Remember the chimp? Well now it's gone APE

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Some of you may recall my utter fascination over Ripped Winkler's chimp. I had run into someone who was doing precision animations with a baton, but wearing this fantastic avatar. I snapped a couple of pics, crashed and then logins were disabled. I could barely sleep that night. I know, I know, get a grip Bett. It's an avatar! But yeah, I just loved it. I blogged it and by the time I woke up I had all the answers I could ever hope for. (Thanks again, you guys).



For five months now, Ripped has been laboring away, learning to script and making custom animations for his newest: MONGO KOKO, a giant gorilla avatar that pays homage to the legendary great apes "Gigantopithecus blackii" of prehistoric times. These apes inspired tales of giant ape men from the time of the first spoken word to the folklore about Bigfoot (North American), the Yeti (Himalayas), the Moehau (Nz), Yowie (Australia), the Afghan Barmanou, and the Vietnamese Batutut, to name a few.

MONGO KOKO stands 20 meters tall and has 30 HUD-driven animations. "The animations are mine, though some have motion captured data mixed in to add noise and realism," explained Rip. "None were easy to fit to his over-sized nature," he added. And he can carry an avatar in the palm of his hand!

This gorilla costs a pretty penny: L$4,000, but he's worth every dime in my opinion. The quality of the work astonishes. Have a look.


Machinima by Branco Merlin

When I asked Ripped if he was from Australia, he replied, "Shure as a Roo's got a pouch!"

Teleport to Ripped's store, New MonkeyMoon, directly from here.

Avatar movie is ahead of the curve, and you usually are, too, Vanity Fair

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

This is a gentle rant brought on by Vanity Fair magazine's twitter: "@VanityFairmag Don't Be Fooled by Avatar's Lame Trailer http://is.gd/2s7YX #Avatar" a couple of hours ago. For like forever, I've been known to say that if I only had access to three magazines to keep up with the state-of-play, smarter, faster, better-informed intelligentsia, I'd pick Vanity Fair, Businessweek, and Utne Reader, and that selection still stands, but it's teetering. Vanity Fair, don't make the same mistake that Chris Anderson and his Wired made in 2006. I forgive you, but hurry up and realize that avatars are ahead of the curve. Like you. In fact, your readers are mostly going to embrace their avatarhood and evangelize about it within the next three years, and that "lame" Avatar trailer and movie are going to have something (if not a lot) to do with it.

~*~

It was 1997 and opening night. I recall whispering in the dark to my companion that if Kate Winslet's aged character "throws that damned necklace into the sea, I'm going to have to leave the theater." And she did. And I did. To this day, I have never seen the ending of James Cameron's Titanic, the all-time highest grossing film at the box office. So yes, I have questioned and even suffered visceral adverse reactions to Cameron's work.

Yesterday, I watched the teaser trailer for Avatar, slated to hit theaters this December. I've spent the better part of the last two years traipsing around virtual worlds as an avatar, so I'll confess that the poor trailer was in trouble even before I hit the "play" button. My overlayed cynical filter was as thick as the bottom of a glass Coke bottle and I fully expected to loathe it.



But I didn't hate it. Turns out that I can hardly wait to see it, and it made me want to learn more about the plot, the script and how and where it was produced. It looks as real as the island of Kauai does, which stands to reason because that's where most of it was shot.

I don't play games in virtual worlds. As Metanomics puts it, I'm all over the serious aspects of three-dimensional persistent, immersive, massively multi-player online "games," such as art, architecture, business and education. I've put up with an awful lot to be an early-adopter avatar, including lag so bad that my "character" couldn't move, umpteen flying penises and banana phones (annoying griefing devices employed by sophomoric idiots), communications so shoddy that my text chat never made it to the person or people I was trying to speak with, and hundreds upon hundreds of *crashes,* to mention only a few of the ways that I have been inconvenienced.

Things are picking up for avatars though and at a high rate of speed. Stability, scalability, tools for user-created content, communication, and collaboration are all vastly improving. The number of choices an avatar has on how to spend a quality hour consistently overwhelms me in much the same way selecting an art film to screen in Manhattan does. And just this week, industry analysts at Piper Jaffray released their forecasts for virtual goods, indicating that 2009 US revenues are expected to hit $621 million (134% over 2008), and $2.5 billion in 2013. Global revenues from virtual goods should exceed $2.2 billion this year, and climb to $6 billion by 2013. I'm old enough to remember when total online (2.0 web-based) revenues were lower than that, and how so many detractors doubted they'd rise significantly for decades. Heh.

