Truthseeker Young and "Voices: Orion's Arm"

Posted by Alpha Auer
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Yes, that's it folks! Absolutely no need for any further pontifications from yours truly on this newest one by Truthseeker Young. Teleport directly from here.
:-)

Role Play: Memory or imagination? The use of masks to create an Impossible Reality

NPIRLer Yohann Emoto was so captivated by this place and topic that I invited him to guest-blog about it here. In Real Life, he is a 41 year old French man, self described as "a night owl," father to two children, a designer of social and pedagogical games and a corporate consultant. He's been a resident of Second Life since 2006. - Bettina Tizzy


By Yohann Emoto

I have always been fascinated by the unfolding of passions and rejections provoked by Role Playing (RP) in Second Life®.

I have seen the compelling fervor of various creators and players who, pressured by the constraints of their ideas devote their limitless energies to their tasks like hypnotized collectors or enthralled philatelists. And I have observed those who reject RPs all through the anthology of questions of morality or the lack of personal desire to embody a role other than representing one’s true self.

To become a prowling vampire during a whole night, thirsty for vengeance with a neighboring tribe, or a Star Wars character that battles against his own impulses of the “Dark Force,” or a lonely cowboy who will drink his cupidity in a lost saloon, or a mermaid, a fairy, an elf or a powerful dragon... there are as many choices as there are sensitivities, a wide array of unbridled imaginations allowed by the role of masks that Second Life makes possible.

In a way, all of this is Impossible in Real Life, hence the presence of this article in our preferred blog!

To bring a novel alive, or a literary piece of work through collective creation, by a vastly improvised yet well regulated play, was my concept of the RP until my unexpected encounter with Jo Yardley, the creator of the 1920’s Berlin Project, which opened on July 18th.

During one of my many explorations, I landed in a place where I immediately perceived the excellent quality and historical sourcing of the textures used there.

When Jo Yardley greeted me with the sharp tone of a German school teacher, admonishing me for not adhering to the dress code, I knew that I had arrived in “outer space” and that I would experience “wow!” moments that only Second Life can provide. It happens when one meets seriously devoted people.



After we became better acquainted, she offered me a guided tour of the place, the main area, the small streets, the “backstreets," the “nightclub”...





...her typical “Berliner hoffs,” with a space so tiny that you have to share water and toilets.



Her movie theatre screens films of that era, a hotel welcomes lovers who can enjoy moments of care-free “insouciance” possible only because they were taking place in between two wars, a cabaret fills with musicians who play live music of the period. There is an “education factory” where classes about the 20’s are offered, as well as documentaries about life during those years.





I also liked the original and interesting “posing balls,” which animate avatars and enable them to physically have an argument, or dance the authentic dances of the 20’s. It is easy to lose oneself in this well-reconstructed atmosphere, and listen to the accurate music of that period that comes from another time... Jo, a historical consultant from Amsterdam in Real Life, is passionate about life between the two great world wars. “Berlin, at that time, was very interesting as well as exciting for its politics, culture and music, but we also wanted to show its darker side of poverty and prostitution," she explained. Jo has additional projects planned and hopes to own a complete simulator. I wish her a well deserved success.

I was fascinated by this woman’s passion. While she only just rezzed in Second Life in February of this year and is therefore an apprentice creator, she has built quite a realistic place sourcing over 80% of the textures from her personal archives. I have discovered through her work another form of RP: that of bringing back to life a forgotten era of our human history and making it a place for social gatherings where exchanges are regulated. Berlin was at the hub of captivating world and part of an enlightened time, before darkness engulfed it, and the late 20s were a defining moment in the new era of modernism before it was followed by conflict.

The rules of this “game” become a sort of a framework through which time stops and the Masterpiece theatre begins.

I was familiar with RPs that stemmed from romanced imaginations; I have now discovered those born from Memory and History. It is no more an issue of merely incarnating a character than reincarnating it…

Jo’s passion has deeply inspired me, and today I question the living reason for Second Life. Is it not an immense RP in which we incarnate someone else? Do we live with insane or phenomenal powers? Don’t we fly from one place to another and speak “telepathically” with others? Don’t we teleport ourselves? Don’t we disconnect from it at our leisure? How then are our human behaviors based on this model modified? What does “being our self” mean when the self becomes a totally imagined being?

This reminds me of the “Comedia Del Arte” where the Art of Masks was used to bring forth the true personality of man... we think we hide, and in fact, this is where we allow ourselves to be truly who we are beyond our permanent social masks!

Who said anything about playing a role?

You can visit the 1920’s Berlin Project by teleporting directly from here.

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.

What *has* Nomasha Syaka been up to?

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

When it comes to virtual creations, I'm a snoopy gumshoe. I want to know what everyone's making, and especially a handful of people I keep track of at all times. For the past year I've been pinging "Anything new, Nom?" now and then, and not getting a straight answer. Just invoking the guy's name here with some news makes me happy, for Nomasha Syaka (rez: 9/13/2006) is the British creator of the poetic sculpted Icarus that I often rez at my own Chakryn, as well as the wacky blender where I take folks when we're up for a giggle. His in-world group I use my nose to type is worth joining for the name alone. He is also renown for his electric guitars, sculpted tigers and wolves, among other animals, but he has been suspiciously quiet for a long, long time.

So an IM from the owner of Blackwater Gallery Jurin Juran to say that she was dancing, and why, had the effect of a bottle of vintage champagne. It turns out that he has been making motion capture animations. Like a hundred of them! Fluid, fun, funny and lots of the oolala variety.

