Groundbreaking, literally - Faith in Selavy Oh

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

And they said you couldn't move mountains... Oh ye of little faith!

Physics and now Land artist Selavy Oh has created a script that operates the terraforming capabilities in Second Life®, resulting in the continuous and automated reshaping of land, even without her presence.

To my knowledge, this is without precedent.


That's me filming in the center of the mountain peaks. Selavy was not even in-world for that portion of the taping!

Filming and editing: Bettina Tizzy
Music: "Truth of the Legend" by Kevin MacLeod

Terraforming, the ability to intentionally transform surface topography, atmosphere, temperature or ecology, is not unique to science fiction or even science (where it is primarily called planetary engineering).

In his book, The Making of Second Life, Hamlet Au (aka Wagner James Au), explained the in-world terraforming process quite poetically: "Standing on a hill like a demi-urge, a Resident can wave her hand and cause the ground to swell, expand, or even collapse into the sea."

In Second Life, terraforming land is a skill that looks easy to do, but frequently results in unrealistic and poor duplicates of mountains, lakes and canyons.

Selavy, who rezzed in February of 2007, is most widely recognized for her physics work with the most basic of prims: the humble but noble cube. She has expanded her range considerably in the past few months and now works with any number of shapes and even Alpha textures, but physics are always involved. Art historian Amy Wilson once compared Selavy to Rauschenberg, explaining that, "I can’t help but think she’s the Rauschenberg of SL, albeit one whose hands are much, much tidier than his ever were (makes sense for the environment we’re talking about). Navigating in this little space created by artists whose work is pure abstraction (DanCoyote, Juria) and artists whose work specifically references real life (Cheen, Nebulosus), she comes to find some very fertile ground indeed."

Given recent developments with Comet Morigi's terraforming explorations and her anchoring of huge prims to sims - thereby extensively and surprisingly expanding the canvas - and now Selavy's epic work - many of the most exciting innovations in virtual worlds at this time have to do with Land Art so extreme that I can't help but wonder what James Turell and Micheal Heizer would think.

Possibly the closest reference to Dancing Mountains in Real Life might be Heizer's 1971 Double Negative project in Nevada, for which he removed 240,000 tons of stone to make two slices 30 ft wide by 50 ft deep on opposing sides of an existing canyon to suggest a line between the canyon walls. His focus was on the removal of something, thereby creating a Land Art piece that stressed space, rather than an object. But I have no Real Life reference for land that wiggles, shrinks and grows, with no attending human, in an automated fashion.

Selavy accomplishes this by leaving her scripts with Negative Overland, a bot that is hidden underwater.

Some years ago, I was traveling in the rain forest in the heart of Costa Rica. My traveling companion and I had just sat down to a white tablecloth dinner at a lodge perched a top a mountain less than two miles opposite the Arenal volcano. The volcano was erupting (and still is to this day). Constantly. With a surprisingly loud and deep rumble, the mountain would cough up the fiery lava and rocks, dressing itself in a never-ending kinetic skirt of thick veins in an orangey red.

We struck up a conversation with the couple sitting at the table next to us. They were vulcanologists from Finland and they spoke about volcanoes the way we talk about virtual worlds. The woman shared how she got a kick out of hugging active volcanoes at the base and putting her ear up to them. She swore they sounded like the loudest heartbeat on earth. That certainly had a lasting impression on me.

For some reason, it was the first thing I thought of when Selavy teleported me in to watch a proof-of-concept demo of Dancing Mountains. She has managed to breathe life into the landscape in ways heretofore unimaginable.

~*~

Dancing Mountains can be experienced on arts patron Mab MacMoragh's Soup sim by teleporting directly from here.

In addition, Selavy nearly always has an installation at Brooklyn is Watching. Teleport directly from here.

See also:

• Land Art in Second Life: A historical perspective and an introduction to virtual artist Comet Morigi
• The Patron Saints of Poetik
• It's Hip to be Squarish
• Selavy's page on the Odyssey Art Ning
• "Attention Economy" by Beth Harris on smARThistory
• New York Times piece on art in Second Life

I can fly, but meh - Part II in our Gravity in Virtual Worlds series

Chasing a dream - Photo of Nessy Shepherd by Sennaspirit Coronet


Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Dreams of superheroes and their feats often populated my thoughts and aspirations as a child. My grandmother would tie the arms of my father's old business shirt around my neck in a makeshift cape, drawing a big "S" on the back, and I would become SuperWoman, tearing around the park in pursuit of villains, real and imagined, but still wishing I could lift off and become airborne.

