Inside the Second Life Universe With Life 2.0

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Life 2.0
Directed by Jason Spingarn-Koff
May 20 through 26, ReRun Gastropub Theater

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More About

• Jason Spingarn-Koff
• Second Life
• Carl Jung
• Virtual Worlds
• Science and Technology

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Creepily validating Sean Parker’s Social Network proclamation that “Now we’re going to live on the Internet,” Life 2.0 plugs into Second Life, the PC-gaming realm where users construct avatars, environments, and relationships that often have real-world implications. The shifting boundaries between virtual and flesh-and-blood realities are empathetically investigated by director Jason Spingarn-Koff, who alternates between traditional nonfiction footage and graphical Second Life clips in a manner that reflects the lives of his obsessive subjects. Those include a woman claiming to earn a six-figure salary selling computer-society clothes and mansions, a young man playing as an 11-year-old girl (which he justifies to his understandably chagrined fiancée with Jungian psychology), and a middle-aged couple having an online affair that soon goes offline. With nonjudgmental compassion, Spingarn-Koff depicts how these individuals—fleeing into imaginary universes to express and indulge emotional desires that inevitably bleed into their everyday existences—long for self-actualization and fulfillment. At once a disturbing vision of escape, a cautious portrait of liberation, and an exploration of authenticity and artificiality—as epitomized by a Second Lifer’s fondness for Vegas’s Paris hotel but indifference for the real Paris—it’s a documentary that trades not in absolutes but unsettling ambiguity.