The first and most vital necessity was to dance... and obviously to speak with Nomasha.


Nomasha's sim, re-purposed and lovely

So... what have you been up to for the past year?

Nomasha Syaka: Getting these animations ready – they are very difficult to make and process. I made it my mission to produce better animations and I think for the greater part, I have. Most of the feedback I have received so far suggests this and I have been as obsessive about it as I was about making art objects in SL.

Did you have experience with mocap before?

Nomasha Syaka: None at all, nor with animation generally. Self taught. Though I use someone to process the data once it is recorded and he is a real expert.

How did you recruit your dancers? Did you dance, too?

Nomasha Syaka: Lol, my dancing would qualify for NPIRL. No, I use professional dancers always, recruited from London dance agencies.


Fruits and noobs and bears and all sorts of things zoom by and over the animation stands

How do you make mocap animations?

Nomasha Syaka: The dancer wears a special suit and multiple cameras record the dancer’s movement. These calculations are then transferred onto a computer character and a lot of processing has to be done by hand to ‘clean’ the information and make them suitable for Second Life®. The SL avatar skeleton is a freak, so you have to make a lot of adjustments for it.

You were among the first creators to provide Second Life's musicians with beautifully crafted guitars. Do you have music in your background? (There are over a dozen fabulous animations for guitar players, by the way). Why guitars?

Nomasha Syaka: No music background, at all. I learned the violin as a child for a couple of weeks, and then the teacher disappeared and was never seen again by anyone. Later on I learned the flute, but then the school's music building caught fire and burnt to the ground. Not a good history with music. I made the first guitar because I knew it would be difficult, as no one had made any decent ones at all.

I was relieved to discover that you've rezzed the Blender on the revamped sim. I would have been miserable if it had vanished.

Nomasha Syaka: My favorite build... never been sold.


Nomasha makes it possible for you to dance moving over and around a white tiger, via four different animations

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Are all your interests coming together with this new venture? Music, tigers, art, and now...

Nomasha Syaka: Time for some more sculptures, I hope!

Will there be a NPIRL category of dances?

Nomasha Syaka: When I record myself dancing – for sure.


You can teleport to Nomasha's Ministry of Motion from here.

Attend Xeniversity in-world and learn Maya

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

On Saturday, artist and creator Hern Worsley logged into Second Life® and joined 7 others for an in-world class on Autodesk Maya that he deemed “really excellent.” It was to be the first of three sessions for which he paid a total of $L16,200.

Maya is a powerful and expensive ($4,995 US dollars for the Unlimited version) and - by most accounts – intimidating software package given its robust and multi-layered/complex nature. It is considered by most creators I know to be the rockstar program for creating and exporting sculpted objects.

Importantly, the courses are focused on developing content for Second Life. “It was my first real experience with education in SL and it is exactly what I needed,” explained Hern. “The prices are not terribly expensive but reassuringly not cheap, if you know what I mean,” he added.

The courses are provided by Xenius Revere who worked with metaverse developer Electric Sheep for 1 ½ years as their resident Maya expert and also taught Maya for 3 ½ years at the University of Buffalo, NY.


Xenius, photographed by Xenius

Xenius has founded Xeniversity (teleport directly to their headquarters from here).


A tree at Xeniversity

At this point, Xeniversity offers two courses: Maya 101- An introduction to Maya modelling for Second Life at $L5,400 per two-hour session and $L16,200 for the full course; and Maya 102 – An intro to Maya texturing for Second Life at $L10,800 per two-hour session and $L32,400 for the full course.

Xenius shared that he built a business model that supports his costs plus allows for expansion. Also in development, a course on scripting for Second Life artists. “If you pro-rate out the cost of taking a class in a state university, versus Xeniversity, you are getting an incredible deal. Plus, all sessions are geared directly for Second Life content creation,” he said and added, “Second Life is a messy aggregation of a whole bunch of tools.”

“I think it does help if you’ve had some experience already with Maya. It is about technique and seeing someone doing it makes everything much easier. It is so obvious when you see it done, but you’d never get there so quickly by trial and error, and it’s like getting access to all the secrets,” continued Hern. “I’m very cautious about new things. I kind of need my hand held.”

Classes are conducted in-world, in voice and via the 2.0 web.

Moonwalkin... Second Lifers REPRESENT

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

5:09pm UPDATE: And here it is: The chosen segment live and... moonwalkin!

In a marathon session yesterday, at least twenty Second Life® residents moonwalked around the Bogon Flux at the Odyssey under the direction of Mescaline Tammas and his cheerful partner in crime, four Yip. The goal is to submit a filmed segment to Eternal Moonwalk (click, click, click), an everlasting virtual tribute to the late, great rocker, Michael Jackson.

Kindly click through and vote on your favorite segment here.



Animations were provided by Iron Serpente. The lovely ducky Ravenelle Zugzwang made a "the making of" machinima, too! We are so serious in Second Life. :P

Real Life illustrator four Yip has already submitted her clip, and it's a wowzer, of course.

