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
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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