Just two days ago I finally got around to downloading the client for the new virtual world Blue Mars that's in private Beta until... sometime real soon now (maybe in a couple of weeks?), and I can only say that I was overcome and dazzled by the life-like graphics, the rolling ocean foam, the exuberant vegetation and shadows that behaved the way real shadows do. In fact, it looked a lot like the trailer for Avatar.


Virtual Space Entertainment is just one of the developers rushing to create content on Blue Mars' gorgeous CryEngine2 platform

So wait, Vanity Fair. Please tell us why the Avatar trailer is lame?

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.

The apogee of fandom: Kevlar Keen breathes life into Bryn Oh's art

Posted by Bettina Tizzy


Kevlar poses for me at Immersiva

Kevlar Keen was so captivated by Bryn Oh's story and art for The Daughter of the Gears, that she created an avatar in tribute. Yes, friends, this is an avatar, and not Bryn's much admired virtual sculpture. It seems that Bryn approved, too.

Imagine how you would react if a piece of artwork at your local museum suddenly came to life and walked up to you. That is precisely how I felt when I glimpsed at Kevlar as the "Daughter" out of the corner of my virtual eye. The resemblance is perfect, right down to the beanpole legs and knobby knees, plus the "face" can be opened to reveal... ah, you will have to hunt Kevlar down to find out! This is a one-of-a-kind avatar, too. What must Bryn have thought when she saw it?!

Bryn developed both the character and the concept for the Daughter of the Gears when Rezzable Productions invited her to create an installation for the mysterious and poetic (and hallowed) Black Swan sim. I get a lump in my throat when I think of it, but we've learned that Black Swan will soon be erased from the grid. It seems it has less than one month left. However, you can now visit the piece on Bryn's own sim, Immersiva, by teleporting directly from here and looking for the tower.

Bryn Oh: It is a story about a mother who watches as her daughter becomes sick. And as her life begins to fail she transfers her daughter's soul into a vessel. A machine. When the townspeople find out what she has done they come to take the daughter. They see her as an abomination against all their beliefs and to all they hold true. But to take her daughter they must first get by her.

The mob climbs the tower and reaches the top. The mother fights them and wins. But is mortally wounded. And as she lays dying, she realizes that her daughter will now live forever alone and lonely. A girl in the body of a machine in a hostile world. So the daughter of gears goes into stand-by mode like a computer. And in stand-by she dreams of her mother for eternity.

As with every Bryn Oh creation, there is always a bit of poignant sadness, and also discovery. You can read the accompanying "machine" poems on Bryn's blog.

More coming soon on Bryn and her latest: the Rabbicorn Story.

Grendel's Children and Avaria featured in new Nitwacket machinima + A chat with Flea Bussy

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Perched high in the sky over the four Avaria sims in Second Life® is a place that holds as much magic as the virtual constellations that surround it, for within the Grendel's Children store are the seeds of imagination and playtime where grownups go to shrug off the stress of their daily real lives and explore other parts of themselves. This, the largest emporium in virtual worlds for non-human avatars, is the land of pretend... turbo-charged.

Flea Bussy, the founder and lead creator of this empire, didn't set out to provide tens of thousands of people with therapeutic tools, but I can personally attest to their power. To put it in purely quantitative terms, I must own over 200 avatars from Grendels (not including color variations) and I've worn every single one more than once.

It's been nearly 18 months since I last did a serious post on Grendel's, and Pyewacket Bellman's latest machinima - gorgeous! - featuring Avaria and several of their newest avatars prompted me to touch base with Flea.

I thought I'd kick it off by asking him to update me on some of the fast facts I published back then. His responses in italics:

FAST FACTS ABOUT FLEA BUSSY

* Rez day: 6/29/2006
* Flea is only 22 years old!
I'm now 20 years old! Wait, no, that's not right, how do we do this again?
* Works an average of 20 hours a day, 7 days a week
Works 25 hours a day, sleep was given up in the 24th hour! 365, all year!
* Was kicked out of art class
* First store opened on September 1, 2006
* Grendel's Children has produced more than 800 avatars
Grendel's has made way too many avatars to count. It hurts my little brain! [Note from Bettina: Many, many hundreds more]
* Average price per avatar: $150L to $250L, with many freebies available
Average price per avatar: $1L to $150L, with many , many, many freebies available

Favorite recent creations?

Flea: Does my staff count?

You and several members of your staff collaborated in-world while in Skype conference back then. Are you still doing this?

