I’ll be back later to comment but I just got this email -

You have received a message from Second Life:
Your object ‘Wang’ has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Brooklyn is Watching from parcel ‘Brooklyn is Watching’ at Popcha 56, 143 due to parcel auto return.

Left by Arahan Claveau on September 28th, 2008

I want to add a little context here, as I was pretty brutal with myself here regarding my ambivalence of “Hyperformalism” in Second Life. Just before the podcast started, Dancoyote Antonelli was running around pretty frenetically, and my slight dourness/criticality that was happening based on working out technical problems and managing 3 Instant Messaging streams. This elicited commentary as being a “Hyper-Hater” from DCA, which seemed pretty unwarranted, as this is the furthest from the truth.

The truth is that I love art that I’m not sure if I like or not - it keeps me coming back. There is Hyperformalism that I love - Adam Nash (Ramona) has been nominated for the equivalent to the Turner Prize in Australia, and rightly so. I was really fascinated by the current Juria piece in Princeton sim, and how it reminded me of the end scenes of Tron, which I thought was one of the best visual referents I have seen yet. Annabeth Robinson is pretty amazing as well. Selavy too, there’s plenty.

That is why I picked the piece I did, because maybe I thought it was a good Minimalist composition, but had problems with the link to the idea of the Kowloon Walled City.

It was a good conversation, and it resolved something that had been nagging at me.

Sometimes a frame enhances your work; sometimes it destroys it, sometimes it does little good and is left better unsaid. The same goes for theorizing/contextualizing your work, and I’m certainly guilty of that as well. It has to work; it has to be appropriate; and it has to be able to stand up to the investigation of the people you’re trying to communicate with, or even impress.

Therefore, I’ve really been meditating about whether I can call a prim a piece of art, and I think this podcast proves it can, if it has the soul of wit and a keen awareness of its intent and doesn’t bog itself down with too much context or marketing.

Left by patlichty on September 28th, 2008

“…if it has the soul of wit and a keen awareness of its intent and doesn’t bog itself down with too much context or marketing.”

Eloquently put Patrick, I think this can apply to all SL art, much of which often fails to live up to this criteria.

The various objects placed by Ichibot were indeed created by Butterflysmasher Dana as Jay correctly suspected. I haven’t seen for myself but it sounds like Ichibot just separated parts of the original piece and placed them in different parts of BiW, adding a couple of scripts possibly. He did this before for you with Butterfly’s work when he made the wonderfully witty Francis Bacon / Butterflysmasher homage “Butterfly Smashed”, which I think you missed.

Selavy’s “tractor beam” was rather brilliant and the resulting conversation it inspired in this podcast was unexpected and illuminating. If you haven’t done so already, I strongly recommend you visit her temporary work ‘Systems of Reference’ on level 3 of the Arthole gallery for more examples of clever use of scripting within a space - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kress/169/89/391/169/89/391

Hey Jay, thanks for promising to listen to the radio show. Full details and times are on the blog - http://artholeblog.blogspot.com. Basically we are live, every Wednesday, 9pm UK/GMT and then again 9pm US/EDT (Brooklyn time). This week we have a very special guest DJ, hope you can tune in.

Anyway, great podcast.

Left by Arahan Claveau on September 29th, 2008

*oh dear that SLurl above is messed up. Try this -

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kress/169/89/391

Left by Arahan Claveau on September 29th, 2008

Hi, I pretty much agree with what was said in the cast. I removed the piece a few days after putting it up for the same reason, someone was stood over my shoulder while I was showing them round and said that if I had to explain it then perhaps i’d already lost.

http://oddee.com/item_96462.aspx

A place that was renowned for it’s lack of planning or even form, people would nail boards to window sills and move out across the streets to create new rooms for example. I was trying to reduce a section of this to a basic form with applied rules, hence the forced walls and use of cubes.

As to “hyperformalism” or even “formalism”, this goes towards my experience of the six months here, neither of those terms had any particular meaning to me (although i’ve heard them bandied about here) until a few minutes ago after i’d googled them. BIW has put me in touch with many people and areas of art that I have never experienced before and apart from the occasional mullering over a careless piece I keep returning as this is a fantastic learning process for myself.

Left by snowy hoobinoo on September 30th, 2008