Fabulous falsies

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

It was very late in my Second Life® when I discovered "false" eyelashes and now I want more. More styles and colors and by all means longer, crazier, hotter ones. Sure, they raise your ARC (Avatar Rendering Cost) a tad, but I'm willing to cut back in other areas if I can have some fantasy springing from my own peepers and basic lashes. Maybe we can persuade Jopsy Pendragon or Darek Deluca to make some with particle effects, or who knows what Cutea Benelli would attach to them... Dollar bills? Miniature scissors? Spiral Walcher would make them glow, of course. It's a pain to get them to fit properly in both lives, but worth it, I tell you, so very worth it.

D.W. Griffith came up with the idea for false eyelashes back in 1916 when he was directing the film Intolerance and wanted actress Seena Owen's lashes to "brush her cheeks."

I was chatting with virtual artist AM Radio who must have been simultaneously searching on the web, because he began to send me one link after another that led to the more than theatrical lashes that Japanese company Shu Uemura makes (check out their Tokyo Lash Bar). Perhaps this is an area where Real Life has trumped us on the fantastical plane and we need to catch up?






All photography via Shu Uemura

The Machine Poems and (virtual) sculpted storybook by Bryn Oh

Posted by Bettina Tizzy
Poetry by Bryn Oh
Photography by Dil Spitz "DilSpi" - ©All rights reserved

An acquaintance of mine has had several of her storybooks for children published with some success. In fact, she makes a decent living in Los Angeles in this manner and that is quite an accomplishment given that writers and illustrators with ideas for children's books are a dime a dozen. But there is an opportunity created by virtual worlds that intrigues me and I expect will pique the interest of book publishers, too. Eventually... One of these days now.... Seriously! I cannot, for the life of me, understand why they haven't capitalized on this platform already. Certainly animation studios and production houses are beginning to look at virtual world imagery as both a source and a resource (I can tell you that folks from Disney are frequent readers of this blog) and conceptually, I do believe that even a television commercial for a major brand may have been heavily inspired by content created in Second Life®.

Virtual artist Bryn Oh is already considered a master at delivering supremely immersive environments through the use of her sculptures coupled with original prose, poetry and even a play in which the attendees took part. There are simply thousands of us - virtual residents - who have attempted to explain to each other how moved we've felt by what we've experienced through her art via photographs, blogposts and machinima.

Her newest installation, curated by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani (aka Andrew Sempere) at one of the two IBM art sims in Second Life - Rabbicorn - is a second installment on her dark but moving Daughter of the Gears story. And it really is a story. Instead of turning the pages, we teleport to the next chapter. Instead of gazing upon the illustrations on a 2D page, we walk around the characters and situations. We hear the music, we move in and out of light and shadows. We are right there. But even if you never logged in to Second Life, the potential for the events to unfold in a traditional book is very much there through the use of well executed photography.

German photographer Dil Spitz "DilSpi," instantly agreed to capture some images of Rabbicorn for this blogpost when I approached her, given that she is already a fan of Bryn's work. Dil donates the proceeds of all sales of her images taken in Second Life to organizations that help stalking victims in Real Life. Keep in mind that Rabbicorn is a predominately dark build, so photography in this case was a challenge and Dil respectfully did not tweak the gamma or brightness.

The Machine Poems that follow on this page were written by Bryn for previous installations and not for Rabbicorn, but I thought I'd post them here to give you a taste of her storylines.





Charlatans

All my friends
Are charlatans
Beetlebots
And Videonauts
In dark nights
With search lights
Broken hearts
Are useful parts
Carry me
From the street
And love me though
I'm obsolete







26 Tines

The laboratory is silent
The scientists gone
We have seven hours
Before the dawn
Come to me through the half-light
To my jar by the rack
Surrender your cord
To the adaptor on my back
26 tines
At the end of your cable
Connect you to me
So that we are able
To feel emotions drawn
Through the cables caress
And forget till the dawn
Our loneliness

Hardwired

All my dreams
Were programmed by you
So that they would
All come true
Fly on the wall
Then to the street
Robots
When obsolete
If I could only see you
One more time
Maybe you would
Change your mind
Resale hunters
With laser beams
Take all the parts but
My hardwired dreams







Teleport to Rabbicorn directly from here.

Here are just some of the blogposts we've done about Bryn and her work in Second Life:

• Attaining presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh
• Beautiful Mondays in the eyes of the Virtual Film Archive
• Bryn Oh chronicles the fall of the angels: A story in prims
• Crap Mariner's marathon video session: 31 videos in one day: Bryn Oh's steampunk alphabet
• Self-hypnosis and Bryn Oh's Steamgarden

My happy place in Second Life - And a fab new Windlight preset by Mescaline

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Created by Blotto Epsilon and Cutea Benelli, the Bogon Flux (and the new couch for big asses!) - currently at East of Odyssey - is where I go when I want to be happy. I whiled away a very pleasant hour yesterday in Blotto's company and came away with a grin on my face. It's like a vacation in Second Life®.



This gone-bonkers Steampunk structure builds upon itself and then sheds parts or all but its base to begin anew. Pipes and doorways (many of them open with a touch) make it possible to navigate from one section to another until, that is, it decides to cut you loose.


There are lots of new modules on the Flux

Teleport directly from here, and by all means turn on your music stream.


Oh, how happy I would be to have such a couch in Real Life!

These photographs were taken using Mescaline Tammas' appropriately named Sunday Windlight preset.

Mescaline has a new preset, too! The Bristol...



Says Mescaline: (I shot this) "Short film to demonstrate a new Windlight Setting 'Bristol.' Edelwiess reminds me of Bristol which reminds me of Banksy and Massive Attack. This preset is made having 'lived' in shadows for a while, more ambient light than previous settings. Film has no post processing, just cut. Shot in Kirstenlee Cinquetti's S17."

