Back to Reality

Last Friday I went to the Films Across Borders event put on by Visions and Voices.

The featured filmmaker, Alex Rivera, had made some rather interesting short films (a lot of them dealing with immigration) and he showed some of them to us, as well as giving us a little preview of his upcoming feature film, The Sleep Dealer, which deals with the fact that while we're tightening our physical borders, we're also making use of technologies such as the Internet that allow for completely open/non-existent borders. What was interesting, though, was that he touched upon one of the ideas of this chapter: a virtual "home" for diasporic people, provided by broadcasting and media forms.

In 1995, when CGI was nothing like what it is today, Alex Rivera made a short film about his Peruvian father. He recounted how at home his dad tried to completely separate himself from his Peruvian background, but every night he would sit in front of the t.v. and watch Spanish-language programming for hours at a time. He was miles and miles away from his home country, and even seemingly trying to forget about it, but each night he would, as Rivera put it, transport himself back to Peru through a virtual world... Because television can do that.

To try to make visual what Rivera imagined happened to his father each night, he made the film Papapapá (potato father), using now-ancient technology that was way cool at the time (and took three weeks to render, he told me later) to put his father in an actually virtual space (skip to the end of the 28-minute film to see that part).

It was a little hard for me to watch, because the graphics were so horrible, but it gets the point across. His dad his shot out of a Pringles can and lands in this virtual reality that's somehow Peru through his television. He finally finds a way out to get back into the real world, but we're left to wonder, what about all the people now?

We have much more addictive things than the television that can create virtual worlds even more realistic than the one created by Rivera for his father. What happens if we don't leave?

We talked a little bit in class about the question of why we prefer Second Life to the so-called 'First Life,' and of course the most obvious answer was that in Second Life, you can fly! But what about places like the ones described in Sturken and Cartwright, where poor communities purchase a television set rather than a refrigerator or a bicycle? The analogy can be carried over to us - we use the Internet to build relationships with people who live just down the hall from us, rather than bothering to get up and walk over there to actually physically hang out.

Part of what makes it so appealing is that we're able to come into contact with so many different people online that it makes it easy to have a huge number of shallow relationships, while at the same time choosing which people we get closer to. That sounds pretty good. In fact, it sounds a lot like life, but with even more of the slightly-shallower contacts. Plus, it's super convenient...and of course, there's the flying, but who knows, maybe we'll all find ourselves trapped in a world of bad CGI, begging to get out and get back to that mythical "MeetSpace" or "First Life" and live IRL for a while.