2011: The Year for Virtual Worlds Arts

 
Location: VWER meeting

It was a pleasure, back on December 15, to interview artists Wizard Gynoid, Soror Nishi, and Miso Susanowa for our Roundtable meeting.  The year for the virtual arts ended badly, as Bryn Oh's work at Immersiva became unavailable for reasons still not clear as I publish this post.

In our meeting, we talked about work by our three artists in SL, their moves back and forth from OpenSim, and the nature of art itself in virtual and physical spaces. A full transcript of our chat can be found here, but I'll tip in some highlights.

On the "medium" in VWs:

• Wizzy Gynoid (wizard.gynoid): i belong to a group called NPIRL Not Possible in Real Life. most of what i do is not possible in RL. . . .due to the scale landscaping as an art form is almost impossible in RL.
• Miso Susanowa: but there’s also the exploration of what is native to this environment that is ONLY possible in this environment, like… say… AM Radio’s The Far Away.
•  Wizzy: if someone can see the beauty in a mathematical object, then i have succeeded.

On Second Life and OpenSim 

• soror Nishi: I have a sim in InWorldz, it’s far cheaper, less restrictions on building sizes and better support.
• Wizzy Gynoid (wizard.gynoid): the open sims allow me to build bigger and link bigger stuff.
• Miso Susanowa: also… the chance to build and not be overwhelmed with socializing.
• Wizzy Gynoid (wizard.gynoid): there is no clear driving direction that Linden Lab has. where are they going? 3D prim versions of PacMan?
  

That remains to be seen...as does SL's growth under the Electronic Arts alumni Rod Humble and Will Wright. All three guests believe that 2012 will be a year when more VW-native art becomes tangible, as more galleries recognize the promise of the online spaces and 3D printing matures to enable more items to be exported to physical space.

Happy 2012, all!

Burn 2: A Fool and His Spleen

 
Location: The Playa

Given Miso Susanowa's recommendation and nice machinma about this installation, I started with  Grail Quest by Trill Zapatero.

I clicked a face-down tarot card. As The Fool appeared, I read the following:

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." -William Blake

Well, with that intro, how could I resist?  Blake and being foolish are two of my favorite pastimes.

The installation is more introspective than I'd thought it might be, and certainly more interactive than many of the other installations I walked through after. It's worth a long look, if only to meditate upon the abundant follies that surround us and that we contain.

As I bumbled about, I came upon The Insolence of Nature, entered through a gate labeled "Where I dragged my weakness." The artwork focuses on a giant prostrate figure, collapsed into nature. Say, perhaps I have found the political messages of past Burns, after all.

At Mystical Tree (Black Rock sim, next to Grail Quest) I was back into introspection. I followed the journey up from my root chakra through to the seventh and final one, the crown Chakra, where I flew.  I had to stop and meditate, however, at my spleen; I've been told I'm full of it.

The heart chakra was a bit intense, with the deep breathing and the heartbeat. But I rather like that.

It may be my mood, given the turning of the year in this hemisphere to fall. Or it may be the times, where the most vital form of performance art is on Wall Street and other places where the other 99 per cent have given voice to some long-overdue rage.

This year, Burn2 seems smaller, less populated. But I cannot be certain. After all, it may just be my foolishness, and Blake reminds us that "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."

Burn2, 2011: Arrival

 
Location: Hither and Thither on the Playa

A nasty allergy attack has limited my Burn2 time this week--only so much energy for grading a big stack of papers and other things. But today I got by for a get-acquainted look on my free blue bicycle.

I'll do a proper storyboard later in the weekend, after I really get around to see some art.


Social messages seemed a little muted this year, but I've hardly begun my explorations. I do like a sign that reads "that humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with artificial paradises seems very unlikely."

So I settled in for some fun. I met avatar Eleyn Zlatkes, and we wondered if an exhibit of prims were a type of memorial, now that mesh is on the scene.


Message, smessage! We decided it would be more fun to get dizzy on the big spiral in the display.

Artist Sells Herself as Commodity: Iggy Buys Her Head

Location: Getting Ahead in Second Life

When a post by Miso Susanowa caught my eye today, I had to participate, if only to use a groaner of a pun I've always loved.

Miso is selling herself, a bit at a time, at the University of Western Australia's 3D Open Art Challenge.

Needing a place for my spare dreadlocks, I bought her head for 300 Linden Dollars.

Thus the artist in SL these days: as Linden Lab turns its back on the builders who made the world possible, the remaining customers and their creations are, indeed, commodities.

Well done, Miso. I promise we'll never play soccer with your head.

