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 .

Digital Afterlife

This is what the afterlife might look like in the future when we have technology implanted into our brains which continues to stimulate our optic nerve after most of our biological brain functions have stopped. A hallucinatory heaven mediated by microprocessors that force feed our senses for the period between life and rotting in the ground.

Either that or it's a snapshot of a new build I am working on in Second Life.

Beauties Part 2 and so on.

I've installed "The Beauties of Flourescent Blur; Usher Out Our Tungsten Glow" a second time at the 'Art Maniacs' gallery in Second Life (VIT World, 33,33,33). The build is much bigger this time and includes an optical illusion that attempts to 'bend' space and further the message of the piece, if you are interested, you can read my statement here.

In other news, Georg Janick, a professor at the University of Massechuchets has purchased an entire island inside of Second Life which will become the home of an art collective/social experiment playing with socialist ideals and open-source style knowledge sharing. The island is not yet live but it will host a small community of artists from many different disciplines who will work together to learn, teach and express themselves. Will keep you posted.

In yet other news, the Node Zero Gallery has recieved a bit of a facelift and a new exhibition is installed there (Vaoetere, 60,217,289). Here are some snapshots...

The trouble with virtual life...

Is that is has no expiry date.

The Beauties of Flourescent Blur

Here is a snapshot from my latest piece entitled, "The Beauties of Flourescent Blur; Usher Out Our Tungsten Glow".

It's an intentional maze of flourescent lines and semi-transparent walls which, in it's dauntingly confusing navigation, begs the question, "Why has our obsession with compartmentalization of space from the physical world so directly leaked into our virtual ones?"

Streaming Video

So I haven't updated my blog in a little while... ahem.

I have been struggling with how to present my thesis study at the end of the year show... It's really hard to present my experiences and art pieces that I have created inside of Second Life without the piece just becoming about the medium itself. When I installed my virtual gallery at the awards night, I quickly realized that very few visitors were checking out the art, they were just asking questions about Second Life as though I was a spokesperson for Linden Labs rather than an artist.

I had a meeting with Mark Argo the other day and explained my perdicament to someone who was being freshly exposed to my project. At the end of the discussion we came up with the idea of not giving users control and simply presenting documentation of my study. Video/audio captures of my discussions with other virtual artists, photo demonstrations of some of the works I have built, etc. I like this idea in that it definitely overcomes the issue of the foregrounding my work/study rather than the medium of SL itself, but it feels as though its a bit of a cop-out in the sense that I am studying this very interactive, social, and dynamic medium but presenting it in such a static way.

With that said, I have been experimenting with streaming live video/audio into and out of SL and I think that might be a nice middle-ground for my presentation... I can show static documentation of my piece, but in addition, I will have a projection of Second Life and will feed live audio/video of the visitors into SL, projecting it onto a sculptural 3D virtual artwork that avatars can experience in the virtual world. So viewers will be able to see themselves in a live video feed into, and communicate with avatars looking at their enormous head through their voice.

I did a quick video/audio streaming test and the images above were the result. The first, just a large-scale flat screen, the second was the product of me getting a little more creative with the geometry that the live video is projected on.