Project Idea - Draft

In approaching the question of what I can explore as a thesis project, I developed a series of criteria to run all of my brainstorms through. The criteria were as follows:

- The project needed to be something that was engaging, carried clear meaning, and stimulated immediate response from the majority of my audience. I was very hesitant about being obscure for obscurities sake and felt the need to create something that was contemporary and socially relevant.

- With this being my last year as a student, I was very conscious of my willingness/committment to develop skills which would potentially carry over into my post-education art practice/professional career as well.

- With the rare opportunity to spend the majority of a year working on a single project, it was very important to me to create a piece which allowed me to excercise my skills in the various media I enjoy creating (music/video/programming/graphic design/etc.), all while having a cohesive over-arching idea.

- Lastly, I wanted to keep in mind that this project is meant to represent four years of new media study and experimentation. So it was important that the project embody much of the ideas that have stuck with me for the last 3 years.


After much brainstorming and consideration of these criteria, I was left with an interesting set of issues I wanted to address with my piece. I had found that I was very interested in the relatively new emergence of 3D virtual life and multi-user universes (such as Second Life, VastPark, etc.) . I was incredibly intrigued by the possibilities that were available inside these literal 'human-authored alternate dimensions'. However, I was unsure of what sort of problems/issues I wanted to address inside the virtual space.

Taking into consideration my first criteria, I set out to make something that no one could deny was blatantly political and social. So my interest began leading toward the creation of a virtual simulator which would collect data within a series of small virtual spaces. Each of these spaces was to be governed by a different political structure and my hope was to draw some sort of conclusion as to which structure the participants of my simulation preferred. However this idea quickly began to feel (a) a little out of my range to properly execute (I have no real political science training) and (b) simply too literal and without even possibility of really proving anything at all. It was social and political, but it wasn't really something that would affect anyone as it was.

So this idea slowly took a backseat and I continued brainstorming with my first criterion in mind. Through my research of virtual life and other relatively new technologies I came across a few other sparks of interest which caught my attention.

These ideas ranged from:
(a) examining how marketing/branding steals some sort of authenticity from human experience through the creation of a physical installation which would showcase a family whose entire life was 'sponsored'.
(b) staging an Orsen Welles inspired hoax using new forms of mass media to see if the public trusted YouTube more than CNN.
(c) creating a series of collaborations with many non-artists from very different walks of life.
(d) (an idea which abandonned my criteria but seemed natural to me was creating) an installation which would further explore my experimentation with concrete poetry and allow users to interact with poetic text through the movement of their bodies in physical space.

These ideas were interesting but yet again, none of them truly fit all of my criteria and their proper execution wasn't something I could easily imagine.

What I needed was a project that was contemporary, social, and a relevant summation to my career at Ryerson. On top of that I needed to do work that allowed me to excercise my various creativities as well as develop useful skills.

It was not until a wonderful conversation with the ever-engaging Alex Bal that I realized what I had been missing. I've been studying to be an artist. On top of that, an artist who works in the field of 'new media'. And like that, suddenly all of my ideas made much more sense and I had a piece which fulfilled all four of my criteria perfectly. I realized that I had been researching a medium that is literally new to the art world. I was fascinated with a virtual social tool (namely, the 3D universe) that allows content creation in a number of media and just happens to be a rapidly growing career-building opportunity. It was an chance to be a relatively early contributor in the truly new medium of 3D virtual life art-creation. And so I had my piece which satisfied all my needs.

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What I am proposing as a thesis project is to explore the aesthetics and sensibilities of collaborative art making within a 3D virtual space. I would like to create a virtual art studio & exhibition space in which I will work with other virtual users/artists in order to author our own reality and explore what it means to creatively collaborate within a space outside of the physical world.

These collaborations may very well include virtual instances of the aforementioned project ideas (3D concrete poetry, branding being the theif of authenticity, and explorations of 'democratized' media outlets) but the true experiment is to explore what it is to create art in a virtual social setting which can be considered a medium of it's own.

The project will take place completely within a virtual space, utilizing virtual social software that is, if not Second Life itself, something similar to it. The project will almost definitely utilize a variety of digital mediums (including sound, video, poetry, generative programming, 3D modelling design, etc.) which will be combined within the virtual space in order to create a new form of art making and exhibition. During the final new media show, viewers will be allowed to explore the final virtual space and communicate with both me, the artist, and some of my collaborators. It is expected that the virtual space which comes as the product of this project will continue to exist and grow beyond the scope of my Ryerson career.