Here is the first of seventeen Superman animated cartoons, all classics and marvelous to this day, which were released by Paramount Pictures in the early 1940s. Soon after, scores of children - clearly early candidates for Darwin Awards - believed they could fly and broke arms, legs or worse by "jumping off roofs with towels wrapped around their necks."


This cartoon - a work of art in its own right - is in the public domain

We wanted - ever so much - to fly as kids... so why aren't those of us in Virtual Worlds spending more time aloft and celebrating that fact? Flickr, which boasts more Second Life groups than you can shake a stick at, has one puny little group called Fly Away with a scant 388 snapshots, many featuring avatars not in unaided flight, but on brooms, flying contraptions and pegasi.


Wings are rightfully popular in virtual worlds. Red Caste Guardian by Ganymedes Costagravas

While I have no hard statistics to offer, I'd wager that collectively we spend hundreds of hours more adorning our avatars with wings and other devices for flight, than we do flying. The first gift I received in Second Life® was a Superman t-shirt, and soon after I was sporting wings (and this phase lasted several months), but I can't recall ever going on a barnstorming flying party or gliding for any other reason than to get from point A to point B or to put some distance between myself and a large party so that I could concentrate on an IM.


We even walk to fundraise in Second Life's annual Relay for Life to benefit cancer research - Photo by Janet Powell

Hamlet Au (aka Wagner James Au) agrees. He has been chronicling Second Life, both as its first embedded journalist in 2003 for the company that owns it, Linden Lab, and since 2006 on his own blog, New World Notes. In his book, certainly the definitive oeuvre on SL, The Making of Second Life (he's working on the paperback edition at the moment), Hamlet explains:

"...the ability of avatars to fly in Second Life actually began as a quick work-around, so the developers wouldn't have to devote time and resources to creating climbing animations. When it came to transitioning from Linden World to Second Life, the team opted to discard the jet-pack propulsion but retain flying. For Rosedale (SL's founder and Chairman of the Board), the power to transcend gravity was "innately, strongly interesting to people," especially when it did not come from an external mechanical function but was a graceful, effortless ability that came from within.

But if flying is a universal dream, few Residents have embraced it in full. Where one might expect airborne societies of people frolicking in the clouds, the overwhelming majority of Residents insist on remaining earthbound for most of their time."

Maybe the soon to-be-released Watchmen movie might change all that? I doubt it.

Hamlet goes on to say...

"Why the fear of flying? Many have speculated that the sensation of self-propelled flying is too jarring for extended periods, and that people's visceral empathy with their avatars means they need to maintain a visual reference of themselves on the ground in order to feel comfortable."

I don't believe we're afraid. After all, what's the worst thing that can happen? Our avatar falls down and automatically (and comically) dusts itself off. I think we don't enjoy watching our avatar's backsides (the default camera view) as much as we do being able to pan up and down and gaze upon our creations face-forward or from some more flattering angle.

Case in point, we adore watching our avatars dance, and one of the most fashionable animations on the grid is this one. I don't know what it is called or who created it, but perhaps one of our readers might help us fill this in?


Filmed and edited by Bettina Tizzy at Earth Primbee's Inspire Space Park during a particle show (teleport directly from here)

One is the loneliest number

Another common objection is that flight is a lonesome practice, unless it is with others, in which case it requires relatively good hand-eye and team coordination to keep up with each other, lest you be unable to find your way. This is, unquestionably, the best and really the only way to get completely lost in virtual worlds as you always know where you are (the name of the parcel, sim and coordinates are always in front of you).

In typical Hamlet Au fashion, he closes the topic this way...

"Whatever the case, flying remains a largely temporal behavior, sparingly used to quickly get around barriers. (Which was, when you think about it, the function's original purpose)."

Interestingly, there have been some new developments that I will share with you in my next post in this series that may help to change your avatar's gentle (and grounded) mind about all this.

