Will be at faculty restreat, will try to get online, but may not make it.

Quake is a milestone in digital culture; There’s the über-geekiness pertaining to the id engine, the social aspects of quake3 and not least the mental world of free for all and humiliation. In formal terms the build was economically very considerate using efficient scripts, few prims and textures, more importantly it was pretty easy to extent and/or bend. The ghetto is like a fuckin’ survival test and number one way for you to pass. Yo, get treated like a king and they’ll crown your ass.?They never in the wrong though, so I made a song so muthafuckas had know. If, yo, livin situations make you wanna get a gat, that’s ’cause you livin’ in the dayz of wayback.

100 miles & runnin’, peace.

Some of the more mediocre art on display actually seemed to benefit from being encased or framed by Ichi and looked far more interesting as a result, I think Shirley mentioned that too.

I agree with not having rules at BIW. I think the main thing is having respect for other people’s space and creations. Push the limits, of course, but simply being annoying isn’t much of a statement.

The idea of choosing a particularly lame piece of art to delete each week in a spectacular manner has its appeal, but you know what would happen. You’d get some people competing for the attention of having the “Worst Art of the Week”.

I thought that Ichibods domination of the sim did cross the line pretty far. It would become a problem if that sort of thing was done more than once in a great while. It did provoke a good conversation about what should be allowed and thoughts about community standards.

Several of the artists on sim really ramped it up this week. Ichibod of course was one – with his complete quake mod. I believe Selavy Oh also had a lot of stuff there. There were invisi-megaprims all over the place, the screams of the dying and distant gunfire….. a lot of the prims in place were hostile to camera navigation… and there was a lot of lag. It was quite confusing and uncomfortable to be in.

Having said that there was a lot more artwork than usual it seemed, and perhaps the flurry of activity prompted by these extreme works inspired others to place works at this time. There was a mess of stuff literally everywhere. If this is the reason then the confronting sim conversion was inspirational to some artists, and should be comended… but it is also a two edged sword; quieter works were completely lost in the sim, and even the bolder ones were so re-contextualized by the conversion that they couldn’t speak in their own voice. The change in sim changed everything.

Personally I think it overshadowed many of the works placed, either literally by shouting over them, or by acting as too strong a counterpoint for the works to stand in their own space. An installation such as this is so imposing that works need to respond to it or be engulfed.

This is something I’ve seen in many RL group shows, as I helped set up and run several anarchist galleries throughout the early nineties. Hearing that a “radical installation artist” was on the way struck fear into the hearts of even the most zen or stoic gallery folk. One knew they were on thin ice, and likely a heart would be broken, an argument would break out, or at the very least we’d lose a week of sleep cleaning up after. Politically one can’t deny folk the right to producing radical interventions in a gallery space….. and when it works it’s profoundly brilliant…. but often it’s also fraught with problems.

As for how we dealt with it back then… meh… case by case. Laying down the rules stifles creativity, and you lose that fantastic buzz of seeing something huge and effective. It’s worth holding onto the anarchic element for the times when it produces brilliance – I think every artist has some offensively large takeover work in them, and they should be encouraged to let it out. It’s up to the artists themselves to implement diplomacy though in these instances and make sure they don’t step on too many toes – one has to own the consequences of one’s output.

As for if the quakeification of the sim was transgressive in an interesting way… that’s hard to say. On it’s own maybe not so much… as a conversion of a public space a lot more so. I think maybe with a few more layers it would have had more to say. (Those layers of course may have been there, but with the anarchy in the sim would have been hard to spot.)

Can items create their own context? I think two ways. Ichibods of course by being bigger and enveloping everything else – it was the context. Dekka Raymaker’s conversely by drawing your perception into it… when engaging with that piece you are enticed to explore it closer, so it becomes it’s own context by drawing your focus. I feel Harpo Waco’s bear does this as well by being so divinely stylized – thus creating it’s own space wherever it might be.

If you don’t rely on size or loudness to create your own context, you are stuck with either finding the best placement and context within the environment, or producing something sophisticated which does this for you. For a subtle work to be it’s own context it must have your whole attention, and to get that it needs layers and subtlety. Attention is held if you feel that, if you just keep looking, you’ll notice something more or new in a work. This can be tiny details, perfections or imperfections, references, elements, whathaveyou. The sense that just by glancing you haven’t seen it all.

In my early work in sl I did this by putting in detail too small or subtle to see clearly – trying to give the impression that there was always something unseen but almost perceptable. Kat2Kit finds the same depth through his/her medium in cyanoprints. Dekka acheives it through very sophisticated composition of symbols and tight execution. Harpo with great style. Ichibod in that earlier work through a surprising absurdist approach. There’s a lot of roads to acheive this aim.

Some works though need the neutral space of a gallery to exist in. They’re gentler… not shouty…. and I don’t think they survived this week unmolested. So… good at the time, but I hope the full sim takeovers don’t become a habit. Work can create it’s own context…. it just shouldn’t _have_ to.

Just my two cents

I’ve been thinking for a while now that BiW definitely needs more females, faggots and foreigners and on the panel, so I was excited to hear that Neb had been invited to participate as she fulfils at least one of these criteria. That excitement soon turned to irritation though because when Jay asked Neb for her thoughts she was interrupted and talked over on several occasions. A little rude I thought.

I did enjoy the discussion towards the end though. Perhaps you could install some medieval stocks on the stage and whoever leaves the most awful artwork can be pelted with rotten fruit and veg until they apologise and promise to try harder.