Flea: Oh, depends if we have to have little meetings on new ideas or such. Otherwise it's just normally us typing in the box actually. [Bettina: Working in Maya, plus Skype, plus the SL client is a formula for lag.]

How has the environment changed for avatar creators in the past year? Copybotting, more advanced sculpty work, a stabler grid, etc.

Flea: We wouldn't know, we kinda just stay in Avaria. I'd assume that those things like a stabler grid might exist, but, only in stories n song, you know, mythological stuff! We've never noticed anyone bothering to copybot what is almost all free here anyway. It's probably more work to copybot our stuff then just get like, $5L and buy it.

Avaria & Grendel's Children from Nitwacket Machinima™ on Vimeo.

The Avaria sims, were rebuilt in just 5 days and are now unified by a single river cutting through sandstone canyons and lined with hardwood forests and surrounded by drier pine uplands.

Terraforming: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook, Psyra Extraordinare, Sanje Batra, Constant Riel, and Toady Nakamura

Rocks, sculpts, caves, tree and plant creation: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook, Sanje Batra, RaptonX Zorger, Merlin Falworth and Toady Nakamura.

Prim installation: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook, RaptonX Zorger, Sanje Batra, Psyra Extraordinare, Constantine Riel, Merlin Falworth and Toady Nakamura.

Village: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook

Scripting - Craft System: Flea Bussy
Scripting - Drakelets: Piper Zuhal
Scripting - Geysers, sun dial, sound prims, rockfalls: Toady Nakamura
Waterfall and statuary particles; water and motion - Flea Bussy

Teleport to Grendel's Children directly from here, and don't forget to explore the Avaria sims below.

See also:

* Flea Bussy's empire: Grendel's Children, one wacky avatar at a time...

* Climbing walls, sky dancing (in HD!), and weightless sex/showers - Part IV in our Gravity in Virtual Worlds series

* Flea Bussy - Makin' stuff for the love of orks 'n goblins

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.

Semiautonomous Puppet Architectonics: Second order cybernetics and MosMax Hax

Posted by Alpha Auer

Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of regulatory systems, closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second-half of the 20th century, cybernetics has been pronounced to be equally applicable to physical and social systems; preeminent whenever the system under scrutiny is involved in a closed signal loop: An action by the system in an environment causes some change to that environment and in it's turn that change is manifest to the system via information / feedback that causes the system to adapt to the new environmental conditions. Ergo, the system changes its behavior.

Cybernetic theory uses high level concepts such as order, organization, complexity, hierarchy, structure, information and control, investigating how these are manifested in systems of different types; allowing us to ask questions such as whether complexity tends to increase with time? How do the components differ from or connect to each other? How does the one transform into the other?

According to Cybernetic law, systems rely on feedback loops whereby outputs are fed back into the system as inputs, increasing or decreasing effects. While input can be defined as the result of the environment's influence on the system, output is constituted by the influence of the system on the environment. In every feedback loop information about the result of a transformation or an action is sent back to the system in the form of input data. If these new data facilitate and accelerate the transformation in the same direction as the preceding results, they are positive feedback - their effects are cumulative. If the new data produce a result in the opposite direction to previous results, they are negative feedback - their effects stabilize the system. In the first case there is exponential growth or decline; in the second there is maintenance of the equilibrium.

Yet another key concept in cybernetics revolves around control, which includes two subsystems: "the controller", and "the controlled", in perpetual interaction with one another. The controller may change the state of the controlled system in any way, including the destruction of it. A whole new twist is brought into the mix however, as soon as the word "observer" is substituted for the word "controller": In quantum mechanics the observer and the observed cannot be separated, and the result of observations will depend on their interaction. Thus the observer too is a cybernetic system, trying to construct a model of another cybernetic system. To understand this process, we need a "cybernetics of cybernetics", i.e. a "meta" or "second-order" cybernetics. Thus, second order cybernetics emphasizes autonomy, self-organization, cognition, and the role of the observer/controller in modeling a system, recognizing the observed system as an agent in its own right, interacting with another agent, i.e. the observer. This creates a closed system wherein the effect of the environment is minimized and the feedback loop takes input and output from within the system itself. Thus, self-organization is a process of evolution where the development of new, complex structures takes place primarily in and through the system itself, leading us to autopoiesis (self-production), the process by which a system recursively produces its own network of physical components, thus continuously regenerating its essential organization in the face of wear and tear.