See also:
+ Overcoming gravity (and reality) - Part I in our Gravity series
+ Oh, those intrepid gravity challengers - Part III in our Gravity in Virtual Worlds series
+ Climbing walls, sky dancing (in HD!), and weightless sex/showers - Part IV in our Gravity in Virtual Worlds series

Random stuff about Hamlet Au, and some questions for the man who asks questions

In as much as I routinely go against the advice of nearly every social media specialist and don't shrink from publishing long blogposts here, it is hard to condense what I have to say about Hamlet Au (aka Wagner James Au) in one article... so, to heck with that. Today a morsel... tomorrow the world!

Instead, let me give you some tidbits that have little or nothing to do with the recent publication of his book "The Making of Second Life," which has been praised to the hilt by everyone including me, or that he publishes New World Notes, the most widely read Second Life® blog (and it is believed that there are at least 1,000 of them), or the fact that Torley Linden credited Hamlet and his New World Notes for convincing him to dip his watermellony toes into Second Life, or that Hamlet's been covering the gaming industry for GigaOM.com since July 2006, or importantly, that he was hired by Linden Lab as the first embedded journalist in Second Life between April 2003 and February 2006, or that whenever he's blogged about me, or NPIRL, or the Garden of NPIRL Delights, readership of this blog has soared.

I don't know how he does it.

And that's not the half of it.

Whenever I get to feeling sorry for myself and my combined Real Life/Second Life workload, I think about Hamlet. In all my dealings with him, I have never once heard him complain, even when he was in the throes of launching his book and doing most everything else at the same time.


At home, Hamlet has the bestest wall clocks. If I knew how to file a JIRA, I'd ask for something similar: the current time in these six places in the world, on the top of my screen

But back to those tidbits:

* He didn't major in Journalism; rather, his BA is in Philosphy from the University of Hawaii
* In fact, he's originally from Kailua in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, which also happens to be the location where episodes of the television series Hawaii Five-Oh were filmed and where Lost is shot today
* His first by-lined article was an interview with David Lynch
* His first published piece was erotica for a now defunct San Francisco magazine called Future Sex , and yes, I did look for it and didn't find it :D
* He has a lot more on his mind than virtual worlds and games. In his January 1, 2002 controversial piece "We were wrong" for Salon he asked "When will Nader, Moore, Steinem, Chomsky -- and the other leftists who were monumentally mistaken about the war in Afghanistan -- join me in admitting it?"
* Hamlet doesn't rightly know what his true rez day is, especially since his Hamlet Linden account has been deleted

I find it interesting that someone who was born in paradise - Hawaii - and lives in one of the most sophisticated and exciting and delicious and expensive cities of the world - San Francisco - spends most of his time in front of a computer.


In his virtual living room, Hamlet enjoys a photograph of the view outside the window of his Real Life home

Several weeks ago, just before my two lives went simultaneously crazy, Hamlet indulged me and let me ask him a lot of random questions - some which are now as old as a good bottle of Port (how time flies in Second Life!), but a few are perennials - like, what did he look like when he was a newbie? Did he wear wings? His answer: "I had giant weird 70s hair and white pajamas because I didn't know how to make a suit or adjust hair, and it took me forever to bother doing either. A bit like an afro meets, I dunno, Sean Cassidy."

What were some of your earlier epiphanies as a user... not as a journalist?
Hamlet Au: Any epiphany I've had, I've written about. That's how I did it. I didn't want to insert my epiphanies directly, but rather, describe what I saw and experienced and who I met.

The way I see it, you take yourself out of the equation as much as possible and look at it almost as if it were a film... except that you get to ask questions. (BTW, Hamlet had originially intended to work in film way back when).
Hamlet Au: Well, if it's a film, then I try to be more like Errol Morris. That is, I have a definite perspective, but I try to keep it underlying the narrative and not let it overwhelm what people are telling me and doing. So, (I try to be) "Someone like that." The book finally gave me a chance to put my perspective more to the fore. My editor had to push me on that, it's been so ingrained for me to shut up and let the story unfold.


Ha! I knew Hamlet had the NPIRL blood in him. Here's a couch in his living room

We wonder about the person behind the man who reports for us.
Hamlet Au: "Reporting," per se, I consider less my role. I don't write "news" so much as try to find emblematic stories and content. My blog has become more "newsy" ironically enough, as I started writing the book and had less time to go in-world and really root around for that perfect story. That's always been a tension. People will often ask "Why aren't you writing the news about Linden doing X?" or whatever, and the thing is, if it's just the usual downtime or whatever I don't necessarily jump on it.

