Marshall Sponder’s blog on the New York art scene, Art NYC, did an interview with Jay Van Buren (aka Jay Newt) last week. (The interview was on June 13, and the blog post went up on June 15.) Just a short post in text; most of the content is in two embedded YouTube videos with a combined time of about 17 minutes. When I tried to watch them, part 2 said “This video is no longer available”, but I was able to watch it on the YouTube site. In case anybody has similar problems, here are the direct links: part 1 and part 2.

You’ll have to get past a couple of annoying problems. Sponder gives the name of the gallery in Brooklyn incorrectly in both the blog and the video; on the blog it’s “Jack Pelican Gallery”, and on the video he calls it “Jack the Pelican”, at which point Jay adds the missing word “Presents”. Second, the handheld video is very dizzy-making; the unnamed videographer does not have anything even vaguely resembling a steady hand. And that was just watching the video at normal size on my laptop screen; on a big screen it would be downright vertigo-inducing.

Sponder had some good suggestions about improving the exhibition; they were focused on increasing the interaction between the gallery visitors and the Second Life exhibit. The easiest to implement was the idea of having another computer present for people to interact with the blog. That would not be as big an expense as another computer for interacting with Second Life, as it would not require nearly as good a system. (Though it might need two monitors; a big one for the gallery guests to see at a distance, and a smaller one that the typist could read conveniently.) He also talked briefly about having some way for people inside Second Life to interact with the blog; sadly, that is not possible within the current state of the art of the SL viewer. More extensive capabilities for HTML on a prim, including interaction with web pages, are planned by Linden Lab, but no timeframe is available. This sort of interaction between 2D web space and virtual worlds is a priority in some other virtual world projects, including Croquet and Project Wonderland.

Sponder had a neat idea about having the blog computer display information about the works when people clicked on the objects in Second Life. That would be possible with some cooperation from the artists that place works at BiW and the blog posters; the works would contain scripts that would send email to the blog computer at the gallery, which would then use those messages to determine what to display. Not a trivial bit of scripting and out-world programming, but it is technically feasible.

I think that Sponder missed one important goal of the exhibit: outreach to members of the art community who are unfamiliar with virtual worlds and their potential for artistic expression. He asks “why couldn’t I do this at home?”; the answer is that he COULD do it at home, if he knew it was there and had a suitable computer (which he does), but not everybody in the community of art gallery visitors knows about Second Life. The presence in the gallery and the large screen also offers possibilities for visiting the gallery while also being part of a large group of people in the real world, something which most of us can’t conveniently arrange at home most of the time. Placing this at a gallery takes virtual world interaction out of the usual solitary setting and into social space.

Sponder also goes into a rant about how artists are doing the best things in Second Life, and how corporations are clueless. I would amend that to say that MOST corporations are clueless. There have been a few corporations that have come into Second Life and made positive contributions to the world; those would include the living communities that have built around The L Word (Showtime), Gossip Girl (Warner Brothers), and Playboy. (The last is a particularly interesting example; at the beginning they looked like yet another example of a corporation that didn’t get Second Life at all, but somewhere along the way they figured out that building a community was the important thing.) Sponder talks about IBM, a company that has been VERY active in Second Life but which has not made much impact on the SL community at large… but to be fair to IBM, their primary interest in SL is as an internal communications medium (which they have used extensively as a way of holding meetings among physically separated employees), and as a research platform for future directions for the company.

The odd striped effect on the piece that we see near the end of part 2 is probably because the piece has some sort of scanned backlight. It’s similar to what happens when you point a video camera at an old-fashioned CRT television or computer monitor. I would expect similar problems with doing video of a plasma screen or an image from a DLP projector, but I haven’t tried that; video of an LCD computer screen or monitor does not produce the same effect.

I can’t offer any personal reaction to Sponder’s opinion of the works at Jack the Pelican Presents; I have not yet visited the RL gallery. It’s something I plan to do; visiting Brooklyn is an inexpensive trip from the Boston area. (Yes, that’s where I’m from. Yay, Celtics!)

Posted by Shirley Marquez on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 11:33 am.