In essence I propose to create, not simply a virtual representation of my art practice, but rather a very 'real' portion of that practice which exists only within virtual space. I hope to explore and possibly even participate in the establishment of the aesthetics of 3D virtual world art.

A pretty incredible idea...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA

After posting my last post, I did some searching for ideas and found this... Someone has essentially modelled Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting... Unfortunately it isn't actually a space inside of Second Life... But its a ridiculously cool idea to re-create a 3D representation of a famous 2 dimensional painting and then allow people to explore that painting in three dimensions. This guy didnt technically do that, but it's what he was getting at and it would be really interesting to actually create a physical installation out of it.


http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/190479

Here is another interesting article from the Toronto Star... It talks about brand pollution and how it is ruining the virtual universe for a lot of people. About half way through it mentions an in-game group called the Second Life Liberation Army blowing up virtual stores... Pretty ridiculous... This article doesn't really turn me on to the whole Second Life thing, but it does make me realize how interesting it is that marketing has already become this terrible virus that spreads through everything, stealing and corrupting our ability to have experiences that feel 'genuine'. In my thesis, it would be interesting to incorporate a projection of when marketing will become such a scourge that it will render itself useless in catching anyone's attention.

Starting a second life...

In chats with my father about my ideas for a thesis, he mentioned the possibilities that are opened up by using a medium like the online virtual universe of "Second Life". Part of the problem I am having with my thesis is that I want it to include so many things... musical content, possibly video, design, 3D modelling, a social experiment, coding, etc. His argument is that a project within this virtual universe requires all of these aspects, and is inherently interesting simply in the sense that the entire project takes place in a reality that isn't where we spend our daily lives.

I'm still not completely convinced that something like Second Life (www.secondlife.com if you aren't aware of what it is) is something I am willing to commit a large chunk of time to... Like so many articles/sci-fi books that I have read, something about it is frightening and quite frankly, just a little to geeked-out. However it seems that this entire 'virtual life' phenomenon is clearly the new topic of much interest in the new media world. It would be interesting to perhaps blend some of my brainstorms together and perform an Orsen Welles inspired social experiment which somehow including creating a virtual space inside of Second Life. The virtual space could possibly include an area which holds my "Ghosts of The City" installation in a virtual manifestation; as well as musical/visual content I would create in order to further the experiment somehow. Lastly, the project would have to be collaborative as it would take more than one participant to pull of a large-scale, virtual social experiment.

Again, I'd have to do more research and further convince myself that spending the year in a virtual life simulator isn't suicide, but it could be a possibility that inherently raises many research questions related to our field of study. I briefly looked into the Second Life universe and it does have tools that give you a lot of freedom to create (and I believe that their proprietary coding language is based on Java)...

Sometimes I don't even like computers, but it's pretty bloody interesting that technology is rapidly moving toward a point where people can literally get confused as to what reality they are in...

A side project...

In brainstorming for my thesis I had the idea to start an online zine/discussion blog which would feature many different perspectives all speaking on weekly talking points. Unfortunately, I was possessed to forget brainstorming and just build it. So I did. It's online and running now at www.bunchofvoices.com ... I'm not sure if I can somehow apply this to whatever my thesis ends up being, but there it is.

Bloody 'ell I need something that I can commit a year to.

Still Bloody Brainstorming...

So I'm still spewing out half-developed possibilities without any sign of committing to one of them... I think it's time to stop thinking and talk some of these things out with a variety of people...

However, the idea for today is as follows... I've always been really impressed and interested by Orsen Welles' radio adaptation of "The War Of The Worlds" in 1938. For any of you who don't know the story, here is a brief explanation http://www.transparencynow.com/welles.htm. I understand the trouble that causing the public to believe they are being invaded by space aliens creates; however the fact that a large number of people actually fell for a radioplay that wasn't even intentionally out to fool them is incredible. I always read about the angry backlash that Welles' radioplay created at the time, with people trying to implement legislature to prevent things like it from ever happening again...

