On Building the Unreal, a Memory

My grandparents, the tired, the poor and the hungry of an Old, imploding Europe, immigrated to America between the 1880’s and the early 1920’s. Arriving on its shores with little more than the clothes on their backs and the energy of getting to work to re-build their lives, crafts and tradesmen, they literally started constructed the inner cities, then the suburbs, of their adopted country’s eastern seaboard.

What? & How? to build & organize the young cities and unbuilt territories of America, was done based on the mental images and memories of the lands they left behind. An instinctive memory of a thousand years of cultural artefacts –art, architecture, cities– constructed by their ancestors’, a ghost-image that somehow they felt capable of reproducing, and that would permit them to thrive in their new home. And build they did, though based on the mental images and unreliable memories of that-other-world. And, like all cognitive representations, filtered by emotion, memory and time, they lacked the erudition and technical precision necessary to innovate or even replicate the patterns, materials and models of the Florence’s, Dublin’s or Warsaw’s of their memory. Thus, in place of Venice & Shanghai, we have Little Italy & Chinatown, which somehow made possible, the mind-set for Disneyland & Las Vegas…

I think of them every time I log into Second Life; we are the new arrivals, building with both the naïveness & energy, intelligence & inexperience that gives the real real world the qualitative traction that could never be possible Just like the real world.” There, with “…little obvious relation between a person’s real and virtual homes, and the main real-world function of a Second Life house is as a tool for fantasy — albeit, in many cases, fantasy that doesn’t stray too far from reality.” [NYTimes] The reality depicted in the article A House That’s Just Unreal is far from both the unreality of the immigrant-builder and the new reality of the builder-artist. “Measured looks“, like the one described in this article, blur the lines between Second Life –game or –real virtuality.