See also:

• Wonky wacky steampunk wonderfulness
• Awesome vid of Bogon Flux (by Mescaline)
• Second Life content creators save lives, one net (and one eyeball) at a time
• Virtual fashions: Recycle and reuse

I was at the Hair Fair...

Posted by Alpha Auer... :-\

Like most other females on the grid, all year long I live in joyous anticipation of the annual Second Life® Hair Fair. I am also experienced enough to know to detach every single prim on my body before I venture forth. Same this year. And not only did I divest myself of every attachment that I had but I also took Laynie Link's hair fair tips on avoiding lag at the location posted on the dedicated Hair Fair 2009 blog to heart and reduced all of my Graphics settings as well.

None of it helped. This was quite simply the laggiest Second Life experience that I think I have ever had. After arriving and realizing just how horriifyingly stuck I was, I also disabled all the render types from the advanced menu. All that I could, including rendering the sky! So, there I was painfully groping for prims to which I was getting stuck, completely unable to move, surrounded by a largely gray landscape which when it eventually materialized I was seeing with no shaders, no volume, under a pitch black sky. Granted I did manage to get about with the usage of the red locomotion boxes provided by the organizers but why would I even have wanted to move given that hardly any shop contents rezzed themselves? Nonetheless, I tried, I really did. I have lost count over how many times I crashed, but I was determined enough to log back in every time - until I eventually gave up...

I ran into several acquaintances while I was out there. Chatter was pretty much impossible due to lag but I did contact them subsequently to ask them how it had been for them. The answer was unanimous: Worst lag experience in Second Life to date.

I am writing this because I think I may have identified one of the reasons of the problem and maybe my two cents worth of input might help the builders of these very large scale locations which attract vast crowds of visitors, should they stumble upon this post: I believe the lag at the hair fair this year was due to an over abundant usage of sculpted prims. As I said, it was too laggy for me to be able to inspect the prims, the information as to who their creators were simply did not rezz, so I have absolutely no idea who the designers and builders of the 4 sims are. I am in no position to comment on their output either, given that I really did not "see" it. All I saw was a specter of a landscape devoid of all shading and volume. But I did manage to identify the presence of hundreds if not indeed thousands of sculpty prims through their highlighted contours when I right-clicked on the structures that they were embedded into.

I realize of course, that many of these sculpted prims were used repeatedly and that it can be argued that once one sculpted texture rezzes all of them will have done so. But, as far as I could tell, there were still enough individual shapes present to seriously undermine the overall rendering process. And also, even though in theory it holds true that once one texture is rezzed all identical textures in your location will also have done so, for some bizarre reason, in practice I find that this is not necessarily always the case.

All in all, I am wondering why far more minimalistic design strategies do not get implemented at locations where the primary objective is providing an easy access to the goods displayed therein. An excellent example of such a location are the Hairspray sims (as it turns out a particularly appropriate example in this case, given that our primary area of discussion here is in fact hair ;-). These sims are the epitomy of the maxim "form follows function", the function here being the showcasing of "hair" with no further obstructions from the surrounding environment. Indeed I would suggest that their huge success as a design system and their ultimate beauty lies in their designer Damien Fate's having diligently followed this very fundamental design tenet first coined by the great architect Louis Sullivan.

So, my dear friends, I did not really get to see the hair fair at all this year. From the isolated few stands, the contents of which I actually did manage to rezz (and where what I saw captured my attention), I have obtained landmarks and will be visiting their main stores in due course.

Get wet!

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Oh, I know... I've been away for a while, but it's time to get rockin' again. Thought I'd get you wet behind the ears while I conduct some research for my next blogposts, so here's a ZeroG shower, courtesy of Oni Horan.



Don't worry! The water at Space Colony Necronom is recycled and purified for your crystal-clean and sensual enjoyment, but do keep in mind - before you hop over there - that Necronom is a dark role-playing environment.

The Flora of the Rain Forest and Jedda Zenovka

Posted by Alpha Auer

"Welcome to Wild Designs... (says Jedda Zenovka) Home of unique and funky Organic designs....

You can take the girl out of the jungle...
But you cant take the jungle out of the girl!
Rainbow Obsidian
A usually dark outer appearance contrasted by a soul filled with burning light
Jaguars dont need self help books!

... Live light free and happy

And have a wonderful day!"

Initially introduced to me by Truthseeker Young, Jedda Zenovka is a regular visitor at Syncretia. During the year or so that I have been Jedda's friend I have come to care a great deal for this lovely, sensitive, talented lady with a huge flair for converting the flora of her home land, the Australian Rain Forest, into formal investigations of botanical shapes, using a virtual 3D building environment and terrain to achieve some remarkable translations/transformations from the organic to the synthetic.






Her flowers and mushrooms have been used to create the virtual garden at Happy Clam Island and I urge you to go and check out this shimmering, glowing virtual space by teleporting from here.

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A complex underwater garden in which Jedda Zenovka weaves together a multitude of shapes and colors to great effect can be seen at Terravia Island. Teleport from here.

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You can teleport to Jedda Zenovka's Wild Designs from here, and also here.

