Denise Doyle, University of Wolverhampton
Taey Kim, SMARTlab, University of East London

Abstract

This article charts the relationship between and the experience of real and virtual worlds. Like the travellers of the earlier centuries who returned with information and curiosities from distant and previously undiscovered lands we bring back with us our narratives, our stories and descriptions of our experience of embodiment in these new landscapes. We find that inhabiting the spaces of these virtual worlds is challenging our relationship to our own.

We explore, through the construction of digital narratives, the experience and journey of Wanderingfictions in her metaverse, Second Life and Dongdong’s trans-national travel in the physical world exploring the Web 2.0 environment as metadata to articulate the user’s virtual identity. Data was collected in the form of narrative; each took their turn to write from their world; like a collection of postcards or snapshots of experience. Through the emerging dialogue we discover a combination of dis-ease, fear, but also wonderment of this new shift, this new view, where we are able to live in and embody multiple realities. Exploring these various conditions challenges us to investigate our physical availabilities as travellers in these virtual environments. A non-human body as metadata offers us resources for thinking in more sophisticated ways about virtual technologies. User Generated Contents and 3D Virtual Worlds such as Second Life bring new forms of participation. These two main waves on the net are contributing to the systems of informatics in their structures, behaviours and interactions of digital knowledge and narrative.

The narrative reveals the complexities of dealing with identity politics in the environments of virtual spaces. It observes how our early, though rapidly changing, sensibilities are responding. We are in transition. This article finds that we will only truly become post-human when our memory of being ‘only human’ finally fades.

Key Words: Metadata, Non-Human Body, Web 2.0, UGC (User Generated Contents), Embodiment, Virtual Worlds