INTERVIEW:
Question 1
First of all, I would like to ask you something about yourself. Who you are, where you are
from, your name, and your experience.
Answer
I’m Bruce Damer and I was born in Canada, lived in Czechoslovakia, and now I live in
Silicon Valley and I have helped anthropologist Jim Fenero. We formed a consortium that is
looking at virtual worlds on the Internet where you can go into the environment in three
dimensions as an avatar and interact with people. So this is my very short history and my
current project.
Question 2
Can you tell us something about your project, Sherwood City?
Answer
We decided that the technology in the Internet to go beyond just chatting with text, as
Mark Pesce talked about, or go beyond the WWW where you go into three dimensions into a
space was advanced enough to try to build a city inside the Internet. We have been
building it since January. In January we put a large forest there because cities start in
natural settings and the trees are cut down later. So we built a forest and lakes and we
built an old Roman acquaduct in the area, as though it were an old ruin. Then in March
people came in from all over the world as digital people and started to build their homes:
they built a bakery, they built a clinic, someone built a park, someone built a meditation
area full of sound and waterfalls, and so this is how the Sherwood City has been evolving.
And probably as we are sitting here right now, there is someone inside or several people
inside Sherwood City who are building or discussing the city.
Question 3
Why did you choose the name "Sherwood"?
Answer
We chose the name "Sherwood" for two reasons. The first was that it is a nice
theme in British literature of Robin Hood and people think: "Oh, now I can be a merry
man or I can be the evil sheriff of Sherwood City". But there is another reason: in
the 18th century in Britain, the Luddite movement - people against the technology of the
day, against weaving machines that were destroying employment in towns - came out and
smashed the weaving machines. They came from Sherwood Forest as well, so we figured that
if there was a revolution in cyberspace against the media, maybe it could happen in our
own town.
Question 4
In this city there is a social and political structure. Is it growing by itself or are
there some rules?
Answer
We tried to create a social structure and the most important thing in the three
dimensional cyberspace is land and who owns the land. Maybe it is just like Europe; there
is not much of it. There was a lady of the land who was in charge of giving land to people
and uncovering and allowing them to uncover it with their own protective covering and then
make it theirs. And that person had a lot of power and we didn’t realise that would
happen. But most of the social structure has emerged spontaneously, because there are
several hundred people involved in the Sherwood experiment. There is a rabbi in Israel who
wants to build a kind of synagogue there and organise a sort of the Jewish community
within the Sherwood experiment to identify who is Jewish and then to reach them. We never
expected this at all.
Question 5
Any phenomena of antagonism between some parts of this social community?
Answer
It is currently living in harmony with one exception in that we have someone who comes in
when no one else is there and destroys property and leaves a mark. Do you remember the
Pink Panther films with Peter Sellers where the Pink Panther leaves a glove? Well we have
that, and they leave a signature and they will destroy parts of the town and there is a
police department in this whole enormous alpha-world city, and we go to the police
department and the police come and they survey the site and they say: "Yes this is
this famous vandal who has come into the town. He has started to deface it with graffiti
and burning flames." Sometimes you’ll come and there’ll be a building on
fire. There is no fire department. But this has shocked us because we were living in
utopia. Now we find that the real world has come in. There is someone who wants to create
antagonism.
Question 6
What do you think about the relationship between the real human being and his avatar, his
digital counterpart?
Answer
Well, this is a very interesting question because when people first enter a cyberspace
world, a 3-dimensional world and they see these shapes moving - it could be men and women,
it could be a fish, a bird, a chess piece - they don’t really identify that with
selfhood until, for instance, they come up too close to the bird or the fish, and then on
the text by-line the bird will say: "You know, you are blocking my view." And
suddenly they associate a person with that avatar. And it is a fundamental realisation
that this is a person, and you’ll often find in the communities when you get someone
who is attacking - and avatars can attack each other by crashing back and forth through
each other because they pass through each other sort of magically - you find that people
defend another avatar, and they stop this. Avatars will come running after one of them and
say: "You cannot do it. That is a person. That symbol represents a human being. You
cannot deface that symbol." So they are abstracting a little bit. But we have seen
this happen. It is fascinating.
Question 7
Coming back to the relationship between avatar and personality changes. When someone
chooses an avatar, does he change personality, even his gender, his sex, or do people tend
to find an avatar with which they identify themselves completely?