On Artists and their Patrons

Nurturing Support for the Arts in Second Life
(A Guest Column by Larry Johnson, aka Larry Pixel)

I had an interesting conversation with Bettina Tizzy the other day when we met in real life for the first time. Over dinner she relayed to me her concern that there are fewer and fewer patrons willing to give artists a place to do their work in Second Life®. Knowing that the New Media Consortium (NMC) has been arguably the largest patron of the arts to the general SL arts community over the years, sponsoring show after show on Ars Simulacra, as well as NMC Campus West, the home of the Aho Museum, she asked if I had any insights.

I do, in fact. At one point the NMC dedicated 7 full sims and 9 voids regularly to art projects, generally passing full control to the artists. Over the last year, however, NMC has reduced its hosting of artists from dozens to a very small number — and none of those we currently host have control over a full sim. That is a big departure from past practice.

The reasons are largely *not* economic.

There is an odd dynamic in SL between artists and landowners. For the landowner, beyond perhaps some bragging rights of limited value, there is really almost no payoff for hosting artists. Most of them generally ignore you, and barely conceal the fact they'd be happiest if you just left them alone to do their thing.

For artists, on the other hand, access to land and lots of it is a huge status indicator. The most successful artists — be they conceptual or "pure" artists, or designers who just love to build — are the ones who have regular access to new land that they can do art on.

The need for new sources of land is important, for what drives the artist is the need to create. To continue to make new stuff, artists either need new land, or they have to pick up past creations, which means their work can't be seen.

There is a large class of good artists who have not sorted out how to manage getting new land, and are stuck building in borrowed spaces or sandboxes, and look to galleries to show their stuff. Galleries, of course, are businesses, so the goals are not very well aligned between the average artist and the average gallery owner. It is hard for these artists to grow, and without sponsors willing to give prims and space, much good art will simply never have the resources to be realized or seen.

Established artists are rare in Second Life, and to my knowledge less than a handful have sorted out how to regularly get free land for projects, which is the ultimate currency in SL for an artist.

Few of the thousands of other artists have been able to find that level of support. Indeed, after listing 3 or maybe 4 well-known artists, all of whom have regular access to land for new ideas, the list seems to fade away. Among that group, challenges are getting more common. One of the most popular has lost many of his early and most significant builds. Another ground-breaking sculpture that once occupied the full volume of a sim lives on only in video and blog posts. A major sponsor of several highly regarded artists is increasingly demanding a revenue flow from the works hosted there, and content is folded up regularly to make room for new projects. That is a very different story than just a year ago when almost anyone with a concept could get land for projects.

I agree with Bettina that big art in Second Life is in serious trouble, and the future looks less and less bright for artists who need to find that patron who will give them a place to work and create.

I'd love to sit down for coffee with some of the other large landowners who support the arts in SL. I bet we'd all share similar experiences, primarily that historically there has been little benefit that accrues to a sponsor from hosting an artist.

I'd bet $1000 that no one whose work is displayed in the Aho Museum, Ars Simulacra, or NMC Campus West really understands or appreciates what we do at the NMC, beyond hosting them, or for that matter, even cares. I'd venture to say even the artists we have given a home to for years would have a hard time explaining what it is we do at the NMC, or how our SL projects line up with our far more subtantial work in RL. The work we do to create a place to host the art is just not part of the story for them. I doubt that anyone who has been featured in our many full-sim exhibitions has had any sense of where they were, that they were taking part in a grand project with international reknown, or that many many other events happen there. They just know we host artists; the rest is a mystery of their own making.

That is a not an issue unique to NMC.

Generally artists in SL just don't pay attention to these things. Certainly there is no mention at all of the hosts on a typical artists' invitation to a show or a performance beyond a sim name. Indeed, I cannot name but one or two examples from all the artists I know that illustrate good practice in nurturing support for the arts.

How many artists list their patrons work in their picks for example? That would be a very very simple thing to do. I did a quick check of the the top artists we support, and not one mentioned our project anywhere in their picks, yet we've put out tens of thousands of actual real dollars in support for the arts over the last three years.

This does not mean artists have to shill.

Indeed, no one would like that. But I do think artists need to acknowledge, especially in here, that their patrons are not stupid rich people with no talent of their own. In fact, of the major patrons I know, all of them have a fantastic and massive vision for virtual worlds that is almost completely unacknowledged by the artists they support -- and all of them work their tails off to make it happen.

Our own project, for example, is the largest educational effort in Second Life by any measure -- a vibrant community of more than 150 universities doing all sorts of cool stuff. The project has been completely self-supporting for 2 years, and was built with no seed money. It now supports dozens of artists, hundreds of faculty, and thousands of students, from more than 50 countries -- and makes tier on nearly 100 islands every month! The average visitor spends an astonishing 98 minutes per visit -- and there are about 15,000 unique visitors to the NMC Campus each month. It is such a substantial project that Linden Lab spent six months documenting it for a case study on their site.

Yet not one artist we support, and there are a great many, would likely have any mention of NMC Campus in their picks. A few note the Aho Museum as a place to find their art, but none the larger project.

Does that seem as out of balance to you as it does to me?

Bettina is right. One day, we patrons are going to realize that the value equation here is way out of balance. Free land for artists is not an entitlement -- no matter how good they are, it should be a partnership, centered on the love of art, but grounded in mutual self-interests. At the end of the day, they need prims to create, and prims are not free.

There is a huge need in SL for artists to acknowledge the symbiotic nature of their relationships with landowners, and they need to take the time to learn and appreciate the work patrons are doing. And they need to help those people succeed. I can't point to a single example in SL that meets that standard.

