So i just noticed this… i’m not sure when this happened but i want to unpack it. First- what happened– I rezed on the island because Amy altered us to the controversy some artworks for Stephen Venkman so we could have a discussion about his artworks that were disallowed at SL5B. Then Stephen came and made them look better because i did a really half-assed job of it and added a landmark giver to send you to his sim. THEN…. some one ( Obscured Quandry clearly someone’s alt) put up a kind of cage around the work with the words “wake up” over it and (more…)

Virtual Worlds, art, social, theory | 25 Comments »

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!)

JTPP, RL, Virtual Worlds, art | 8 Comments »

Calm, calm.

Deep breath.

Ok, look. We’ve reached a bit of an impasse here. I’m constantly complaining that we need new people to leave us stuff at BiW, that I want to give new people a try, etc. So I actually get really psyched when I see an unfamiliar name attached to a piece. Really excited. I tell myself I will be nice and give them a chance - cut them some slack (after all, with many artists’ works you have to see several examples of it in order to really understand what is going on; witness how much Holly Hax’s work grew on me once she left us an installation to ponder).

And then… and then… we’re left something like this. At the entrance to BiW is an installation featuring a picnic table with various poseballs, a notecard giver, and a video.

In world, the video doesn’t work if you click on it. And so, I present to you Virtual Starry Night: Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night:

(note that wordpress is being glitchy… click here to see the video)

Welcome to the hell that is my life.

But don’t let the title fool you: Van Gogh’s Starry Night plays only a supporting role in this video. Actually, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, 1889, features more prominently in it, but I suppose that title wasn’t quite as crowd-pleasing and attention getting as Starry Night. But actually, what figures most prominently than either painting (or any of the other paintings by the artist that flash by) are doe-eyed avatars who seem caught in some sort of mysterious half- slumber, posing and (almost knowingly) shaking their heads slowly, “no.” It’s hard to piece together anything resembling a plot because the song - which I suspect is being sung by a non-English speaker, with the English just being spoken phonetically - really distracts you from what is happening. But I’m also not totally convinced that’s a bad thing, either.

On the picnic table, as I mentioned, is a notecard giver which has hovering text that reads Is it really love? Click on it and the notecard you receive poses a question about whether or not love can exist in SL and then, to prove that it does, a laundry list of quotes by famous people on the subject (of love in general, not on love in SL in particular). If you sit your avie at the picnic table across from your beloved, I am lead to believe you can click on some poseballs to make the two of you smooch, possibly while one of you reads the list and the other watches the video.

I have never before doubted that real, intense, love relationships can exist in a place like SL, but this installation has given me pause. It is in fact so trite and syrupy sweet that it makes me actually question the entire notion of love itself, let alone the expression of such a thing in a virtual world.

This is poor timing on my part, as my RL husband and I are about to celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary and frankly, this piece is kind of a bummer to run into at this exact moment. I’m just going to toss it out there - am I being unfair? Is there something I’m not getting?

(You might note that I have left out the artist’s name in this write-up. Since I got so harsh in my review, I thought it would be kinder to do that and allow that person a fresh start should they want to show us more work in the future. Again, tell me if this was not the right thing to do…)

Uncategorized, Virtual Worlds, art, getting-started | 4 Comments »

Chef Zeme has placed this near the entrance of Brooklyn is Watching. Certainly looks robot-like to me, but with a brain grafted onto the top, but decide for yourself! The cloud of olive particles at the base suggests that it is hovering somehow on that energy. A nice science-fictiony build.

This is my first high-res snapshot post posted to BiW (that is, one taken with that option turned on in the Advanced menu — I’ve got a fancier video card now, so I can take those without my system choking) — let me know what you think.

Virtual Worlds, art | No Comments »

Charlot’s new pair of works raise questions of who is watching who. In the first one, the hungry cat and the wary mouse eye each other in a piece of cheese, one side of which somehow acts as a mirror. In the second one, the cat is watching the mouse directly, and the mouse is using the mirror in the lower corner of the piano to watch the cat. And we, the viewers, are watching both of them. A nice visual comment on the roles of the observer and the observed.

(Edited to add the reference to games1 — I saw the second one first!)

Virtual Worlds, art | No Comments »

Yesterday, the area near the tower was filled with green spheres that floated around and did interesting things. Today, Andres Watanabe has replaced them with a new installation of crystalline cubes. Or do the changes happen automatically somehow? I don’t know, but I do know I really like the cubes! One picture couldn’t even get close to conveying this one, so I included two; an overview from the sky and a closer-in picture taken from ground level. As I’m watching right now, there seem to be some small spheres mixed in with the cubes, so it continues to evolve.

The cubes grow and shrink, spin in different directions and at different speeds, and move around. Sometimes a cube will disappear, or a new one will appear. They’re shiny and partly transparent. The surface texture on some of the cubes (they’re not all the same) reminds me vaguely of the surface of the moon.

In summary: wow! Bubble Matrix is beautiful, kinetic, and completely unlike any real-world piece of art you will ever see. Drop everything and come over to see this one.

Virtual Worlds, art | 2 Comments »

Prox Box v4 is a collection of two dozen rotating pillars; twelve at ground level and twelve more a bit above them. The pillars are partially transparent, and have different amount of transparency on the four sides, so there is a good play of filtered light through them as they rotate. Touching the pillars has an effect, and different pillars do different things, so try them all. The installation also has a pleasant droning sound. I found it a relaxing piece to view; the subtle play of light through the pillars and the sound combine to produce an almost trance-like state.

The artists recommend using a WindLight viewer (1.19.1.4 or later) with at least Basic Shaders and Local Lighting enabled; adding Atmospheric Shaders and Water Reflections is even better if your video card can handle them. They also recommend setting the environment to sunset or midnight (try both, and experimenting with the WindLight sky presets is fun too) and turning up your speakers and stopping music and media, and listening through headphones (though in my experience good speakers work nearly as well).

I didn’t get a picture before Spiral went up, so the photo is a bit cluttered.

Virtual Worlds, art | No Comments »