Just a few days left! "Mixed Realities"

Turbulence - a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, has commissioned over 150 net-based works, and helped to pioneer Real Life's exploration of virtual worlds via its Mixed Realities, an exhibition and symposium, which ends on April 15th and explores the convergence - through cyberspace - of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks.

The funding for Mixed Realities was made possible thanks to a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and links and overlays the Huret & Spector Gallery at Boston's Emerson College, Turbulence.org, and the new media center and gallery Ars Virtua in Second Life (teleport directly from here, headed by Rubaiyat Shatner (aka James Morgan).

The commissioned works allow audiences to experience both real and fictional places simultaneously in John (Craig) Freeman's Imaging Beijing , which combines panoramic photography, digital video, and a virtual installation, to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities.


Imaging Beijing (teleport directly from here)

In The Vitruvian World, by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele, an immersive installation has been created that embodies the principles of Vitruvius, a 1st century BC, Roman writer, architect and engineer who authored specific building formulae based on the guiding principles of strength, utility and beauty.


Vitruvian World (teleport directly from here)

Then there's the debate regarding the value of virtual labor and currency in No Matter, by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott. According to them, their replicas of famous buildings, luxury goods and custom-designed objects in Second life simultaneously disappoint and fascinate, whereas in Real Life, consumer items and imaginary objects serve as forms of emotional attachment — projection screens for desire, fear and love.


No Matter (teleport directly from here)

Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa , and Georg Tremmel, explore the communication of physical data from multiple sources through Remote. Remote connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa -- remotely controlling each other.


Remote (teleport directly from here)

Caterwaul is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the Internet. A physical wall in Boston operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds (this sounds familiar) than they do communicating in Real Life. The resulting cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, and piped out of an "identical" wall in Second Life.

Caterwaul is by Australian Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and Brigit Lichtenegger.


The very noisy Caterwaul (teleport directly from here)

Mixed Realities ends April 15th.

Fibreculture Journal critiques DanCoyote Antonelli's 'Art and (Second) Life'

Jo-Anne Green, co-director of New Radio and Performing Arts - Turbulence, has alerted me to a just-issued and noteworthy paper on art in Second Life.

Malia Ventura (aka Caroline McCaw) is a senior lecturer and academic leader in communication design at Otago Polytechnic, in Dunedin, New Zealand. She has just published the paper Art and (Second) Life in Fibreculture Journal, an Australia-based peer-reviewed international journal that "encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability."

Mostly, she explores two running themes: the Hyperformalist art of NPIRLer DanCoyote Antonelli (aka DC Spensley), his philosophy and accomplishments, and the context in which his art is produced and read, while addressing the environmental metaphors of Second Life. In the second thread, she also draws parallels between his art and the settler culture of New Zealand, "to consider the role of art in new environments."



Notably, Ms. McCaw's paper is derived from interviews conducted with DC during August of 2006, which preceded his Full Immersion Hyperformalism installation, and the second ZeroG SkyDancers Dancing with Angels , as well as the latest and current ZeroG SkyDancers event.

Gary Hazlitt's trailer is the next-best way for those not using Second Life to get a sense of what transpires during Second Spring: ZeroG SkyDancers, which is in the final stretch of its three month run and expected to close at the end of March.


You can see a higher resolution version of this here.

I contacted DC to get his impressions on Fibreculture Journal's piece:

DanCoyote Antonelli: I am very proud to be written about by such a scholarly person as Caroline McCaw. Her critical credentials are impeccable, and in the short time we had to speak with each other, she has gleaned more about my project in Second Life than most. It is often said that art in Second Life is without critical intervention. For the most part this is true. However, this work of Ms. McCaw's is as good as it gets and I am delighted beyond words that my work in virtual worlds is the subject of her paper.

This has been a good month for DC, insofar as Real Media exposure is concerned. He is also featured in the print edition of the March/April 2008 issue of Step Inside Design - along with artist Sabine Stonebender.