It is more than showing up with art. If that is all it is, then this train is already grinding to a stop all across the grid. Large sponsorships are already down significantly, and I can see them drying up altogether.

I think learning how to nurture support for the virtual arts is a self-education project that SL artists need to undertake for their own good. In doing so, they need to acknowledge the role of entrepreneurs in making their art possible, and they need to see the artistry in their patrons' work as clearly as patrons see it in the artists.

It is an investment in the sustainability of virtual art.

I'd hate to see patronship erode further. Bettina thinks it is in crisis. As one who has worked for years to support virtual art and artists and musicians of all genres, I have to agree.

To my way of thinking, it is just devastating to see patrons disappearing across the grid as fast as they are, even as Second Life land ownership sets new records monthly. My hope is that artists in Second Life will work together to make clear what the value in supporting virtual arts is for patrons, and help each other learn how to nurture and sustain support for the arts in Second Life, just as artists do in the real world.

Virtual art is fragile enough as it is. The time to do something is now.

Domenico Quaranta on Gazira's "Hammering the Void"

Photograph courtesy of [DAM]Berlin - All rights reserved

Today marks the opening of Gazira Babeli's newest mixed realities show, which will run through July 31st at the [DAM]Berlin gallery in Berlin and concurrently in Second Life®. A new film will be screened.

May 29, 2009:
* 10pm - 12am at Locusolus - [DAM]SecondLife, teleport directly from here
* 7-9 PM in the gallery [DAM]Berlin

by Domenico Quaranta

“The world we actually have does not meet my standards.” - Philip K. Dick


In 1920, at the opening of a Dada exhibition in Köln, Max Ernst made an axe available for the audience. As far as I know, this gesture was never reenacted. That's a shame. An artwork should always come with an axe in attach. This would remind us that art must be loved, or hated. That it deserves more than an idiot gaze. Duchamp took years to make us accept his urinal, yet he's still unable to persuade us to use it in the more logical way: pissing into it. I bet he would be happy with this kind of interaction: turning an artwork into an urinal.

Gazira Babeli never reenacts – she acts. She's worshipped as a marabout, but she hates spells and she does her best to break them. Tell her “aura” and she'll throw an hail of meteoroids onto you. Tell her “virtual” and she'll shoot you into the air at 900 km/h. When, in 2006, she made Come To Heaven, she released the code of the performance through her website: she discovered the painful delights of being beaten up by a computer graphics card, and she wanted to share this feeling with everybody.

Yet, even on a computer screen, people keep on loving the moonlight instead of killing it, and being charmed by everything is introduced to them as “art”. Thus Gazira created the fourteen sisters. They are called Anger Erin, Envy Sixpence, Gluttony Aboma, Greed Petrovic, Lust Placebo, Pride Placebo, Sloth Swansong, Courage Sparta, Faith Radikal, Hope Varnish, Justice Kimono, Love Brandi, Prudence Miami, Temperance Navarita. They are Gazira Babeli, fourteen times. Carrying a wooden sledge-hammer, they move all together, and hit violently. When you, beloved art lover, meet them, feel free to think at the following references, at your pleasure: La Liberté guidant le peuple, The Night Watch, Il quarto stato, an army of models performing Vanessa Beecroft. At your first blow on the head, art will be replaced, in your mind, by Castor oil and gas chambers.

This platoon in Wellington boots and suspender belt comes without any notice, and intervenes in social events – mostly exhibition openings – making a hell of a mess. Is this the usual, boring self-referential crap we are used to finding in art? What Gazira likes is to intervene in the rituality of the real, and break up its continuity. The world she actually has does not meet her standards, and she hammers it. She works in this direction from the very beginning: just think to her earthquakes, her showers of pop bananas, her Campbell's Soup cans, her pizzas fouling up the gallery with tomato soup. Isn't she an arse-hole? If you need, Gazira's hammers are there for you. Use them, against her too. That's what she wants.

Postscript
When they are not swooping down on some crowd trying to smash an artist's head, Gazira's Furies are imprisoned in a claustrophobic office with a view on Windows' standard desktop, jumping around all the time. The office is encaged in a computer. The computer is encaged in a gallery. Gaz' en valise, finally. It looks like a storm in a glass snowball, until you don't open it. And it comes with an hammer, of course.

Is Second Life the theatre of the absurd? Ask the Kool-Aid Man in SL

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Net Art/New Media artist Jon Rafman has been getting rave reviews and first-rate press coverage with the likes of Rhizome and other coveted art outlets as the Kool-Aid Man in Second Life®, offering free guided tours in-world. His dedicated website features a promo video that I guarantee will produce an emotion in Second Life residents, and invites folks to sign up. I first got wind of this video when Paddy Johnson of the art blog Art Fag City twittered “Best Link Ever! Kool Aid Man gives a guided tour of Second Life and it doesn't suck (like most SL art)!”

Unlike every other machinima I have seen that strives so hard to get past the technical challenges to convey the beauty, the love, the horror, the possibilities within, because of, and thanks to our virtual lives, Jon’s is a breezy, often hilarious tour that celebrates the absurdity of our immersiveness. Second Life users will recognize many favorite builds and installations.

WARNING: This video contains a lot of X-rated content.

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (.com) - Tour Promo from on Vimeo.