MosMax Hax, "the system"
I have to say that I am approaching all of this with the utmost of care: These are heady, sexy concepts and terms which I have seen tossed around, alas all too often and often all too carelessly, during many an art paper/presentation that I have sat through wondering how they could possibly be related to what was under discussion on the table. Well yes, of course... Anything and everything under the sun does after all operate under cybernetic laws. We are all systems, relating to other systems and our environments, operating under the ceaseless give and take of feedback loops. So yes! Everything can indeed be related to cybernetics. However, shouldn't there be something peculiarly, if not downright dramatically pertinent to the matter at hand before the names of the likes of Pask, Varela and Maturana can even be evoked?

It seems to me that the artist Max Moswitzer/MosMax Hax justifies the analogy. And on two levels at that: Cybernetics as well as second order cybernetics.


Semiautonomous Puppet Architectonics, at Odyssey. Photograph courtesy of MosMax Hax

The precursors of the oeuvre of Whitenoise are already present in the very early video output of Moswitzer, who says that "of course in those days I was not so concerned about concepts". I would disagree on that: Yes, of course, nowhere near the level of sophistication in terms of the visual language of today. Nowhere near as coherent. Nonetheless, in the videos "Transformator"(1991) and "Die Ästhetik der Dekonstruktion" (1989) the seed of what is articulated today is already present. This is the cybernetic system of Max Moswitzer, a system influenced by a feedback loop between itself and it's environment. This system makes it's progression over the next two decades, picking up momentum on it's way, resulting in ever more startling manifestations such as the extraordinary collaborative project Nybble Engine of 2003 until it finds it's way into Second Life® in 2007. And it is here, in Second Life, that it undergoes the extraordinary transformation of folding into itself, merging with the law of second order cybernetics: A system in which the artist becomes the output, the observer, the observed, the controller and the controlled. The system that is MosMax Hax.


Semiautonomous Puppet Architectonics, at Odyssey. Photograph courtesy of MosMax Hax

I have had the privilege of being there during the development of Whitenoise, from the initial assembly of it's architectural infra-structure, originally at Klein and then later on at the archipelago of the Synthetic University (of which my island Syncretia is a part of), to the embodiment of it's population: The many avatars, manifesting as the multiple selves and facets of one individual. Never, throughout his extraordinary journey of self-observation, of the creation of a self-organizational system fragmenting itself into ever more inter-reliant and complex parts, have I seen MosMax become heavy handed with words, definitions and explanations. Never have I heard him pontificate or get pompous: All has come about naturally, spontaneously, through "play"; through the invention of games for which more and more "selves" seemed to be needed: Some communal, in which other autonomous "humans" also participated; but more often than not (and particularly over the past year) private, personal, solitary, "autopoietic" games involving multiple manifestations of the "one" human; games of which I was nonetheless aware given that I was in geographical proximity both on the Synthetic archipelago as well as at Klein during this time.

As far as I can tell, it is this constellation of highly individuated "player" alt avatars that has led to the rezzing of the many specialized non-player/actor alt avatars (which seem to me to be quite distinct from MosMax's individuated multiple selves in their functions). And it is these non-player alt avatars that are now gathered at Odyssey as the manifestation of an emergent, self-organizational system, one of whose components is the artist MosMax Hax. A complex architecture - a machine almost. A machine of boats, trucks and teddy bears in motion. A closer look however, reveals that this machine is operated through slender avatar limbs to which the components of the system are attached. Avatars and prims become one integrated whole, a complex self-organizational closed system; quite complete as a distinct entity, separated from the audience surrounding it through the impact of sheer differentiation presented in it's visual Gestalt. And very much in the center of it all is the creator, the observer, the one who in his turn becomes observed - affecting the outcome of the journey, given that after all, "Semiautonomous Puppet Architectonics" is only one stop in the long journey of Whitenoise. A visual manifestation of second order cybernetics par excellence, I would dare to suggest...




Semiautonomous Puppet Architectonics, at Odyssey. Photographs courtesy of MosMax Hax

MosMax Hax: An intellectual, an artist whose inner ruminations find expression not in the (oftentimes) lamentable inadequacy if not indeed downright banality of the spoken word but in a coherent/individuated visual language which winds itself like a red thread across decades of output, adapting itself from medium to medium, from environment to environment. It's current residence is in the virtual world of Second Life. Will it always be here? Given that Max Moswitzer would be unable to fragment his Real Life body as the visual manifestation of his psychic assemblage, the embodiment of second order cybernetics which I have tried to describe above, relies on "the avatar" for the realization of the autopoietic structure involved. Thus the "population" of Whitenoise is indeed something utterly "not possible in Real Life" and as such would appear to be destined to stay in the virtual realm. But as far the underlying virtually "physical" architecture of Whitenoise itself, I seriously doubt that Second Life is it's final location. A long curriculum vitae of significant achievements and recognition prior to his entry into Second Life, coupled with the substance of the output presented in Second Life since 2007, suggest that Moswitzer/Hax is a formidable visual artist of his generation; one whose work is certainly not limited to Second Life alone. Thus exporting his output from one domain into another (i.e., from the "virtual" to the "physical"); endowing it with the universality which is it's due, would be very much the next step. And this is a quest which he is actively pursuing, alas, to date with far from satisfactory results.


