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 .