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.

Chouchou leaps from digital platform to digital platform: Releases first album + iTunes

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Until now, the only way you could hear Chouchou, the Japanese musical group with a panoramic, shimmering sound that existed only in Second Life®, was in-world via live concerts, on the lovely beach that is their Chouchou sim (teleport directly from here), or on your own land parcel with the help of their “Little Tiara,” which enabled you to stream their weekly radio program, as well as all of the songs in their repertory. The radio box had ceased to operate some months ago, so I’ve been ending each day at the Chouchou sim lately because I’ve missed hearing their music, and yes, I’m a card carrying member of the Chouchouaholic group.



Finally and effective immediately, I can have Chouchou music any way I want. Juliet Heberle and Arabesque Choche have remastered and remixed every single gorgeous track and released one album with still another on the way on the Earth Records label.



NARCOLEPSY features ten tracks, including Coma. “It is sung in a language from nowhere. I created the lyrics, imagining words from somewhere very, very far. Yes, people really like the song, even if they don't know the meaning of the words,” explained Juliet.

The icing on the cake is that we can now buy and vote for their songs on iTunes, the most popular source of music in the United States, and it is once again possible to stream it on our land parcels in-world, this time via a direct web link.

Never heard Chouchou? This was their first music video.

"coma" Music Video - Chouchou


There's also a brand new fan group for Chouchou on Facebook.

See also:
Enjoy Chouchou while you can.

Many thanks to Masami Kuramoto who whispered the news in my ear last night!

Multiplicity at The Good Life - A story in pictures

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Via Toady Nakamura, we discover...














Click to see large


Click to see large

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.

She[s] got a hammer: Hammering the Void

Photographs courtesy of [DAM]Berlin - All rights reserved

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

In Hammering the Void, there isn't just one Gazira Babeli, there are 14 and they all fight against an inner void. 14 clones of an artificial person, they are each named after Virtues and Sins: Greed Petrovic, Sloth Swansong, Temperance Navarita, Courage Sparta, Envy Sixpence, and more. Equipped with a hammer in their hands, they descend from the pedestal in the gallery, they swarm to openings of exhibitions and public events. They strike other unsuspecting avatars with blows from their hammer as if to say: "Wake up! Defend yourself! Act!" They force others to react. You love them or you hate them, but you cannot remain indifferent against this aggression, which can be understood as an attempt to awaken the intellect or simply as a malice.

Friday, May 29th 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

Man Machinaga (aka Patrick Lichty) is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for the activist group, The Yes Men, a founding member - along with Gazira - of the virtual performance art group Second Front, and executive editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He is a member of the faculty of the Interactive Art & Media Department of Columbia College, Chicago. He writes...


By Patrick Lichty

As I write this, Gazira and I are talking about my reflections on Hammering the Void, and in dealing with the moral tropes of Sin, Virtue, and most romantically, Truth, it seems that my text less resembles an essay and is more like a sermon. As this is no more surreal than reflecting on the moral implications of a horde of fourteen proxies wielding cartoon mallets, I'd like to frame this under just such a conceit of a sermon on virtual existence. Let us consider then, my Brothers and Sisters in Virtuality and Hypereality, the implications of unleashing Pandora's Box, of unfurling the Sins and Virtues forth into the Nets, armed with nothing less than Vulcan's Hammer itself; let us consider the effects thereof. I want to say that in setting this forth, the traditional Sins and Virtues give rise to four Principles of experience that remain in virtuality, and those are: Affect, Agency, Volition, and Complicity. It is through these that while after shedding the physical coil, humanity follows us into the Void. Let us meditate upon these in that we may understand the Void.