What's your daily life like?
Hamlet Au: I usually get up late, say 10am ideally, and either blog something immediately or more usually I was up the night before and blogged a late night post. I'm usually in-world late night, which probably means I've come to know more EU Residents than I otherwise would.


On the terrace of his Second Life home, Hamlet has a humongous marijuana plant that must be watered every day or it begins to IM him, complaining

How is the book promotion going?
Hamlet Au: The book tour has been fun, but most of the radio interviews I've done were so basic, I end up giving tech support. Seriously. The radio guy is like "Where do I go to download this?" "Do I have to pay money?" Etc. etc. Most have been curious. Just one radio host (I won't say her name) really didn't like the idea of Second Life. She kept wondering if she went in-world if a serial killer would attack her, so we spent about five minutes talking about serial killers. I said "Well, if you're worried, you can always log off. But she wouldn't give it up. I (then) said, "Well, there's serial killers in real life", and she's all "But I'd know to run away," and I'm thinking "Yeah, Ted Bundy was really popular with his female co-workers," and then I'm like, "Why the fuck am I arguing with this lady about serial killers?"

What were some of the better interviews?
Moira Gunn of Tech Nation did a really great interview with me. She's a smart cookie. She asked me if I was an evangelist for Linden Lab, and that was a good point to raise. I said "No, I'm an evangelist for the community, and for the idea of Second Life." I don't think I was even when Linden Lab was actually paying me as a contractor. Residents I interviewed would often go "OMG I love LL! I love Philip!" I rarely quoted that stuff. What's important is not what they think of LL; what's important are the things they express in here, what it says about them, about the world, and the world outside.

Good answer!
Hamlet Au: Virtual Worlds 2008 was hugely fun. It's so great and humbling to meet such a diverse group of SLers. "Colonel Bob in the Morning" - that's the name of his show - Very nice guy. He kept talking about wanting to be Dean Martin in SL.

You did tell him he CAN be Dean Martin?
Hamlet Au: Well, of course! Dean Takahashi did some great interviews and reviews for Industry Standard and Wall Street Journal. Very gratifying.

In between our chatter, I learned that Hamlet hasn't read "The Painted Word," a book that I have easily given away 50 copies of, by Tom Wolfe, the man who originally inspired Hamlet's three-piece white suit.
Hamlet Au: I've been meaning to send him a copy of my book. He seems to keep up on the latest tech stuff.


Hamlet Au... from Tom Wolfe-ish to Hunter S. Thompson-ish, but really his very own person who just happens to like three-piece white suits, seen here at Parsec

Seems to me that back in the early days you had more direct access (to Linden Lab). Is this just because everyone's gotten so busy?
Hamlet Au: I used to be able to ask Lindens I know about this or that issue and now they want it all funnelled through their PR agency. Again, it sort of is understandable, but then, I don't know how it's helping them overall. They're trying stuff, they deserve credit for that, press conferences, etc.

How often do you deal with their agency versus with them? Do they have an account exec that takes your questions and then "gets back to you?"
Hamlet Au: Yeah. I used to be able to e-mail Philip and get a direct quote within 24 hours. Wow, up until mid-2007, I think. I've always tried to be an intermediary between the Lindens and the Residents, sort of an ombudsman, but that's become quite difficult.

I get the sense that it was almost a personal loss for you when Cory Linden (aka Cory Ondrejka) left.
Hamlet Au: Yes, I was really upset even without knowing what happened; I still don't. And I still am.

What would you like to have happen with New World Notes?
Hamlet Au: Well, I want to take NWN to the next level, and that could mean many things, including more Second Life content creation. I loved working with Lainy (Voom). I'd love to do more stuff like that. (Hamlet and Lainy created this vid to promote his book).

How ingrained is this life with you? And can you imagine another? Are you actively exploring other virtual worlds?
Hamlet Au: I report on lots of other VWs for my day job, so to speak, with GigaOM.com, and I am interested in an abstract level, and there are definitely a lot of good ideas going on out there and folks building competitors to SL that I admire. Still... People keep asking me, What are you doing now that the book is out, will you leave SL? And the thing is, there's really nothing else out there that has everything I could ever want. This is what I do.

The Perils of Mixed Realities events - as experienced by Hamlet Au

Last Thursday, and in the company of my friends and NPIRLers Pavig Lok and Flea Bussy, I teleported into a recreation of a penthouse in Manhattan. The event - a mixed realities party on the occasion of the Real Life and Second Life® book signing of Wagner James Au's (aka Hamlet Au) The Making of Second Life.



