fact and fiction – lesley's headspace

Pseudomonarchia Daemonum

from http://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-writings/devils-demons-and-dangerous-creatures-pseudomonarchia-daemonum-003177

The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (or the False Hierarchy of Demons) is essentially a 16th century version of my FYP, the brainchild of Johann Weyer, who crafted a tome in painstaking detail to poke fun at the supposed hierarchy of demons that were said to be worshipped and invoked by witches of the time. He took his fiction as far as making up a series of rites by which one could invoke demons (and woe betide anyone who tries – I actually believe in all this stuff and if you’re dumb enough to follow instructions in a book to invoke a being you probably can’t control that would love to slowly disembowel you, YDI.)

Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum ended up an inspiration itself, leading to the writing of The Lesser Key of Solomon in which one section, called Ars Geotia, discusses seventy-two demons evoked by the ancient King Solomon—four more than Weyer described. The purpose of this subsequent book is to act as a grimoire, also known as a spell book, to provide the reader with important facts about demons that might be summoned, such as what they look like or what abilities they might possess.

I thought it was inspiring that someone should think to go into such detail to craft a fictional grimoire. This is the kind of feel I’m going for with my FYP, except it’ll be more medical rather than supernatural. I really love the idea that this fact/fiction interplay was going on decades before I was born.

Second Life

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4698382/second-lifes-strange-second-life

I was never very interested in Second Life or the Sims franchise even though I had one or two Sims in my childhood and I was a fan of SimCity for a bit. Simulated reality is a wonderful way of capturing the imagination (I take Pokémon way too seriously) and creating an immersive, total experience. I wouldn’t be the only one to tell you that a Pokémon battle can get emotional, even if you look as if you’re casually button-mashing and interacting with pixels that don’t have any bearing on real life.

Creating an alternative lifestyle for oneself on a virtual platform would posess even more of a hypnotic draw, and my job isn’t quite to explain it but to note down whatever is relevant for my research.

People are very self-interested, for one. If you create an avatar resembling an idealised version of yourself (not your physical self – a version of yourself that you feel is authentic to your personality, which has no bearing on what you actually look like) you’re bound to invest time and effort into it, regardless of whether it’s tangible or not (and this makes me wonder if we should place more value on tangible goods as opposed to intangible goods, and why intangible goods are often regarded with contempt especially with regard to gaming). It isn’t unheard of for people to spend real money on their virtual possessions in Second Life and consequently to form very lasting attachments to these possessions.

The mutability of Second Life also offers a freedom that real life does not accord to you. Any aspect of the appearance is easily altered, and the environment bends to a coder’s will through several clicks and keystrokes. The phenomenon of virtual control versus real-life passivity (the thought of repainting my room, for example, makes me shudder with horror because so much effort is involved) is quite seductive.

Second Life is also subject to its own share of crime – virtual property can be duplicated and stolen, the system can be glitched and slowed down simply out of a vindictive pleasure in disrupting the order of things and the mutable age and appearance of Second Life avatars has already resulted in simulated child pornography becoming a very real phenomenon. There are communities that indulge in ageplay, which I don’t exactly want to go into more depth with than I absolutely have to. I find it unpleasant, and it’s tangential to the key issue that a virtual reality comes with its own set of conundrums and codes that don’t necessarily correlate with real-life society’s.

Another issue I was interested in more was death and virtual reality – firstly the death of an avatar (dying in Second Life returns you to your home location), the murder of an avatar (there are specific combat-centric locations in SL where you can bear arms and fight to kill – otherwise killing is a no-go) and what happens to the avatar if a real-life user dies. (And equally, what happens when a real-life user considers SL more real than his/her ‘real’ life.)

I still haven’t answered most of my own questions about existence (in terms of the virtual sphere) but this is my starter kit of thoughts for the fact-fiction issue I’m exploring.

The puzzle storybook I made

(I’m honestly quite terrified that my gift recipient will think to ask me how my FYP progress is going and I’ll have to make up some excuse about not giving out my URL until after mid-September is over, but I need to log my progress and I need to balance that with the pressing need to keep this surprise a surprise.)

I based the design of my book on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, except I set my type in Baskerville because it just goes well with abandoned houses and Sherlockian mysteries. The inner margins are large because I’m using Japanese stab binding.