Whitenoise exported with present-day technology shown at "GAMES Kunst und Politik der Spiele", Vienna 2008. Photograph courtesy of MosMax Hax

A competent technology which will enable exporting the architecture of Whitenoise from Second Life into other domains will surely come, although it has to be added that it does seem to be taking it's sweet time coming. Meanwhile the many many facets of MosMax, the avatar population of Whitenoise, is here with us while Hax is already embroiled in new ideas, new play, new visual manifestations.

...

You can teleport to the location of Semiautonomous Puppet Architectonics at Odyssey directly from here.

I am a cyborg

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I am human. I am a machine. I am post-human. I am organic. I am synthetic. I am a better human.



I am the future. I am a series of devices and mechanisms and integrated circuits. I am also made of flesh.



I'm in the zone when I wear this avatar. Or is my avatar, any avatar, already my cyborg? In "The Cyborg's Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments," Frank Biocca asks how the sense of physical presence and our changing representations of the body in virtual environments affect our minds. As we drive and watch our avatars, embody them, are we not already part human, part machine?



This incredible avatar was created by Justen Jigsaw. Teleport to his shop directly from here.

Bryn Oh pokes fun at da boys

Artist Bryn Oh has discovered machinima, and we never know what she's going to do next!

The Alien Factory

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Once in a blue moon (heh!) I just grind my heels in the ground and quit blogging for a bit. When I do, I get downright stubborn about it and nothing can compel me to post a thing on this blog for days or even weeks. It's my way of staying sane, I guess.

I was in this mode just about a month ago when, on a whim, I whipped up a little machinima to share the fun of a new avatar-generating gizmo that Madcow Cosmos had come up with, with a little help from his friends Tezcatlipoca Bisiani (scripts) and Lorin Tone (sounds). I happened upon my vid just now as I was browsing through friends' works and thought "what the heck," so I'm posting it here for posterity. Y'all have probably seen it already and that's okay. You can just watch it again! Oh, and you can get your own alien avatar for free here, at Alien Isles of course.



And if alien avatars aren't your thing, you can head on over to the Museum of Robots where Madcow and his pals have created a variation on the same theme: Yep, you guessed it, a Robot Factory and also free. Teleport directly from here.

I've also been meaning to tell you that Madcow's got a new blog, too. So there you have it. You've been war..told.

Vanfarel Kupfer - R.I.P.

I've just learned that Vanfarel Kupfer, a french artist who's work I admired, was killed in a car accident last week. Vanfarel described himself as "createur de textures Alpha."



Our deepest condolences go out to all his friends and families in both his lives, pixelated and real.

Here's what you missed... Kazuhiro Aridian's avatars

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

A highlight of Saturday's activities was the NPIRL Koinup Safari featuring a presentation by Kazuhiro Aridian on avatar creations. The sim filled with photographers, machinimators and creators even before the event began, so here's an overview of what transpired there for those who were unable to attend.




Photography by Bark Aabye

Kazuhiro is an artisan who spends several months painstakingly creating one avatar at a time. We learned that Kaz's perfect avatars are no accident.


Kaz won't sell me this graphics card-killer avatar no matter how much I beg. Kaz??

They begin with fantastical illustrations coupled with back stories birthed in Kazuhiro's dreams, followed by hundreds of textures, animations, and sculpted prims in Maya, all meticulously detailed.


Photograph by Eves Rodenberger

Chenin Anabuki of Avatrian sent us this excellent video featuring difficult-to-capture highlights of the presentation, including several of Kaz's earliest never-on-the-market avatars and glimpses of the AO's, sans prims, lest you imagine that anything Kaz does is tossed together.

Hit the HQ button!


You can add your own photographs from the session to the NPIRL Koinup Safari group, and visit Kazuhiro's shop by teleporting directly from here.

Anatomia - Alpha Auer's 3D anatomical drawings of a different sort

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

For – like forever – when I thought of the human body, it was always in the context of Gray’s Anatomy, the classic textbook developed by British anatomist and illustrator Henry Gray, or Leonardo’s studies of the human skeleton. The yucky factor was zero and none of it, from my POV, was related to me or my body. Like a flood taking place in some remote village in China, it was something that was happening somewhere else.




