1 Play , Art and Ritual on Irc ( Internet Relay Chat )

one of the world's most popular online chat modes. 1 Usually, IRC participants communicate via typed words. In contrast, this group communicates in real time mainly via the display of brilliantly colored visual images created from letters and other typographic symbols on the computer keyboard. Participants gather in a channel (chat room) called #mirc_rainbow, or " rainbow " for short. 2 While a dozen or so channels across the many IRC networks have featured this form of Please do not cite without permission. Note: illustrations for this chapter are not included in this file. Interested readers may write to request the additional file containing illustrations at one of the addresses above. The final version of this paper will appear in Eric Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman, eds., Media Anthropology, in preparation, and was adapted from a book in progress, tentatively titled Pixel Patchwork: an Online Folk Art Community and Its Art. An earlier overview of this art and its functions is available in Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online (Danet 2001, chapter 6), full text and illustrations also available on the book's Companion Website, # is the symbol marking every IRC channel. " mIRC " is the name of the Windows-based version of the IRC software. 2 visual communication, it has particularly flourished on rainbow on the Undernet. 3 This chapter presents an ethnographic study of rainbow art and communication as an online form of secular, ritualized play. INTRODUCTION Figure 1 is a sequence of interaction that I captured while logged onto rainbow in August 2002. 4 We see that five players have deployed six different images and one line of ready-made text to greet or acknowledge others. The " nick "-IRCese for nickname-of each player appears at the left of each image, together with each of its lines, just as if a person typed ordinary text. All players happen to be " ops, " " operators, " players with administrative responsibilities and privileges, in effect, the group's inner circle. First, , 5 a male signage installer from Pennsylvania, greets , a male Mississippi carpenter who has just entered the channel, with an image containing nine repetitions of his nick, a hint of the importance of repetition and repetitiveness to an understanding of this art-a topic developed later in this chapter. 6 Like all other images in Figure 1, 's image had been prepared 3 There are, or have been channels of the same …