In the beginning of the Hammering the Void introductory video, Gazira and I (or my Man Michinaga proxy) sit before a screen in Second Life, marveling at an opening of 90's net artists, Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin. We gesticulate excitedly like old heavy metal fans about the “Monsters of net.art." We agree that she must set the cloud of Gaziric Sins and Virtues upon the world, equipped with large mallets, perhaps as inquisition, perhaps as divine intervention. For the rest of the video, the Gazirae invade virtual social events akin to a host of viral Agents (as per the “Smiths” from Matrix Reloaded) creating avatar mosh pits and hammering the hapless onlookers. All of this would appear as simple farce; but I know Gazira, and we know one thing...

The Truth is out there, we are all complicit in its creation, and Gazira is hammering you over the head with it.

One point that is essential to consider when looking at the gaggle of Gazirae and their accouterments, is that she has provided the hammer in the gallery for you.


Nice to Meet You Mallets

They aren't inflatable hammers, either. They're probably oak or maple, engraved with the Deadly Sins and Noble Virtues, inviting you to pick them up and play. As a side note, I had considered being more explicit in regards to “play," but doing so would have been too heavy-handed, which is unnecessary when one is wielding an oak mallet.

As Gazira and I have continued to make works in virtual worlds for years, the question returns to the “why," which may return us to the Cartesian cogito. However, I would like to remap the Cartesian assertion into a consideration of the increasing retreat into virtual worlds in asking about some of the things that remain in our Pandora's Box of simulation when we remove materiality and embodiment. This leads us back to the fulcrum of our sermon; the median icon of our discussion.

The sign at the center of this discussion is the hammer, the archetypal sign of Vulcan/Hephaestus, the God of Technology and Artisans. In Hammering the Void, perhaps the null-stuff of virtuality is the metal of disembodied existence that the Gazira-Hephaestae forge into an ironic tool for dragging our own mortal encumbrance into cyberspace. Her traditional Sins and Virtues infest the online worlds, placing all they encounter upon the existential anvil or litmus test of action and reaction. There is little time for reflection, for what is under the hammer nothing less than our human nature. What do you do? From this vantage point, the result is the transmutation of the traditional Sin/Virtue binaries into monads of four human elements of virtual existence. These Monads, as we have transmuted beyond Sin or Virtue, are the principles of Affect, Agency, Volition, and Complicity. which are all complex significations embedded into Gazira's Hammer.

Affect: Identification with the act. One of the most striking images of the Gazirae is that of the fourteen Sins/Virtues rampaging before their puppeteer in a bold thrust, akin to an ideologue ordering their army into action. This encapsulates this writer''s fascination with the evident identification of increasing numbers with virtual worlds, and as of this writing, there were 65,000 people logged into the single online world of Second Life alone, showing the “reality” of virtual reality. This evidence is also embedded within the results of each intervention of the Gazirae, from the amusement of the appearance in the Uqbar region, varying to confusion and even anger in other instances. The paradoxical question of the visceral reaction to virtual events shows that affect is not just for identification for another body, but for an identification with their proxies/avatars as well. Although the avatar version of Burden's Shoot (Kildall or Mattes) is different from the first, both create a “gut reaction”. There is reality in the virtual.

Agency: The act of intervention. If the avatar did not have some sense of real agency, some ability to intervene in affairs, this essay would not exist, as Gazira would have had no effect. Perhaps this is a realization of Baudrillard's primacy of the hyperreal – the object/image that has greater effect than its subject. But this is in agreement with the principle of Agency, as Gazira, and her doppelganger Gazirae, the replicants controlled by a simulacrum, create reaction to her actions. Although this may sound like the erection of a wilderness of mirrors, there are vectors of effect as well as affect when the hammer swings. The effects of the impact (to paraphrase Sanborn) of the virtual mallet are evident in that they set off chains of causality in the physical, even if they are as simple as the fact that she occupies a space in which the hammer is realized in a gallery, asking you to pick it up and swing it yourself. And more specifically, the way she does.