Jon rezzed in Second Life on 12/10/2006 but used it sporadically until recently. I’ve spent a couple of evenings this week in-world with him and I can tell you that he’s a pleasant, intensely curious, and intelligent fellow. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, and double majored in philosophy and English. I’d call him spontaneous, easily bored, and a fascinated yet detached explorer. I expect you’ll be as curious as I was to hear what he had to say about this. I sent him some rather open-ended questions via email to see what I’d get back.


Why did you elect to omit music to that video?

Jon Rafman: There is a tendency to use music as a crutch and let the soundtrack manipulate the tone of the work. I want the visual aspects of the video to speak for themselves. The formal qualities of the landscapes should dictate the mood of the piece rather than the soundtrack. Moreover, I always felt like the generic in-world sound effects, like the ominous low-pitched wind that blows across SL, creates a subtler emotional resonance than music.

Kool-Aid Man is on a quest for sublime kitsch in Second Life. Music used inappropriately corrupts the underlying mundanity of my avatar's search.

At certain points in the video there is music; however it's always what was streaming in that sim during the time of capture.

I don't want to assume anything so I have to ask: Are you really going to give guided tours?

Jon Rafman: I like this question. It forces me to ask myself: Where's the "Art" happening in this project? How important is the actual tour-giving process to the Kool-Aid Man in SL? Is the core of the artwork the video and photo collections? Or is it the process of the tour itself and the interaction with people in a virtual world that is the core of my project?

Yes, I'm giving tours. It is not a hoax!

But...

Even if the tours were a hoax and the project existed only conceptually, I'd be cool with that, too. I'm a big fan of work that walks the line between fake and real, ironic and tragic, fiction and documentary.

Do you intend to continue your work in Second Life?

Jon Rafman: I'm currently integrating some videos I've captured in SL into a larger documentary film about professional video gamers. I'm searching for ways to transcend the kitschiness inherent in the SL aesthetic and haven't decided yet on how significant of a role SL will have in the film yet.

I'm also toying with some story ideas for a few Kool-Aid Man in Second Life short video series. There's so much potential with Second Life machinima, but I have yet to see a work of machinima that's truly inspired me. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough though.

What do you want Second Life'rs to know about you most of all?

Jon Rafman: I found an analogy for surfing the web in the act of exploring Second Life as Kool-Aid Man. User-generated realms of Second Life can be viewed as a 3D virtual expression of the Internet’s anarchic psyche. Kool-Aid Man is my alter-ego, a secular icon that resonates with decades come and gone.

I see Kool-Aid Man as a self-conscious professional web surfer “breaking through walls” into various Second Life communities and subcultures. He never fully fits in, but he empathizes with whatever he passes. Like Baudelaire’s Flaneur, wandering the arcades of Fin-du-Siecle Paris, Kool-Aid Man keeps a cool and curious eye, strolling through the virtual world in search for the banal sublime. Kool-Aid Man's motto is best summed up by a line at the beginning of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil: "I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter."

I wondered as I read Jon's response if he was aware that French author, photographer and film director Chris Marker is very active in Second Life. Perhaps there are two bounty hunters then? It is unlikely we'll ever know, given that Marker famously does not take interviews.

Jon Rafman: The Kool-Aid Man in Second Life project is partly an attempt to investigate certain 'outdated' concepts from bygone eras and to reframe them or test them out in distinctly contemporary pop-cultural contexts. I am interested in the disjuncture between earlier uses and my own use and what this reveals about how consciousness has changed over the past decades. Whether a fundamental change has occurred is an open question as the forms of alienation that existed one hundred years ago are present today in mutated forms. But these subtle changes are revealing of what it means to be alive today. What are these subtle changes I mention?

The fragmentation that started with the emergence of mass culture has only intensified. Decentralized global society is epitomized in the World Wide Web. This is not to say that the power of centralized authority has declined or that a new genuine techno-democracy has been achieved. This is far from the case; I’m interested in the ways that self-regulating authority manifests itself from the ground up.

I do think that the task of grasping the present clearly has become more difficult because so much now obscures us from seeing it. I frame my quest for the banal sublime as doomed from the beginning because I am trying to highlight the loss of a certain type of consciousness.

Am I nostalgic for Fin-du-Siècle Paris?:

Yes, my project is a somewhat melancholic attempt at pointing towards the importance of understanding the historical context in the digital age. I can’t deny my nostalgia for earlier modern periods; however I am also aware that the image of the past that I yearn for reveals less about the past and more about an acute lack that exists in the present. And it is this “lack” that I want to point towards.


Jon moved to Montreal from Brooklyn, NY recently. He prefers that I not reveal his in-world name. So what do you think, Second Life residents?

The quirky avatars of Lime Breen

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

When I think of animation, three things immediately come to mind: Disney characters, Japanese anime, and the Simpsons. Japan, by the way, just announced that it is investing 11.7 billion yen on the creation of a new "shrine" to anime in Tokyo.

I can't think of a species of avatar that I haven't seen in Second Life®, but on the whole, animation-style avatars seem to be in short supply. That's just one reason why I love to stare at Lime Breen whenever our paths cross.


Lime Breen, as photographed by Lime Breen

Lime hails from New Jersey and works as a web/flash designer, but in Second Life, Lime makes avatars. Idiosyncratic, quirky, cartoony and wildly exaggerated, these avatars are... cute.


"Janette"


Lime's "Noodle" was a special commission to do a Gorillaz band member

No shop yet, but Lime does take individual commissions for avatar creations. Plans include the addition of optional facial expressions.