But then you think about mass media today, and every pop singer lipsyncs, we watch terribly obvious staged reality TV; and essentially my first instinct is that anything the mass media says to me HAS GOT to be some sort of fabrication... So, 70 years after Orsen Welles, it seems like everyone wants to try and recreate the stir he caused but we're all so bloody jaded because of the constant bombardment of 'instigated panic' that it doesn't even have an effect... It's like in shopping malls when the fire alarms go off, nobody even flinches, they plug their ears, keep buying their groceries and give the ceiling dirty looks as if they are pissed off that someone is disturbing their shopping spree in order to save them from being burned alive.

So I guess the idea that comes from that, is, with the so-called 'democratization' of mass media through blogs, youtube, myspace, etc. is it possible to subvert our jadedness from years of not wanting to believe anything? Are people beginning to trust my blog or my youtube video moreso than CNN? That may be a little much, but I think it would be very interesting to cause some kind of stir by getting a whole web of seemingly unconnected people to post videos/blog entries/etc. about something that is between ridiculous and believable... Maybe not an alien invasion, but something of the sort... The only problem is doing it in a way that (a) doesn't get me arrested (b) doesn't actually cause any real harm to anyone (c) once explained, will actually leave an impact on people and inspire some questions in them as to how truth sustains itself through a mass media that is authored by anyone and everyone. It'd be really fun to author a series of interconnected postings and release them slowly and sporatically enough to be believable.

Ghosts Of The City (Part 2)

Last year I made a series of concrete poems that I entitled "The Ghosts of The City". The image above gives an idea of the form the poetry took... The idea was that the lines all ran together, meeting eachother perpendicularly, and interesecting like the streets of a city (as if the page is a top-down view of city streets). The interesting thing I discovered when I finished the series was that it was fun to see people interact with the words and choose their path through the text. I was thinking that it may be interesting to expand on this idea and create a huge epic poem of some sort following the same format, and then create an installation out of it. The installation would essentially be a projection of the poem onto the floor and people would literally walk along the lines as they read, turning and following their own unique paths as the lines would scroll according to their movements...

Unrelated to that, my friend and I always get into pseudo-intellectual rants about reality and the like, and a while ago a somewhat interesting idea stumbled out of my brain... We were talking about utopias and the possibilities that 'cyberspace' give us to create our own individual reality... So the interesting idea we got talking about was that (perhaps) reality is the mashed-together product of every individual brain's projected utopian reality. I want a tree to be 15' tall, and you want it to be 5' tall, so we both percieve it as 10'... Throw in a billion or so projections and it's pretty radical that we percieve anything at all (under that hypothetical condition).

Neither of us have much training in philosophy but I think that this is an interesting idea to explore, especially with virtual reality becoming more and more realistic. Perhaps I could make a peice where users defined a whole series of parameters to create their own VR utopia, and then a computer combines all of that data to define the same parameters in a 'collaborative-non-utopia' which represents the product of all participant's creations. I find the thought that 'imperfection' can be born out of the product of many 'perfections' to be interesting. It's like you and 5 random people throwing your very favorite color of paint at a wall and ending up with an ugly shit-brown mess.

Another level of the collaborative brainstorm...

During a brainstorming wander about the city tonight (accompanied by the almighty soundtrack of Mum) I further developed my collaboration idea...

The idea of creating a series of artworks in partnership with a variety of people is decent, but not really something that jumps out as incredibly interesting to me. So I had a quick chat with my sister, who thought the idea was neat, in it's possibilities of examining the psychology of my connections with my collaborators (she mentioned color theory, etc.). I agreed and mulled it over on my walk home.

With that in mind I thought of how to differentiate each of my collaborators so that there would actually be some interesting patterns/subtexts that may emerge when veiwers were able to see the entire collection together at the end of the year. This led me to two small revisions to my 'collaboration' project idea.

#1. Everyone I collaborate with has to be someone I have not known before the collaboration begins.

#2. Each of my collaborators must come from a significantly different walk of life... Whether it be their class, ethnic background, orientation, etc. (It may be interesting to focus on the ideals of my collaborators rather than class or ethnicity specifically... E.G. what they find most important in life, money, love, success, family, etc.) I'm still mulling this over. But the point is that I can envision two very different voices coming from me between when I am collaborating with a homeless youth versus my well-to-do grandmother's knitting club leader...

Although I am still hesitant about the entire collaborative thesis idea, I feel as though these new criteria help to refine the peice as something that is inherently social/politically-oriented and also much more interesting (as well as a greater challenge).