Volition: The will to action. The fact that Gazira sets her plan in motion is a testament to the principle that one has the ability to act through the virtual. The Aktion zur Macht breaks the stasis of virtuality, setting forth the path of agency to the creation of affect. Through the creation of the Sins and Virtues, Gazira has set them upon others, setting up causal chains, however slight, but this prime mover, probably the simplest, is a fundamental factor of intervening.

Complicity: The inseparability from the act, or the impossibility of total abstraction. The double sign of the hammer in the virtual and the physical and their similar functions illustrates our complicity with actions in either world. Through the hammer, argument of separation of subject and object through mere virtuality implodes, as the difference is far more complex. It is no longer the question of the effects of hitting someone with the hammer in the gallery or in the virtual, as both actions hold us complicit with the real issue of violence itself actual or implied, leaving the hammer itself transparent. Violence through cartoon or oak mallet differ little in terms of their being consistent with the same practice, and that is the gesture of the swing, and the effect of the impact. Gazira and her vices/virtues ask you to pick up the hammer and hit your friend over the head with it, but then say, “Funny, that doesn't happen here... Ahahahah....” through this doubling and the resultant difference of effects, Gazira holds us responsible for the violence of signs, the affect of the impact, the effect of the hammer's extancy, the volition of the swing, and the complicity to the hammer and its function.

Before ending my sermon, I would like to talk about the narcissism of the Global Village; of cyberspace. As McLuhan said,

"The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else's business and much involvement in everybody else's life. It's a sort of Ann Landers column writ large... huge involvement in everybody else's affairs. So the Global Village is as big as a planet and as small as the village post office."

In many ways, this intense concern is emblematic of the collective dream of pop technoculture less from from Star Trek and more to World of Warcraft. The shift of focus away from the outward vision of Buckminster Fuller 's “Spaceship Earth” to the inwardly looking complicit panopticism of McLuhan's “Global Village” seems to be the object of the swing. Perhaps this inward look is the gaze into the abyss that Gazira is hammering at. Rather than “leaping into the void” a la Klein, is Gazira hammering away at the null-sets of illusion in the void of cyberspace to get at the truths that remain in virtual existence? Is there anything there?

Or is she merely asking you to hit your friend in the face with an oak mallet because that is the most fundamental form of human communication remaining?

In the end, what remains is a communion of reflection; something that is considered an endangered species in the age of constant partial attention deficit. As the Gazirae descend upon us, there is a moment in which we are forced to meditate upon the four elements of human existence in the virtual, and then the offering is put forth.

The Hammer of Gazira. Given for you. May it dispel your illusions.

Now, SWING.

Amen.
Patrick Lichty

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.

Cubist Scarborough and The Manual: Second Life edition

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I hope you have a little spare time, dear readers, because I am about to lead you down a rabbit hole, a veritable treasure-trove of ideas so rich and varied that I have not yet been able to unearth them all myself.

As personal blogs go, Ian Truelove’s (Cubist Scarborough in Second Life®) is almost buoyant with optimism and analysis of all the inherent possibilities and joys of virtual worlds, and that’s very good news, because he’s an educator and he’s teaching 100+ students at a time, often introducing them to Second Life for the first time. He is Principal Lecturer (Technology Enhanced Learning) at the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, in the Faculty of Arts & Society.


Cubist makes three-dimensional holograms of people's Real Life faces. Here is one of himself


Ian (Cubist in Second Life) is watching you everywhere on the Leeds Met sim

His blog reads like a private journal at times and is chock full of insights and deliberations he has with himself and has siphoned off onto the web in a way that we might all consider and possibly benefit from… simply one of the best uses of a blog I’ve run into in a very long time. Ian expounds on the dichotomy of dealing with people in public and private spaces, both in Real Life and in Second Life. He defines and deconstructs the virtual studio. It’s a fascinating stockpile of thoughtful documents pertaining to education, Second Life, OpenSim and a project between Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan and Kings College London called Open Habitat that took place earlier this year and set out to explore how Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) can be used in Higher Education.