This photo of the Anatomia installation by Alpha Auer

Now Alpha Auer (aka Elif Ayiter), my co-blogger here and creator of the ground-breaking Syncretia sim in Second Life® (see here and here and here), and also Body Parts, has come up with another way to look at our bodies. In essence, she’s turned us inside out and fanned out our musculature and appendages in a way that barely resembles the real human bodies that are on display in the world-touring exhibit Bodies, inviting many new questions about our self-schema.





Teleport to Anatomia from here and "buy" the outfit that is offered there. Put it on and become a part of the installation. Then you might understand that Alpha doesn't want the visitor to "have illusions of grandeur regarding her elevated status as a human, or indeed even an animal or mammal. I want her to be vulnerable, perishable, impure. I want her to gaze upon something other than her - in its cleanliness, its shiny surfaces, its clean bright lines, its mechanical perfection." In fact, Alpha has added the horns of a demon, as well as botanical growths.



On her blog, Alpha explains,"I have tried to deliberately make the dweller of the exhibit un-clean… Not the pristine, sharp black and white image assembly, with the odd spot of clean bright color here and there, but something mussed up with organic textures, layered and superimposed with elements that seem confusing and out of sync. The avatar of Anatomia is quite fragile: This is not a perfect, unbreakable machine, a thing rendered to help us gain insight into the workings of a superlative system. But rather a black and yellow mass - the colors of when things go bad in our bodies. Not the red of living blood but the low saturation of decay."

The little steampunk mermaid, and pixie and Cinderella

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Update! ZOMG, gender adjustment time. I mistakenly believed that Onakagoo was a woman when I wrote this post, so I've gone ahead and corrected all the she/hers-isms. Sheesh.

Steampunk, highly detailed and hot hot hot, I give you the flying avatars by Japanese Onakagoo Epin (rez: 11/22/2006), available at his 109 Prims Circus fantasy store in the sky.

Capturing avatars in steampunk flying cages is a running theme with Onakagoo. Take his Flying Little Mermaid avatar, complete with a steampunk tail and breastplate, as well his own submersible.


Shown here with Vampire Mermaid hair by 3star Tyne (teleport directly from here)


Note how the avatar is anchored firmly to the interior of the submersible


Mercifully, Onakagoo has also provided a shatter-glass box on the side of the submersible with a pair of prosthetic legs, should the mermaid in you decide to go walking

The Flying Little Pixie is caught inside an hourglass-shaped lamp, but the crystal has shattered, making room for her lacey steampunk wings.



You can detach the flying cage and go about your pixie business wearing the mechanical (but nevertheless dainty) outfit Onakagoo provides you with.



In lieu of a heart, Onakagoo appointed the pixie with a bell...


You can ring my bell

Finally, the Flying Little Cinderella isn't really an avatar, but an attachment you wear... a whirring, rusty steampunk carriage. Talk about making an appearance (or disappearance come the stroke of midnite) at parties!


I'm wearing Eshi Otawara's latest: the POPI outfit, complete with a giant poppy hat and dangerous hat pins


Housed within a sphere megaprim, the 109 Prims Circus store is its own environment and worthy of a visit whether you purchase anything or not. Teleport directly from here.

Many thanks to Poulep[Oh]ndeuse who's fabulous Flickr stream I follow. It was she who guided me to Onakagoo and his latest magic.

Skills Hak and her Biological Avatars

Posted by Alpha Auer

Sometimes one cannot help but believe in telepathy, so great is the coincidence of one's thinking about a person and them contacting you: I had not heard from Skills Hak, the creator of Insilico in quite some time and while a return visit to Insilico (and particularly a minute inspection of that Cyber shopping district over there ;-) has been on my to-do list since last Fall, I do tend to fall into a most lamentable daily rut, I find. So, what with one thing and another I have not managed to go back there despite all my good intentions.

Until yesterday that is, when I took a group of my students and co-instructors on a cultural field trip to Insilico, as part of a hybrid art and computation course which we are teaching at my university. Subsequently I logged off, logged back in an hour or so later and - hey presto - there was news from Skills, about the completion of an avatar, of which she had already given me a sneak preview a few months ago; a dragonfly! (Of course, a more sensible person than myself would immediately come to the conclusion that Skills Hak had spotted my name on her visitors list and contacted me through that connection - but telepathy is sooo much more dramatic, isn't it? hhh)

I am not going to pontificate on the glory of this creature but leave you with the images I took - one against a dark sky and one in stark daylight:





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The avatar is also equipped with a combat mechanism and targets avatars which it bombards with an amazing arrow and particle combination. I tried to take a really good photograph of this spectacle as well, however this image is the best that I could capture and trust me it is nowhere near doing the real thing justice.

