Oak Tree on Hill Slope: Everyday Actual and Virtual Harbin

Harbin ethnography:


Everyday Actual and Virtual Harbin.

I arrived early in the afternoon, checked in at the Harbin Gatehouse, and drove up a half mile to the Meadow area, and camped on a platform over the bank of a road in the secluded, pretty, oak forest, which I didn't know about for around the first 10 years of my visiting Harbin. At the gate, I noticed on a Harbin sign a free workshop called “A Journey in Timeless Loving” with Steve Carter; it's also described as an Introduction to Tantra. I headed to the pool area, the main area of Harbin, walking through the woods along the village path. In combination with the option not to wear clothes in the pools, Harbin's unique milieu emerges here. People generally have quiet minds around the pools, where life is relaxed and easy. I put my bag down on the Sundeck, took off my clothes, showered, and went into the warm pool. I began to build the virtual Harbin Gatehouse on Anteater Island on the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) virtual island, after Tom Boellstorff, the editor of the AAA's Cultural Anthropology invited me to do this. I still hadn't established the free virtual land in Second Life or Open Simulator, where I would build the virtual Harbin valley or the virtual Harbin Mainside area, but I wanted to use the virtual Harbin Gatehouse as a place from which to teleport to the virtual Harbin elsewhere in the XYZ virtual grid of Second Life, in which all objects therein are built. For this virtual Harbin anthropological study, I was glad that Tom had given me permission to build on the AAA's Anteater Island – it was very appropriate. I measured the actual Harbin Gatehouse. Above all, I wanted to create the proportions, look and feel of the actual Harbin Gatehouse, from a Second Life avatar's point of view. Using the building block-like, geometrical shapes of Second Life, which shapes and forms you alter, called prims, I laid down the wooden floor, and put up walls, and opened windows in them. Then my computer got stolen, and that stopped my work.

It costs something like $1,800 per year to build in Second Life and have your 512 x 512 virtual constructs and island remain so that you and others can meet and spend time there. I didn't have this money … so I continued my fieldwork on actual Harbin. ...








(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/03/oak-tree-on-hill-slope-everyday-actual.html - March 1, 2010)