Ian's sculptures make it possible for you to get inside his head

Ian also designed the accompanying Open Habitat magazine that serves as a repository for vast quantities of data that the universities collected working with art and design and philosophy students, including surveys, blogposts and chatlogs.

But what I simply cannot wait to share with you is a document called The Manual: Second Life edition, a collection of micro-projects created by lecturers from the School of Contemporary Art & Graphic Design at Leeds Metropolitan University that Ian adapted for Second Life as part of the Open Habitat project. You’ll find different versions, including a cut-out one with instructions for folding it, a text version, and even an iPhone version here.


The Manual: Second Life edition, in Second Life

While Ian asks that we keep all 81 tasks together with the CC license text, he did allow me to share a few of them with you, just this once, to give you a taste:

# 5 Find some gesture animations and practice using them somewhere on your own. Work out a physical comedy routine and perform it to your friends.

# 6 Find a freebie stall on the mainland. Grab 12 small objects that have something in common. Arrange all of your objects into a sequence.

# 7 Build one or more of the following:
The beginning of the world
The end of the world
A self-portrait that includes your full body
Something that happened at breakfast
An image from a recent dream
Something that has yet to happen to you

# 8 Start a cult. Establish rituals. Create a meeting place. Meet.

If this isn’t a formula for discovery and enjoyment of one’s virtual life, I don’t know what is. I believe every single newbie in Second Life should be handed a copy.

You can visit the in-world version of this document and take the notecard form of it by teleporting directly from here.

Object Hair: lat Oh and ALpha Hair

Posted by Alpha Auer

Many thanks go to MillaMilla Noel who alerted me to the existence of lat Oh and ALpha Hair at the Cyberbunker.



I have been developing a craving for what I have begun to call "object hair". So, I am indeed beginning to sport quite a little collection of it and now 3 of lat Oh's hair styles have landed in the so named little folder under the "body parts" of my inventory. And no demo hair either I might add - I am so going to be wearing these sweet babies!




(Please note that I even tucked my ears away from sight in full honor of the occasion!)

lat Oh's collection is small but each and every style is utterly exquisite. So check it out right here my friends and a merry day's shopping to you all!
;-)

A sculptural installation that has attained A State of Grace

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Glyph Graves' latest, largest and certainly most stirring installation had many births. Originally conceived in early spring of 2008, it didn't reach fruition due to his busy schedule and limited prim availability. Since that time, however, he has made a name for himself as a notable sculptor in Second Life®, and today marks the public opening of his Strangers Also Dance, the inaugural show at IBM's brand new art and architecture exhibition space, curated by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani (aka Andrew Sempere, Research Designer at IBM's Center for Social Software).

Glyph is an Australian biologist who's virtual self is best known for kinetic, mostly abstract alpha sculptures that emit musical notes and eerie-to-sweet sounds when triggered by an avatar's proximity, though he is increasingly working with partially inverted solid-textured sculpts.

I've been a fan of Glyph's work for some time now and frequently feature his work on my own sim. This winter I happened upon this video by Todd Vanderlin and shared it with him as it reminded me of the behavior of several of his undulating sculptures and their responsiveness to avatars.

Scary Vines from vanderlin on Vimeo.

Glyph has since incorporated this thinking and included it in his reactive reeds. I mention this because he is an artist that is unusually receptive to new ideas and, like his sculptural work, acknowledges and rapidly evolves with his environment. This isn't to say that he is malleable or excessively adaptive. Rather, he is acutely aware and sensitive to exploration.

Strangers Also Dance is a remarkably immersive installation based on a poignant story that conjoins our Second Life universe with an alternate reality sweetly suffered by jellyfish that ventured too far from their warm gas giant home, becoming displaced in an environment that they find difficult but make the best of.

