates and perpetuates messages that maintain systems of power and oppression (Gallagher). As Berger's work demonstrates, these phenomena have a long and well-established part to play in social presence. It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace �Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento�s Sketchbook.How we represent, portray, illustrate or render have long been important processes for understanding socio-political communication events.
He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation �Peter Fuller, Arts ReviewThe influence of the series and the book.
By now he has.Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics. he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings. *************************************************************īook Descriptions: John Berger�s Classic Text on ArtJohn Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language.