Success at Caerleon

The Caerleon Isle - Toronto Conference was a great success. Other than a few technical issues we ran into during the last day of the symposium, everything went incredibly smoothly. Many thanks to all the speakers who took part and all the collaborators who helped bring this monster of a post-human to life.

I will be posting full documentation soon, and hopefully we can make this happen again in the not so distant future.

Caerleon Isle - Toronto: Virtual Art Symposium

Caerleon Isle - Toronto Virtual Art Symposium
March 27th-29th (opening 6-9pm on Thursday)
3rd Floor, Image Arts Building
122 Bond Street
Toronto, Ontario

March 27- 6:00 pm
Opening welcome from all collaborators & speakers. Virtual collaborative artwork begins.

March 27- 7:00 pm
Nonnatus Korhonen / Andrew Burrell
(Australia, Hybrid Media Artist & Educator, http://www.miscellanea.com)

[Philosophical reflections on parallel realities]
Much of the dialogue that surrounds virtual worlds discusses them as being somehow discreet or separate from reality. Nonnatus will be arguing against this notion of a divide between the real and the unreal and looking at how the self can inhabit such spaces in a sense that is indeed very real.

March 27 - 8:00 pm
Adam Ramona / Adam Nash
(Australia, New Media Artist & Composer, http://yamanakanash.net/)

[MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments) can be viewed as ‘post-convergent mediums’]
This talk will discuss the performative, compositional and formal implications of post-convergent artistic practice.

March 28 - 1:00 pm
Alx Beaumont / Alex Bal
(Canada, Educator)

[Emerging economic models in virtual societies]
Second Life represents becoming a forum for building a community of practices. Given the introduction of artificial general intelligence to Second Life, are we witnessing the emergence of a new definition of communities? One whose practice is based on the co-existence of human and machine networks and the interplay of their experiences?

March 28 -3:00 pm
Filthy Fluno / Jeffrey Lipsky
(USA, Real World Painter/Virtual Artist, http://jeffreylipskyarts.com)

[Differences of creative expression within the physical and the virtual]
Filthy has been a practicing visual artist in what he refers to as ‘RL’ (Real Life) for years, but claims that Second Life has afforded him opportunities he would never have found prior. Filthy will discuss how virtual worlds have changed, supported and enhanced his artistic practice.

March 28 - 5:00 pm
Georg Janick / Gary Zabel
(USA, Educator & Philosopher, http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/)

[Exercising political ideals within virtual worlds]
This talk will discuss the motivation behind being patron to the Caerleon Isle project, a non-capitalist art utopia in the virtual world of Second Life. Georg will discuss how he has manifested his political philosophies in the virtual world and the implications of doing so.

March 29 - 1:00 pm
Blackthorn Hare
(USA, Recent Master’s Graduate & Artist)

[Aesthetic qualities of shared virtual worlds and their implications for artists]
Blackthorn has just received his Masters for a body of work created within Second Life. He will be speaking about SL as a medium, its formal qualities and how it pushes art production along particular axes.


March 29 -3:00 pm
Feathers Boa
(USA, Student & Artist)

[Techniques, philosophies and sensibilities of a virtual artist]
Feathers will discuss her experiences creating art natively in Second Life while having no ‘real world’ exhibition experience. She will give an overview of her body of work and discuss the positive response from her online audience.

March 29- 5:00 pm
Collaborative building of virtual artwork ends. Celebration of symposium.

Second Life Motion Tracking

I've managed to get relatively rudimentary motion tracking data into Second Life. The video above shows me moving a large prim box in Second Life with left/right movement of my body. The next step is to introduce forward and backward motion as well as moving an avatar directly vs. moving an object within Second Life. The good news is that the hard part is out of the way.

Node Zero Opening

We've got a new show opening at the Node Zero Gallery. Our theme this time around is 'The Senses of the Ghost in The Machine'. The work being shown raises questions of how our technology would see, hear, touch, and percieve us and it's surroundings were it given our sensory inputs. The show is a look at how we are filtered, translated, and reflected in our technology and how that relationship is evolving in virtual worlds.

