trendpreneur

While I attempt to scrounge up time to work on a longer post about journalism, these galleries of abandoned places caught my eye.

Firstly, I now want to go and visit every one of these places (except perhaps the ones that will kill me).

Secondly, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels to the Internet. How many corners of the Internet are there that are equally forlorn, unvisited, unloved; existing only as a memory in someone’s mind (and impossible to trace once you remember it)? This is even more apparent in proper-like virtual worlds, such as Second Life, flawed though it may be; you can fly around for hours without seeing a soul, just prims and textures and buildings and imaginations unleashed, that people have wandered away from and forgotten.

Games, too; for hours on end, even months and months, you inhabit this other place only to wander off the moment you finish the game / unlock the secrets / get a girlfriend. All it takes to go back is to execute some software, and you’re right back where you started – load a savegame and everything’s as it was. MMOs change with more volatility than this, of course – while I may have considered World of Warcraft practically a second home at one point, I log in these days and am frankly bewildered by the place. It’s changed, and so have I. Not only is the ’space’ I inhabited in the world abandoned, so’s my identity.

So: How can we find fantastic abandoned virtual spaces, and how can we record them? How do you record an experience? Video and images are the best we can do with real spaces, but when the entire experience is digital — but it isn’t, is it? There are more factors than just pixels at stake, especially with these other worlds. And you definitely need to account for the observer changing as well as the observed.