Importantly, Glyph approached the design of this build and its narrative beginning with its climatic circumstances. The Second Life ground upon which the adventure begins is suitable for humans (aka avatars) but too cold for these extra-SLterrestials and plants. Even so, the landscape is other-wordly. Obeying the laws of natural selection, a delicate pink creature was unable to keep up with its peers and has crystallized, laying dormant until it is visited, and touched, and therefore warmed by the avatar's body.





The avatar is enveloped by the creature, which begins to whisper to its guest:

Freed Alien Jelly: Nothing that will hurt you little one. Your warmth has freed me from the cold down here. Let me show you something few have ever seen... rest now. In your sleep, strange fragments of dreams of swimming in strange clouds come unbidden. Suddenly you feel disturbed as the hard crystalline surface you rested on melts away, then comforted by a sense of gentle enfolding and warm gratitude.

Delicately, a luminous jellyfish breaks free from the crystal, enclosing the avatar and floating upwards, all the while reassuring its capture that it will be gentle until...



... finally, almost tenderly, it deposits its human prize somewhere new, somewhere quite different, on a strange and wonderfully tropical terrain.



Sit on one of the immense tubes and you are one with this new matrix, downloading information as quickly as the creatures can share it.

The time was a memory past
through banded clouds
over hot seas
we swam

then later,

of cold stars and eternal night
we arrived,
we stayed too long
we could not go back

Released, you begin to explore, learning as you go about their sorrowful plight which they seem to accept with enormous grace. As I listened and absorbed their story, I couldn't help but admire their forbearance. My empathy grew.


"Do you want to know how we felt?" asks Biocrystal darkness. "When we first left the cradle of our world? Remember, our home, always bathed in warm clouds, always immersed in soft light. (Silence) Then dark. (Silence) What light there was, sharp like thorns and cold. (Silence) Enter. And feel."

Technically, there are a number of hallmarks: All sounds throughout the installation are played note by note. The speakers (the green plants) are designed to produce a spatial sense by cascading the notes down prim by prim as well as having them arranged around the sphere. A stereo effect is created by splitting the stereo track into mono components and playing them in opposite prims, which is also swirled by playing the pairs in consecutive prims.

Glyph's cellular automata react to both the avatar touching them and to the state of each of their local neighbors. After they've been touched, the music begins to self-propagate in a repeating pattern, which is different each time.

Since 2006, IBM has played an active role in empowering Second Life content creators with the IBM 6 sandbox which recently doubled in size and is open to all residents on the grid, whether they work for IBM or not. PatriciaAnne Daviau, its manager, has done an admirable job of maintaining a lively and active community there, though I can't help wishing that they didn't force teleports to one central location. It makes it very difficult to share works-in-progress with others who must then go by the coordinates to find their way.

Thanks to Jessica Qin's (aka Craig Becker, CIO Office of Strategic Initiatives) initiative and drive, IBM has moved to advance its presence with the content creation community, and particularly fans of art and architecture, with the launch of the new two-sim IBM Exhibition Space.

Teleport directly from here.

NPIRL fashion sometimes obeys the laws of geometry and thrift

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

While both the Spring and Summer catwalks for 2009 featured fashion with a geometric - even architectural – construction, Alpha Auer (aka Elif Ayiter) kicked that up a notch under her label Alpha Tribe. What’s more, whether she is aware of it or not, she’s in tune with the global economic mood. During the great Depression, a popular maxim was "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without:" To create her latest outfit, Deagu, Alpha Auer recycled a poster she had designed for an invitational exhibition at the Daegu Culture and Arts Center in Daegu, Korea in 2006.

On her blog Strange Pixels, Grady Echegaray seemed to be invoking the Gods when she composed her post about Daegu: "I can feel them. They are coming again. Sweeping in over the shoulder of Orion."


Daegu, as modded, modeled and photographed by Grady Echegaray


The Deagu headdress, as modded, modeled and photographed by Grady Echegaray

To obtain your own Daegu outfit teleport directly from here.