Traveling Without Moving

New York City's Lower East Side--the storied, once forlorn corner of the city turned crossroads of cultural production and wellspring of "cool"--is now brought into extreme proximity via the virtual transportation capabilities of the Internet. Rather than visiting the neighborhood in person, imbibe the local ambience via the MMOPRG Virtual Lower East Side online instead.

The world of VLES...is an idealized, Smurf Village reduction of the real Lower East Side, and yet instantly recognizable to anyone who’s logged more hours at Pianos than he cares to admit or ducked out to Rosario’s Pizza for a late-night slice....

Like their flesh-and-blood counterparts, the computer-generated residents of VLES (which opened to the public last week) are free to walk a familiar gritty strip between Houston and Rivington Streets, befriend one another, watch music videos, hang out at rock shows, form their own bands and get into as much after-hours miscreancy as the Web site’s programmers will allow.

Instead of a site about the Lower East Side, the site aims to be the Lower East Side, or at least a 3D visualization of it. A NYTimes reporter and LES resident describes what it's like to move from his physical environment to its virtual parallel:

It began as a typical night on the Lower East Side. A few weeks ago a crowd of young urbanites gathered in the bowels of Cake Shop, the pastry cafe cum music club on Ludlow Street, to see a performance by an indie-rock band, the Virgins. A couple of minutes into the show the subterranean space was already packed to capacity and smelling of stale beer, so I left.

I walked a few blocks to my apartment on Avenue A, turned on my computer, directed a small, pixelated representation of myself to enter a small, pixelated representation of Cake Shop, and rejoined the show. There were no imperious bouncers or foul odors to contend with, and no fluids of any kind expectorated on my shoes. Except for a slightly choppy video feed, it was by my standards a pretty successful evening on the town.

MTV, smartly interested in expanding its role as conduit between consumers and the music industry, developed the Virtual Lower East Side site to "leverage the cultural cachet" of the neighborhood, gambling on the idea that social networking of the future--the "future of music," even--will take place in 3D environments. Long a site of incredible possibility, the Lower East Side as retooled by MTV becomes the site of a new type of cultural production (not to mention consumer fantasy).

“It was a way for us to get back to our core virtues around music discovery and passion for new, underground subversive bands,” said Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks’ music group and a 20-year veteran of the company.

And capitalize on them, obviously.

Game designers went to significant lengths to replicate the particular mix of cultural influences and physical form that inform the feel of the original:

Not every business and storefront is represented, but several landmarks are there, from the neon-lighted exterior of Katz’s Delicatessen (where I could press my digital nose against its salami-stocked windows, though I couldn’t go inside) to a fully explorable model of the club Max Fish, complete with a framed photograph of Julio Iglesias hanging above the bar, a “Pirates of the Caribbean” pinball machine and familiar messages scrawled on the bathroom wall.

To fill these knowingly grungy environs VLES’s creators turned to Judi Rosen, the fashion designer and proprietor of the downtown boutique the Good, the Bad & the Ugly, to photograph real-life denizens of the Lower East Side. Then they created a variety of avatars using her photographs for fashion reference. “You can’t just have generic skater boys,” Ms. Rosen said, “because there’s punk skaters, there’s hippie skaters, there’s graffiti skaters, there’s square skaters. All those little nuances mean a lot.”

But what does this portend for a sense of place? Can a virtual "place" ever approach the complexity of its physical counterpart? What is the real-world impact, if any, of virtual commodification? What happens when the Lower East Side no longer resembles the virtual version?

Moreover, what does it mean to make what was once the de facto province of very few become so instantly accessible to anyone? Is this what's next in "glocalization?"

For decades, the Lower East Side has derived its coolness from at least a veneer of danger and inaccessibility. Venturing there for the first time required risking the disapproval of the locals, whether they were the immigrants who once populated its tenements, the drug dealers who shouted from rooftops to warn of unfamiliar faces, or the bartenders and bouncers who didn’t recognize you as a regular. How can the area retain its mystery if anyone with a computer can experience some fraction of it?

“It takes something that was a neighborhood, and now it belongs to everybody else,” said Clayton Patterson, a photographer who has been shooting in downtown Manhattan for more than 25 years. “It’s the complete denial of your space, a complete theft of what it was that you lived in for years.”

Some longtime members of the community, however, said that VLES poses little risk to a district whose iconoclasm they feel faded away long ago. “The flavor’s already gone,” said Dick Manitoba, the frontman of the punk-rock group the Dictators and the owner of Manitoba’s, a bar on Avenue B. “The Second Avenue Deli’s a bank, the Fillmore East is a bank, and you’ve got to pass by 12 restaurants and coffee shops just to get to the couple of places that still have character.”

Ironically, the VLES is free from some of the more aggravating processes at play in the Lower East Side.

While VLES might be a fantasy of fetishized dirt and muck (to the point that its official logo is a big fat rat), it’s also a neighborhood without an impending sense of gentrification, exorbitant rents or luxury condominiums sprouting from every street. “It’s not an accurate representation,” Mr. Manitoba said, “but it could be a fun, entertaining thing, and if I guess if I lived in Nebraska, I would love to see it.”

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Comments

[Phillippa - Bedding E-Tailer]

I've always wanted to go to New York - missed my chance when my boyfriend (now husband) went over to run in the N Y marathon, but I couldn't get days off work to join him. A big regret - but one day. This blog just makes me want to go all the more to see it for myself.