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The Cyber Widow rezed at Syncretia. Sadly I had to remove her after a while due to her prim intensity. A larger image is here.

Note: I am getting more and more engrossed in the relationship between biology and art. Thus a recently discovered mind blowing blog named Bioepehmera, (which, incidentally, seems to be in the process of changing its location these days), has been holding quite a bit of my attention. It seems to me that Skills Hak's two avatars, the Dragonfly as well as an earlier one, the Cyber Widow, are befitting material for Bioephemera.
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You can see the biological avatars of Skills Hak at her store Gemini Cybernetics located in the above mentioned cyber shopping district at Insilico. Larger images of the Dragonfly avatar are to be found here on Flickr. A previous post on the beautiful and yet doomed sky city, Insilico can be read here.

"body parts" : Virtual lovers are star-crossed islands

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

“body parts,” Alpha Auer’s fittingly poetic contribution to the new Poetik sim, is an installation that consists of several monochromatic and nude human bodies heaped upon each other, and an offering of unusual skin outfits (both male and female) to be worn by its visitors. Poseballs scattered around the bodies invite visitors to become a part of the sculpture. In the accompanying notecard and on her blog, Alpha bemoans the lack of corporal love in our virtual environment and asserts that avatars are ultimately alone.

While Alpha’s work in Second Life® is often playful, this is no puff piece, and it opens up the conversation about the compromises virtual world residents make when we dedicate so much of our time tethered to our computers, manipulating our human simulations, but never actually making contact.



Virtual lovers are star-crossed islands but… are we not beautiful to look at? Like hothouse petals, translucent “body parts” emanate from the wearer, pining for, reaching out for, but never touching. Romantic? Yes... but also quite sad.

One might argue that physicality is not essential to love or to friendship, and most assuredly, it is not. But it is the deepening of that exchange between two people that gets hobbled and can go no further in pixilated form, no matter how ardent or tender the feelings. Intimacy is the casualty, and any participant in “body parts” is sure to face his or her demons.





Alpha was intentional in creating a colorless piece, but “body parts” plays well with Windlight. The installation can also be found on her own gorgeous sim, Syncretia, where it resides behind a cinematic wall of creamy nudity.



In addition to creating art of staggering beauty (or hilarity), Alpha Auer (aka Elif Ayiter) also blogs here on Not Possible IRL.

You can visit "body parts" at Poetik by teleporting directly from here, or at Syncretia, by teleporting directly from here and looking for a creamy globe some meters above ground. While the lighting at Syncretia is set to "sunset," Alpha has also created a Windlight preset for "body parts," which is available here.

Many thanks to Naxos Loon for posing for these photographs. Because Alpha is a mix-master when it comes to avatars and clothing, I knew she wouldn’t mind if I adorned my avatar’s body with Hern Worsley’s hair.

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

Head, move back up to the neck please!

NPIRL joins Olza Koenkamp's Big Psomm

Posted by Tooter Claxton

There's a huge box in Brussels that looks like a giant padded cell. So, I felt right at home when Bettina Tizzy and I arrived there on our first NPIRL team building trip. We were there for the opening of Olza Koenkamp's latest project; the Big Psomm. There are a bunch of free avatars you can wear there, and each avatar is a piece of one giant avatar. The idea is to gather a group of people, everyone picks a body part to wear and together you try to construct the Big Psomm. Sounds simple; it's hard.

Olza had sent out invitations and put up a huge sign at the Hobo info hub, so there were more than enough people there to make it happen. At first everyone was trying on the different avatars, admiring Olza's work on them and running around in circles. So for ten minutes it looked like the Big Psomm was hit by a train. But then it slowly came back to life. The lower leg cuddled up to the foot, some of the heads (one of the more popular avatars) found their way to the neck which was trying to decide which of the 3 chests (also popular because of it's curviness) to attach to. Then there was a lot of laughing and shouting instructions to each other. “Head move back up to the neck, please!” “There are three bellies, give us a hand!” Text chat covered the window. Everyone tried to get this done in their own way; some IM'd their nearest limbs, some politely asked where to go, some yelled, and I started a group called Big Psomm right leg. I'm so pragmatic.

