The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World by Nancy Colier

Author:Nancy Colier [Colier, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2016-11-01T06:00:00+00:00

22

all alone in virtual community

I recently asked a young woman why she spent so much time playing The Sims 3, a virtual-character video game. She told me she likes the sense of community it offers her. She feels less cooped up in her own home and more a part of the world when she plays. She goes out into the neighborhood and walks around, sees other people in their houses, and gets a sense of the community. The neighborhood she is talking about is a virtual one, of course. When I reminded her that the people she was looking at in those homes are not real and that the neighborhood she wanders around in is also fake, she laughed and said she knew all that, but it didn’t bother her.

When I first heard composer Eric Whitacre talk about the debut of his virtual choir on YouTube, I got the chills.1 This virtual choir is a collection of individual voices recorded in different physical locations and then woven together online to create one choir, as if the singers had actually sung together. First, I was chilled by the music of “Lux Aurumque” (“Light and Gold”), which is heartbreaking and captivating. Like all great music, it has the power to connect us with our own divinity. But then this virtual choir also injected me with a dose of isolation and a fear of what this kind of composition could mean for the human experience. My blood ran cold.

Whitacre has assembled a technological collage of sound and sight that is remarkable, but other than the project involving music and humans, it has little to do with the experience that takes place in an actual real-life choir. There is a magical and transcendent experience that happens when we come together as human beings to create music, side by side, heart to heart, an experience that Whitacre himself describes as life changing — it was the first time he felt a part of something larger. The magic and mystery of the experience are a result of living something together, cocreating and sharing an experience as it unfolds before us, larger than and containing us. When we come together as individuals in a creative process, we become a part of the larger whole, our separateness melting into the experience itself, into one another. We become vehicles for the universe to express itself through our seemingly separate embodiments.

When we omit the together part of the experience, when the process no longer happens together, it’s no longer shared — we cut out the key ingredient in the experience, entirely change its nature, and extract its very soul. As I witnessed Whitacre conducting alone in front of a black screen in silence, as I watched the singers’ faces float by in individual boxes — a mosaic of separate lives pieced together in the ether, creating the illusion of connectedness — I knew that I would rather feel the connection directly than be left with the thought that I had lived it.

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