I’ve just had a chance to read and juxtapose two recently done articles: Remnants of the Biosphere (from BLDGBLOG) and Whatever Happened to Second Life? (from PC Pro).

The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.

I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.

Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.

This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?

Between a dawn airport run and my 9 o’clock appointment in the loop, I killed a couple of hours watching a great film that’s been on my shortlist for a while: Tokyo! (dir. Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, & Bong Joon-ho – in three parts, each overseen by one of the directors).

View the trailer from youtube here:

The whole set of three made for an enjoyable experience, but especially the third, Shaking Tokyo (dir. Bong Joon-ho). The lead character (Teruyuki Kagawa) retreats away from the sight of other humans for a decade, until finally breaking out of his “perfect” world into the real, larger, brighter, but still frightening one, in pursuit of another extreme introvert (the pizza delivery girl – played by Yu Aoi). My favorite quote from this segment of the film comes after Teruyuki Kagawa’s character has finally rushed out into the city, only to find that everyone else in the city has fled in doors, into their isolated lives. As one of the characteristic earthquakes shakes the apartment building, a man yells out, “It’s collapsing! Everyone come out!” This isolation cannot continue, but is difficult as anything to escape from once it becomes more and more controlled, less painful.

Even as it participates in the technological world, our goal for the Cube is to find ways to re-connect people, to reverse the trend toward diseased isolation we can so easily see in increasingly mediated lifestyles. Tokyo! itself works this way, but also calls out for us to find more ways to break free from our fear of each other, of sunlight, of reality, of all things beyond our control. The movie’s tagline is instructive: “Do we shape cities, or do cities shape us?” It’s a both/and, but the exploration of that question is very important. It’s interesting that it is the incursion of the “real” environment (sunlight and other humans) that presents that greatest threat to our sense of control, yet also provides a pathway out – far enough to recognize the pallid, small, dirty place we’ve so long called ideal. One of the early inspirations for the Cube was to bring people (who might otherwise never leave the city) as close to the complete experience of nature as possible. Among so many other possible routes, this is still one that drives our vision.