Fiction or Documentary? Real or Virtual?

Over a year ago I met art/documentary filmmakers Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita (Dellakino Arizona and Dellakino Omlet in SL). Kaori is from Japan (Tokyo) and Alain is from France (Paris). At the time they were working on a documentary-fiction about people who played the Sims and TSO, but the project has morphed into a Second Life project (details here: http://avatars.blogs.liberation.fr). I don’t know how the project has evolved in the interim, but at the time they were doing things that blew my mind, in particular, interviewing people about their online lives, but stripping out all reference to games and the virtual. The effect was, fascinating, surreal, and compelling all at once. My thought was that their project was exploding the artificial distinction between the real and the fictional. A great example of this is the following interview.

They also showed some of the interviews in game, and the effect of avatars watching those interviews seemed to magnify the already mind-bending properties of the project by an order of magnitude. I’ve pasted an example below the fold.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

This is totally amazing, Uri. The guy in the room with the white drapes, *emotionally* talking about his lack of pants...it's just mind-blowing, you are right. This is excellent stuff.

The artificial distinction between real and unreal was already blown away subconsciously for most people, but if somebody then makes a good documentary film about it, it will then make people conscious of it and blow it away even more consciously.

I wish there was a YouTube of their Sims stuff, too.

[General Cronon]

Wow, first to comment again great story, The guy in the second video I can't really hear.

[Susan]

The clips are fantastic. They've done a really good job of showing what SL is like.

They've maaged to avoid either censoring out the sordid parts or over-playing them. (Though I'd have to see the final cut to know how it eventually turns out).

[Artemis Fate]

It always is a bit surreal hearing about Second Life in Real life, I was so used to Second Life being this little place that no one had ever heard of, and expected to be the only person in large areas to know of it, much less play it. But now that it's been expanding and media coverage is so high, I hear about it quite a lot, and it is still a bit surreal having that barrier being knocked down.

[Prokofy Neva]

Pwned, General, I got my mouse-clicking to go faster than yours har har.

Hey, I'm with Zipster08 on this one. Did you see his "Pet Peeves"? Last to comment! Hey, I'm LAST to comment here ppl, get on it!

[Kerian Bunin]

Oh neat video. Kind of surreal to see it explained like that so bluntly.

[Myrrh Massiel]

...genius, seriously, that's - wow...

[Allana Dion]

>"It always is a bit surreal hearing about Second Life in Real life, I was so used to Second Life being this little place that no one had ever heard of, and expected to be the only person in large areas to know of it, much less play it. But now that it's been expanding and media coverage is so high, I hear about it quite a lot, and it is still a bit surreal having that barrier being knocked down."

*nodding* That about covers exactly what I was thinking.