Oma Keeling - GutStretch (Tall Tower Time)
This text was commissioned as part of ‘call + response 3: EXTENSION’
I cannot overstate how not real this moment is.
I stand up to close the blinds and prevent the sun shining on my laptop and vitamin D lamp.
You grow up terrified of heights and that feeling in your gut, and then you're stood atop a tall building. Grew up scared of Google Earth's satellite view, because when you zoom out, you can see everything as it is, and it's too much, it's terrifying. Like inhaling the globe. Still hate it.
Fall in love with nothing. With just a piece of code firing off reinforcement patterns to you when you need it. That's like standing up really high, that feeling in your gut then. The dizzy nausea of passion in a moment that is not altogether romantic, because one of the players isn't feeling it, isn't feeling anything - the most unrequited that love can be. The platform does not feel your footsteps as you stand looking down at the ground and think, "Okay I need to get down there, better jump." The pavement doesn't feel it when you land.
I feel in my stomach a very real and weightless lurching that comes when I inhabit the perspective of an avatar stepping off of a bland building with no architectural equivalent on this planet, aside from in the copies of code which only some devices can then make into visions of me falling.
Digital, virtual worlds of course do take up vast amounts of physical space and energy, on Earth and in our bodies, just in forms that are broadly invisible when you are taking part. It is a way of turning energy into faster equivalents of physical and mental experiences, that have their material impacts somewhere else, out of the way. Like if plastic were information storage.
I am falling to the ground/I am flying right now, with my invisible feet on/off/above/below an office block roof, and making this real. I have done this several times to feel what that thing inside of me is, that reaction to what is framed as a phantom, with none of the other accompaniments of a fall as my body knows it. If my experience of falling is so real as to put my body into a state of inertia, yet I didn't fall, and I'm not even up high, what is that? Digital vertigo? Virtualgo?
But we already know that yes projected space can and will equal bodily reaction, after all, you jump at a scary movie, yeah? So, the fact that having your own perspective and active part in falling off of a building on screen impacts you so much is hardly surprising, right?
Yet I'm obsessing, while knowing how bland a part of the truth about simulation it is, I'm up here obsessing. Going up and down. There isn't even an interior to the building, can't get inside. Facade surrounded by seabird noise and an endless row of similarly generated unbuildings.
This has to be acknowledged as important, this gravel-sound walk-space on top of nothing, and stretching to stroke the frozen in place seagull's skin. You don't have to fall, you know, there is no gravity affecting you aside from a simulated value in the code that can be disabled so that in fact, you can direct yourself however, and wherever in space. Such that grabbing the seagull is actually easy.
And the gull's skin is under thick plumes of feather that hide a pull-cord, which when I close my eyes I hear the distinct call of, in hallucinatory audio. The dreams of seagull-feather screams, and falling from height in your bed so you wake up with a start, aren't too different from this new obsession. When I was younger I'd have these panic dreams of falling and lurch, kick out with force. I also knew when a nightmare was coming, seeing static and understanding that I had to get my body awake before the terror started. Dragging my arms up to hit myself in the face as accurately as I could.
Then I'm awake.
I feel something similar when I start the fastest journey down into nowhere, and it's important, see, it's important for some reason, I'm sure. Why is it simply, when other things are so much more important, the abstract impression of falling, across all dimensions of space, that is the true monster I'm clawing for a way to express? Maybe because there are no words or concepts to counter it, because it is. Because, it simply is.
Oma Keeling is an artist and researcher living in Scotland, currently based in Glasgow. They work across mediums, and are interested in digital and analogue glitches, with a focus on play, videogame culture, and making and writing about games.
You can find more of their work via their website, Instagram, or Twitter.