This is the TextEdit document where I wrote out the entire puzzle in chronological order and scrambled the numbers once I had it scripted out. It isn’t the best way to do this, especially not when you get beyond 50 paragraphs, and the prospect of creating a similar puzzle at a larger scale terrifies me beyond words.

Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks

Another old and fun thing I stumbled upon over the summer was my old stash of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, which gave me hours of enjoyment in my early teen years (even though I never actually bothered with the battle mechanics and usually cheated because c’mon, nobody really has that much free time to play fair and be honest about the items that you actually have).

I spent the past two weeks engineering my own gamebook based on the FF formula as a birthday surprise for someone (yes, I do have that much free time) partly because I wanted to craft a good puzzle and partly because I also wanted to work through an FYP idea that could still be a viable and giftable project. I wrote 50 paragraphs worth of adventuring in an abandoned house and packed the book with ciphers, and almost lost my head ensuring that all paragraphs led to each other and that the entire adventure ran properly. Then I went over all of my typography, and proceeded to spend an hour ensuring that everything was paginated properly and that all paragraphs looked good.

In this little sub-project I am planning to build a compartment into the back of the book (as I did with my dictionary) for a thumb drive that’s an important part of the storyline within the book. I think this is just my way of building on the FF formula – while I love how immersive FF books are, I want to add another layer of complexity to my project with items that are significant in the storyline being available to the reader in a kit accompanying the book/built into a compartment in the book. These artefacts are probably a step up from what I did for my Gemini project last semester (forging one newspaper page) and I think I really enjoy doing immersive storybook-type things as a way to reconcile the separate universes of fact and fiction.

I’m probably going to continue down this line in my research as it offers the most promise and the richest possible outcome. I don’t think I exactly want to make a gamebook for my FYP but the influence of fictional bands and immersive worlds (that are ventured to with the power of the mind and not the power of your computer’s graphics card) is tugging me, and it might be a good way for me to run the Castor/Pollux storyline too.

I’ll share pictures of my gamebook in a bit, and cross my fingers that my gift recipient has forgotten my FYP blog URL.

Gorillaz: Rise Of The Ogre

I had an idea recently about how to flesh out my theme for my FYP. After doing the Gemini project I’m still keen on exploring duality, but instead of confining it to the realm of mythology I’m thinking of expanding a little into something a bit more contemporary.

My favourite band as a teenager was Gorillaz, and I followed them all the way from their Demon Days period up till now. (Gorillaz is a band consisting entirely of animated characters – none of them actually exist as figures in the real world.) I’ve always thought it was cool that Gorillaz concerts involved holograms of the fictional band members, but it was only recently that it struck me that the entire Gorillaz phenomenon is a perfect example of when fact and fiction start to blur.

In the Gorillaz autobiography, Rise Of The Ogre, an unnamed interviewer has conversations with all four Gorillaz members about their personal histories, their music and how Gorillaz’s look (or rather how Jamie Hewlett draws them) and sound has evolved over the years. The personal histories of the Gorillaz members are so deep and rich in authenticity and character that it’s almost too easy to believe that Murdoc, 2D, Russel and Noodle really exist and are having a conversation with the interviewer, and are not just the brainchild of Damon Albarn and Hewlett.

A band whose members don’t even exist (then again, how do we define existence? By the very fact that the Gorillaz members are now recognizably pop culture icons does that not pull them into existence in this world? And what is celebrity anyway, if the media plays along with Albarn and Hewlett and interviews cartoon characters they created? Marge Simpson has been in Playboy magazine, after all) has sold what is presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars in albums, concerts and merchandise and has successfully kept fans’ attentions on said fictional members instead of immediately associating Gorillaz with the images of Albarn and Hewlett. They’re not synonymous with one another (at least not to me), nor are any of the Gorillaz musicians personas of any of the creatives behind them. Is that not just mindblowing?

Gorillaz and their music have inspired me for the past seven years and I love how a work of fiction has given rise to real-life effects (i.e. Gorillaz may not be real in the same sense that Emma Watson is real, but their albums certainly are real and have given me countless hours of listening pleasure. I also have their band t-shirts and their autobiography, so there) on people and maybe even on modern music. I’d love for my FYP to play with the same kind of fact-fiction divide and blur it so much that people start believing in whatever it is that I create. That would be a wonderful kind of power.