Avatar designer workshop and focus group - Call for participation

Posted by Bettina Tizzy
© All rights reserved on images by Nur Moo

Jo-Anne Green, co-director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA), just alerted me to an intriguing project.

A graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada is studying avatar design in Second Life® and is looking for participants who would be willing and interested in contributing a small portion of their time to developing this academic research.

Interested participants would be involved in a small 2-4 hour workshop session one day and a follow-up focus group for 1-2 hours involving an avatar design critique session with peers.

Both sessions will take place on Odyssey in Second Life.

The researcher plans to watch participants create avatars based on established Modern Art design guidelines borrowed from Art-History to see if they still translate into interesting and useful avatar design. The research will be taking snapshots and video of the avatar creators during the building process so they can be critiqued during the peer review session.

At the end of this research, the researcher will write about the strengths and limitations of using Modernist guidelines to inform avatar design in Second Life and other next generation virtual worlds. All participants will own the rights to their own avatar creations being generated during this workshop.

The researcher will only document these designs in order to visually illustrate their relationship to the theoretical frame-work.

Any potential participants must meet this criteria:

• Genuine interest in designing avatars – especially designing for themselves as well as for clients/friends/other people.
• Some arts background (including arts produced exclusively in SL)
• Relative fluency in navigating the building controls in Second Life.
• Reasonable fluency in English (written) and/or ability to use an in-world translator effectively.
• The willingness to allow their avatar designs made in this case-study session to be publicized, documented and researched by the author.
• The willingness to participate for the duration of the research project.
• Professes not to be a member of a captive population (inmate), psychiatric in-patient nor a youth under the age of 19.
• The willingness to sign a consent form (over the age of 19).

If you are interested, reply with your name (SL name only is fine), background, contact information availability (including your local time zone) and specific design interests. Submit a notecard with your proposal to uuuuuuu Heliosense, or via email to Jeremy Owen Turner at jot@sfu.ca. Replies of interest must be received by August 10, 2009.

Potential participants will be notified of the status of their participation by August 13, 2009 for sessions happening on the following week.

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.