Answer
In fact recently some of the worlds are offering avatars of many races and if you choose a
woman, often you get approached by many avatars because there are far more men in this
phenomenon than women and they are looking for a connection with a woman, so many people
choose a woman in order to fool the other men, but this has backfired too because
sometimes a woman has chosen a man. But sometimes we occasionally choose a black avatar
just to see the reaction because in America there are a lot of race questions and the
communication is different that you get if you choose the black avatar, even though they
don’t have any guarantee that you are black or Chinese or white, but we are so
controlled by what we see and so gullible as human beings that we are willing to even be
fooled by this simple theatre, this simple digital theatre.
Question 8
What is the difference between your Sherwood City and the other experiments of virtual
city that were born before and after your own?
Answer
There is quite an important difference in that the virtual cities that have happened
before have usually happened on Web pages, which are two dimensional and the pictures of
the city are virtual fit ends; they might be done that way or they are based on text
worlds using what is known as MUDs and MOOs. It is all described in text. So you type in
"Enter the square" and it will say "Now, you see a church", in text.
That is a virtual city. Our project is completely visual and at the same time
3-dimensional and inhabited with thousands of people who are moving around in some way,
and it is collaboratively built, so it is really the first global city built with a
visual... built by hand, by people collaborating visually with avatars.
Question 9
Of course there has been a relationship with the MOOs experience that was something older
on the Internet. What kind of reflection about that experience did you bring into your own
experiment?
Answer
From the MOOs? The MOOs have been very, very successful. There are hundreds of those
communities. They are very rich, and there are often many different political structures
such as dictatorships, where a chief who has extra powers to build or powers to give is
really the dictator of the environment. Our organisation has run MOOs for six or seven
years. The membership have run MOOs and MUDs for education for six or seven years, so we
are trying to bring all of that experience. We did a simulation of the human solar system
with the Martian colony and an L-5 colony, etc. with different universities in the United
States and Canada, and the students would simulate a community. There are gigabytes of
logs of experience on how to build a virtual community that we are now trying to bring
into the visual world.
Question 10
Do you think that your experience is something like a re-actualisation of utopian
philosophy, like Thomas Bacon’s Utopia, or Tomas Campanella’s Il Cittą del Sole
(The City of the Sun)?
Answer
Yes, it calls back to that human yearning for the perfect community and perhaps I think
even in Sicily in the time of the flowering of Greece there was a philosopher king either
in Sicily or in Sardinia, so this is really old. Yes, there is definitely this. Of course,
when vandalism and crime appear, people are disturbed but it is the natural course, but
people try to build communities in there. And maybe as a human species we need to have
that chance. Perhaps the Earth is now so covered with our cities and our ways of doing
things and it is going to be a long time before we are living in the solar system, so
perhaps this is the only place that we can carry out these social experiments.
Question 11
A final question. What is the future of Sherwood City?
Answer
Sherwood City continues to grow. We have discovered that many people don’t want to
build in this kind of incorporated planned area. They want to build in a chaotic way, they
want to do just anything. So we have got an area next door that is chaotic. We discovered
with Sherwood that the key need now is for a university to teach people how to go into a
virtual space, how to interact, how to move around, how to build, what are the emerging
social rules. And so we are actually now creating a university called the "U",
which will be another global project constructed by many universities and individuals all
over the world. The rabbi will do religious ceremonies. We have an architect in the United
Kingdom who will build a school of virtual architecture and to have avatars come and be
taught how to build a beautiful and functional structure. We hope this university will
help to introduce a whole generation into this phenomenon and give them some basic
guidance, because if it is a new world and you have no mentors. I was just up here in the
Fortezza talking about how we are going to do the education and it goes back to the time
of Leonardo, back to the time of old Firenze, because the only way you can teach is a
mentor with two or three students walking the countryside, just like in Italy or France in
the 14th and 15th centuries. We are going back to that model of the experienced, wise
mentor bringing the young students through the world and showing them what happens and
introducing them and then they find their own life.
Question 12
What are the technical requirements of your system? How many computers, how many systems
do you need to run this utopia?
Answer
The fascinating, wonderful thing with this is that you can do this on a normal personal
computer. It has to run Windows, say a fast 486 or Pentium, the newer ones, with 8
megabytes of RAM, it can run the old Windows 3.1, and a normal from home dial-up
connection at 14.4 or 28.8. This is all that is needed; no special goggles, no special
gloves or suits, just a normal personal computer. Through our Website we have an entire
description of a kind of university and how to obtain the software by pulling it from the
network into your computer and installing it and how to use it. We have a whole guide
there for the viewers, if they are interested.
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