And sure enough, we pulled it off. There was the Big Psomm in all it's glory! Some dislocated joints in places, but a recognizable human shape nevertheless. Frankenstein, eat your heart out.

We all just stood there for a while to take some pictures and let Olza get his footage, and then we got overconfident and tried to shimmy sideways. (“East!”, “Which side is east?” and so on) and the whole thing fell apart again.

So there it was: an evening spent with sixteen or so people -most of whom I had never met before- turning abstract art into figurative art, and back again. Quite an accomplishment. And a lot of fun too.

Olza Koenkamp (Piotr Kopik) is a Real Life artist, computer graphics teacher, father and avant garde shanty choir singer from Warsaw, Poland and one of my favoritest people in Second Life®^®©☺™. I know Bettina already told you a lot about him here on this blog, but since both Olza and I spend a lot of time building in Glidden Campus I got to do an in-depth interview with him. I'm not much of a interviewer, so at times the answers are at 1% length of the questions but who cares, right? Right.

Me: The thing about the Big Psomm that was quite surprising to me was the fact that working together with a group of people to get it together is half the fun. Did you anticipate that?

Olza Koenkamp: I didn't have any clear expectations. I was really curious if people would like to participate and what they would do. I thought it would be more of a mess. I provided the toys with certain aesthetics, in a specific setting, so there was some control. But they could do anything, I was surprised that they wanted to cooperate.
It wasn't just the idea to make a perfect connected body or to make a video of moving body parts only, there was also the social aspect.
I was thinking about the body and how every part has got some kind of consciousness. The head wants to sit and do something, but the arms are tired, as is the backbone. The legs are half relaxed half stressed... etcetera. You think and feel many things at the same time. The same thing happens when all the different people make the Big Psomm.

Me: Now that you mention conscious body parts: why doesn't it have genitals?

Olza Koenkamp: That would have made it all go one way. Everything would have focused on sex .. so i just added some additional elements, like the flaps. If anyone feels the need to do make a penis with them, ok.

Me: In your art, you seem to be obsessed with certain techniques or metaphors for a while, and then you move on. Recently you are preoccupied with the human body. Are you a fetishist?

Olza Koenkamp: I don't know. I concentrate. Now I'm working with 'body'. This is body art. New body art. It's about combining mind and body. I explore expressions, feelings, physical sensations. It's all about me, but I don't use a mirror or photos. Just my imagination.

Me: So the characters you build into your avatars (see Olza's shop-TC ) are all you?

Olza Koenkamp: Sure. In my avatars I emphasize a certain pose or feeling that i have, I just improvise to adjust them to my mind.
I'm searching for a kind of Utopian -I dont think it is Utopian- harmony. Of course, to find it you must pass many of the monsters. Which I actually think they are not.

Me: So the next stop is blissfulness?

Olza Koenkamp: Little joys, little steps. If I was near to super-blissfulness-enlightenment I probably would not do anything anymore.

Me: So the harmony is in acknowledging and embracing the flaws. That's very Ying-Yang.

Olza Koenkamp: As well as Indian, Hindu, also some baroque, fairy tales from the far east and organic things. Someone said about my exhibition in Real Life that it is folk art. Also, I've been doing yoga. That's very inspiring and helpful for this theme. But I know that 90% of yoga is shit. It's so popular that 90% must be shit.

Me: Somewhere on your site your work is compared to one of my all time heroes, Kurt Schwitters, and I agree, but with one exception: you make what you use, he used what he found. On the other hand you could say that you 'find' techniques like black and white graphics, figurative painting, video, animation, graffiti, tape, food, Second Life^®©☺™, right?

Olza Koenkamp: yes

Me: So do you have a plan as to where you're going with your art? Do you go with the flow and see what happens, or do you adapt your style to your theme?

Olza Koenkamp: Now I go with the flow. I just have some plans. I want to make another Real Life build from wood which I will paint and put stickers on, and big pencil and crayon drawings on paper, and I have ideas for new avatars and there is a 'serious' movie* I will do. There's also the Szu Szu art group, so there are really many different things to do. The only thing I know is to make more, and get better at it, to satisfy my eye.

Keep an eye out for Olza, it may get satisfied. I'm pretty certain it will.

For now you can still build a Big Psomm with your friends here, and watch Olza's video of our attempt here. Or see some (better) photos on Olza's Flickr pages.

* Olza has made avatars and written a scenario for a Second Life machinima movie that is being picked up by people in the 'business'; but I promised to keep quiet about that. TC.

P.S. I'm new to this blog. Find out all about me on this one.