KNNBC_CB
Organised via IMVU and streamed via Twitch
May 2020
KNNC_CB was a transmodable party format curated alongside Pure Ever (Rifqi Amirul Rosli, Zhiyi Cao, Raigo Law, Elsa Wong, and myself) during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. Using IMVU as a format for creating individualised avatars, those in lockdown were able to explore how bodies and selves get transmuted onto a digital realm, and how these elements translate to connecting with friends, partying, or simply having fun.
@pure.ever
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e550bef7122590ae66306088f9d7bed999ec60125b93b87afcf383815b85313a/Screen-Shot-2020-05-30-at-2.38.36-PM.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8dc54c16c8413e0eb1209158d818caed81e1b7331fd775b4a144eda3b5430e9d/IMG_8941.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3b18603ca657c442cd01078ac67950edba337ce25d179195a2b3457b6a6fb729/Screenshot-2023-05-31-at-5.49.06-PM.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81843ac44929b7f80d08922c19223dccfc0a7685cad764c056c67a9a2952149a/IMG_8931.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3b9ed6e9c50780c7ba281ed410fcdcf51a551e5fff1298da8f97257f2087b1d7/IMG_8914.jpg)
In thinking about transferring our interactions unto the digital realm, we are limited in that sociality is difficult to re-model. We miss hugs, and we miss conversations, but in the context or within the space of a con call, a phone call, or even a social metaverse/game like IMVU, a hug is devoid of various nuances readable in physical interactions – eye contact, touch, breath etc. A simple thing like setting up a hug within digital context feels incredibly contrived and ephemeral; there’s almost a looming pressure to assume a natural humanity around and behind these interactions (although, to hug in a vacuum is also to divorce a hug from its meaning altogether). This notion of a “naturalised” humanity gets further distilled when one takes into consideration the many oppressive implications in our society, and how that gets transmuted onto these interactions – patriarchy, racism, and other systems that serve to individualise people. They too become amplified to assume its “natural” state online, whereas a digital space is inherently a produced reality, or a reconstructed or auxiliary world. To be “intimate” in a space like the digital realm is perhaps to gaze back at the structures that define intimacy, and replacing it with a re-naturalisation of social practices that destabilise our self-governance, perpetuation, and reassertion of what a “natural world” even is. And to establish a goal of replacing it with a reproduction of an intimate reality that makes more sense to us in this time, and as marginalised individuals.
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