We have the work of 6 artists on display, including Ub Yifu, Georg Janick, Adam Ramona, Aiyas Aya, Feathers Boa, and Bryn Oh (whose incredible sculpture work you see in the image above).

We are having a public opening of the show tonight (Thursday) at 6-9pm SL time. As well we will have an event where the artists will attend for the public to speak with on Sunday. Stop by and have a look http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vaoetere/61/190/286 .

Caerleon has arrived

Our idealist socialist art colony is finally ready for us to start experimenting with. The ever gracious Georg Janick purchased an entire sim that myself and a few other artists from different disciplines will occupy as our homebase. The island will play host to artistic collaborations, events, discussion and education. Above I'm sitting with Georg, Nonnatus (an Australia New Media artist), and the ever famous Torch Angel.

I spent the night dumbfounded, not knowing what to so with all the space and prims to work with and this is what my playing took shape as. I call it my cubicle.

Come visit us on Caerleon here...
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Isle/41/46/30

David Rumsey Maps

A fellow named David Rumsey has an entire island in Second Life that is a topographical map of Yosemite Valley, with the actual topography moulded in 3D space. It's pretty interesting to walk through a 3D space that is covered in a 2D human diagram of space and feel like their is something tangible about it. It's also funny that when I was in public school, a computer model of real topography was something that required a team of speialized Hollywood actors playing specialized Harvard scientists, but now David Rumsey has done it on his own for anyone with a free account to walk around.

Public Presentation Strategy

I've really been struggling with how to present my thesis study in a way that clearly communicates what I've been going on about all year and is also interactive and dynamic itself. After being told repeatedly that I was trying to do too much at once, I finally took it to heart and realized that perhaps it was true. So for my public presentation I've decided to focus mostly on only one of my 'three tiers of enquiry' (the gallery, interviews, and art projects). What I've decided to do is make my public presentation a final 'artwork' that embodies the very properties of virtual worlds that I've been trying to discover. Viewers will be able to experience these properties rather than read them.

The piece will be a collaborative creation between avatars and real life viewers that exists in both physical and virtual spaces. The piece is named "Basic Building Blocks of Mixed Reality" and the image above is a Second Life recreation of the real life installation.

Real life viewers will enter a room, see many 6" cubes (the most common primitive used in 3D modelling) and a large projection of Second Life. The viewer will see a live video feed of themselves on a large 'billboard' inside of Second Life.

In Second Life, a group of artists from around the world will gather around this 'billboard'. The artists will be surrounded by similar looking cubes in the virtual space. Real life users and Second Life artists will be able to communicate via microphone conversation as well as this visual setup.

On Day 1, Second Life artists will begin arranging the virtual cubes into a structure. They will also prompt real life users to build similar structures in front of the Second Life projection using the physical cubes. Each group (virtual artists and physical viewers/users) will then collaboratively create constantly evolving structures which are influenced by a backdrop of the other groups build.

To re-iterate, real life users will come and go, each adding a little to the physical structure in front of a projection of the Second Life artists' structure. Alternatively, Second Life artists will build a structure with their virtual cubes infront of a large video feed of the real life users' structure. This two way building of separate structures can instead be viewed as a collaboratively influenced construction of a single inter-related structure which exists within both physical and virtual space.

This installation is meant to highlight the real-time immediacy, 3-dimensionality, collaborative/interactive nature, and global reach of 3D virtual worlds as mediums for the creation of art. To make these themes slightly more transparent, I will also have 3 DVD players with audio and video captured interviews of the Second Life artists that will be participating. This will help to re-iterate the message as well as gives viewers an idea of who it is they are collaborating with.

You can view the Public Presentation Strategy write up for "Basic Building Blocks of Mixed Reality" here .