Ever wish you could search for objects in your inventory by the creator's name?

Wizard Gynoid has created a new JIRA issue that I can really get behind: #MISC-2717 suggests that the "Creator" field be added to the SQL query in the Inventory "Search" field.

How many times have I wished for this? If you feel the same way, please vote!

Don't know how to vote? Easy peasy!
1) Go to this link.
2) Sign in with your first and last name (so I would sign in: Bettina Tizzy)
3) Your password is the same as your avatar's password.
4) Look in the lower right hand margin for the word "Voting" and click on the link to Vote.

Voila!

Attaining Presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh

Posted by Alpha Auer

4Jetpacks4 was an immersive installation created by Bryn Oh, with the participation of Glyph Graves and Nonnatus Korhonen earlier this year. I was privileged to be one of the group of avatars that were given the tour of the research centre back on March the 6th. I will not talk here about what 4jetpacks was all about. The extraordinary video by Evo Szuyuan above does that far better than I ever could. What I will attempt to do instead is to talk about "immersion" and "presence" as integral parts of virtual world creativity. I know from personal conversations we have had that this is a subject as dear to Bryn Oh's heart as it is to mine, the thing which she puts at the center of her (virtual) creative activity.

I will quote a bit from scientific sources while I try to set up a basic definition of "presence", as a sense of “being there” in a mediated environment (IJsselsteijn, deRidder, Freeman and Avons, 2000). Lombard and Ditton (1997) define it as an illusion of non-mediation in which a user no longer perceives the display medium as a separate entity. A high level of presence will help users remember a virtual environment as more of “a place visited”, rather than “a place seen” (Slater et al., 1999). A success indicator of the attainment of presence is also considered to be the realization of similar behavior patterns in virtual environments to those in the physical realm (Slater and Wilbur, 1997), and even the manifestation of similar physiological responses towards a given event to its approximation in the physical realm (Meehan, 2000).

Various definitions of the term “presence” and their relevance to the immersive virtual experience are discussed by Mantovani and Riva who challenge the notion that experiencing a simulated environment deals with the mere perception of its objective features; instead proclaiming that presence in an environment (real or simulated) means that individuals can perceive themselves, objects, as well as others not only as situated in an external space but as immersed in a socio-cultural web connected through interactions between objects and people, leading us to the paramount importance of the interacting agent within a virtual culture, i.e., the avatar.

And this to me, lies at the very heart of the problem where artistic activity in a virtual world such as Second Life® is involved. Is the goal to be sought the "perception of objects" only? Or could it be that what would set artistic activity in a virtual world as a genre apart, would involve conditions wherein "individuals perceive themselves, objects, as well as others not only as situated in an external space but as immersed in a socio-cultural web connected through interactions between objects and people"? For me, without the shadow of any doubt, it is the latter. And it seems to me that this definition is what 4jetpacks is/was all about as well: That the creation of an immersive experience was the primary intention became obvious to me during Bryn Oh's opening statement where she addressed the importance of "presence" in virtual art. In her terminology the word "presence" is interchanged with "immersion", which does of course add up to very much the same thing. "Viewing" art, i.e., "the mere perception of its objective features" does not seem to overly interest Bryn Oh, and I am so very heartened to observe this in a fellow content creator, and one for whom I have a great deal of respect at that.

Bryn Oh is an exquisite builder. Every texture, every prim, every shape and object placed in perfect proximity, culminating in visual systems that I am awed by over and over again. And a very good thing that this is so: The immersive experience needs that level of concern for perfection to be pulled off with credibility. Creating an immersive experience does not imply that one can get away with shoddy visuality. If anything, it would imply the exact opposite: For us to become fully "present" within the "artwork" involves a level of visual expertise on behalf of the artist whereby perfect cohesion and gestalt are achieved to the extent at which not even a tiny component of the installation appears out of sync, thus distracting us from the immersive experience through its ineptitude or its misplacement within the overall system. Whether the visual gestalt that is meant to bring about "presence" involves high levels of abstraction or realism, opulence or stark minimalism would not be the issue at all by the way: I would seriously doubt whether one would need minutely detailed craftsmanship emulating realism to attain a state of presence. But, I would dare to say that what one would need would be a continuity of visual language - which as any artist worth his or her salt knows is a devil of a thing to pull off.

However, presence needs more than visuality. It also needs narrative. It needs a story or a situation endowed with sufficient power and imagination to pull us in. "Presence in art" needs substantial planning. An observance of fine detail whilst maintaining a firm grip on the whole. In other words, not a thing to be pulled off in one afternoon. Amongst much else, it is visuality, performance, role play, cyberpsychology combined. Bryn Oh has whatever it takes...

In the end, for me, the attainment of "presence" is more than likely to be the thing which will eventually create a "genre" out of the currently rather haphazard conglomeration that is the state of art in virtual worlds today. It really does seem to me that art generated in virtual worlds needs to be contextualized within the broader framework of contemporary art, given a raison d'etre, a property unique onto itself - and the attainment of "presence in art" would be a not too easily imitated attribute of virtual world based artistic activity. 4jetpacks gave me huge hopes in this direction and I am very grateful to Bryn Oh for having given me just that - hope!

...

A video created by Bryn Oh on 4jetpacks ends this post:



Also please read the post by Hamlet Au on NWN talking to Evo Szuyuan about her utterly remarkable SL-video skills and all that is involved in the attainment of the perfect SL-video here.