Hamlet was in New York city, in the company of Iris Ophelia, to speak at a Fashion Institute of Technology event. In fact, Iris gave the keynote address on the Institute's Technology Day. Go Iris! As an aside, there's a girl who's inventory I'd like to raid any old day of the week.

Since Hamlet was already in the Big Apple, the opportunity to throw a Real Life media bash in his honor was... um... low-hanging fruit, so his publisher - HarperCollins - did just that.


Falk Bergman, Hamlet Au, KallfuNahuel Matador, oh-dear-I-didn't-get-her-name- but-she-was-very-nice, and Flea Bussy

I've never attended a mixed realities event on the Real Life end, and I tend to get engrossed with the people around me - in any life - so I can well sympathize with Hamlet who was torn between attending to his guests in Manhattan, as well as the avatars who were present at the pixelated penthouse. I understand that there was a balcony that he kept heading for, during which time he would leave us avatars to our own devices, and his white-suited self would slip into "away."



Fortunately for him, Iris - who was also present in both worlds - would stand up and jiggle his mouse now and then to bring him back to life - but there was really nothing she could do short of operating his avatar - in the face of the onslaught of tricks that some of us (I'm not naming names) pulled on the poor man.


The lovely Iris Ophelia kept coming to Hamlet's rescue

Various lamp shades were placed on his head, a skirt wrapped around his waist, garbage bags rested at his feet, and cockroaches the size of Saint Bernard doggies visited him.



I stashed my photographic records of these horrors (lol) away, thinking they would never see the light of day, but then Kit Meredith blogged about it and, good sport that he is, Hamlet did, too.

It is a concern, isn't it? Those of us who inhabit virtual worlds must live two lives, and it gets even more complicated when we have to be present - and darling, witty and engaged - in two places at once.

Get de-noobed via one easy volume

I spend nearly all my time in our pixelated world trying to understand what happened, what makes things work, and who is behind it. Every day feels epic. Often times the information is so tangled that I cannot even being to unravel it. Multiply one day of discovered and extrapolated facts by five years and imagine that in an intelligent volume you can hold and read over a weekend.

HarperCollins has just published Hamlet Au's (aka Wagner James Au) The Making of Second Life, and Lainy Voom, whose machinima I delight in, has teased just some of the stories from that book, in this entertaining promo piece.


The Making of Second Life from TheMakingOfSecondLife on Vimeo.

For those of us who read his blogged column daily, Hamlet/James' grasp of our world comes as no surprise, nor do the facts that he was the first embedded journalist and historian in the metaverse or that he majored in philosophy. Take this gem from the preface:

"The physical world of Second Life... is a kind of 3-D palette for the avatars within it. Standing on a hill like a demi-urge, a Resident can wave her hand and cause the ground to swell, expand, or even collapse into the sea. Moving her palm above the ground, she can make wooden shapes emerge from thin air (there is a deep rumble as these objects take on substance), and once there, her hands can mold and transmute their shape, even their substance - stretching a cube into a flat sheet, twirling a sphere into a torus made of shimmering silver..."

It's prose like this that makes reading The Making of Second Life effortless - a factor to consider since so many of us now prefer to expose ourselves to new information in 3D real time - and while I'm just about half way through, I've already experienced an Olympic leap of understanding.

Contemplating virtual worlds: Dusan Writer nails it

Like Hamlet Au and his omnipresent and indispensable reviews and reporting on the metaverse via New World Notes, and his new book The Making of Second Life - which I am devouring, by the way - blogger and specialist in vertical integration of media content and experiences, Dusan Writer has become a touchstone and a muse for me... Someone who takes the time to rephrase raw data, reflect upon it, and then present his take on virtual worlds and those who people them so coherently, so eloquently, that after reading his analyses, the rest of my day is forever changed. Dusan was especially profound and silver-tongued in this post, called "Leaving Second Life." Here is but a paragraph of what I consider to be one of the best internal conversations I've come across on any topic:

"But for now, a few pathfinders will live in that space of tension. The tension between dreams and reality. Between on the one hand the hope of translating the impossible into new languages and ways of living, and on the other despair at its erosion in the face of bad policy, code or a cool indifferent world."