Get over to the show [direct teleport link] before Miso and her secrets (there's one in each body part) are purchased.

I'm not telling a thing. The secret in Miso's head is between me and her.

Wizard Gynoid's Sacred Geometry: Through December 1

Location: Badly Needed Study Break

I needed to get away from reviewing academic articles for Writing Lab Newsletter and so off I went, in avatarian form, to see Wizard Gynoid's artwork. This gave me the excuse to play with the Advanced Sky settings, something I used to do on my monthly road trips until I got so mad at Linden Lab that I parked my fake cars for a while.

I don't get out enough now to see the arts in SL, one of the best reasons to retain an avatar in that grid. I've a layman's interest in geometry, one of the few forms of math at which I could ever earn A grades.

Wizzy's "Four-Point Retroperspective" runs until Dec. 1 at The Turing Gallery and to quote the artist:

"The creations shown here are a retrospective of some of the things I've been working on over the last three and a half years. Precise geometry is the unifying theme. My work has largely been about shifting these objects to an artistic context, so that their inherent beauty can be appreciated.



The lobby has several works by my collaborator Polagirus Paragorn. These works are significant from a "Sacred Geometry" perspective, and are suggestive of the significance of the isometric grid. The "Flower of Life" motif is recurrent.

The next room has objects representative of the Kepler/Poinsot group of geometric solids. The Platonic Solids are represented, as well as various higher-dimensional (than three)"

Get by to see the work. I'm an old-school gamer, so I had to buy a dodecahedron.

Another Must-See at Burn2

Location: sorting & uploading textures to OpenSim
image credit: Miso Susanowa's blog

Today's a busy one for my OpenSim gridnaut, who is working on bulk uploads of textures I made for the House of Usher build.

Since I'll miss the last day at Burn2, I want to thank Deanya Zenfold for this tip. You got a link to Miso's map in my last post, but I'll repeat it here. Get over the the Playa before it all ends! Deanya's advice follows.

Miso Susanowa's House of Cards: The History of the Internet as a house of cards with your sound on! She has been collecting sounds since she was 6 years old, and she has a treasure trove of them at each installation, mind-bogglingly mixed down into compact random-sounding loops. Read about the installation here:

http://gomiso.blogspot.com/2010/10/house-of-cards-burn2.html

She also has a great map of burn2: http://gomiso.blogspot.com/2010/10/playa-map-burn2-artists.html

Lost Their Wings: Bryn Oh at Burn 2

Location: Remembering what it really was all about

A special thanks to Bryn Oh for her installation at Burn 2 this year. Her work never fails to revive a sense of excitement about Second Life's potential.

After Linden Lab backed out of sponsoring the arts event, not even providing free sims for a few months, I felt let down and, once again, felt it time to look elsewhere for inspiration. See Phaylen Fairchild's story about Linden Lab's preference for fake bunnies to real art.

I like to support SL's artists and Bryn Oh is one of the finest makers of 3D art I've encountered. Her aesthetic is consistent and convincing. So off I went to Burn 2. Not a Linden or fake bunny in sight. Good. The artists pulled it off on their own.

I found navigation at the event difficult until I discovered a Playa map by
Miso Susanowa. Many thanks!

It was easy to find the build, but it look me longer to get inside. Once I figured out how to enter the unremarkable exterior of her build, as always, I found myself in an immersive wonderland. Bit by bit, I came upon the exquisite sculpture of Lady Carmagnolle, who "painted faces on rocks/ with things/ she pretended they were birds/ who had somehow/ lost their wings"


Oh's works within the larger work include, early in the build, a skeletal "Seraphim" and a little Steampunk music box with a video link to "Format." As always in her work, there's a sense of childhood loneliness, a subtle and never-quite-glimpsed menace, and (naturally) exquisite detail. The music box and many other parts of the otherwise darkened interior of the Burn 2 build invite close camming. There's a "prim poem" with a reference to "Angler Girl," one of the highlights of her build from last year's Burning Life, "Vessel's Dream."


My wife shoulder-surfed Iggy's journey through the build, and she liked how much of Oh's art, in particular the centerpiece sculpture this year, has been inspired by sewing. It's easy to spot a seamstress' dummy in many figures she crafts. I saw that influence last year at "Vessel's Dream" as well.

It's also interesting to see Oh work with Peter Greenaway, whose films so often are carnal in a literal sense: there's a lot of meat in his work, while Oh's work is so often fragile, skeletal. I like this pairing of these two different sensibilities. Have a look at "Dreams," a video linked from the Burn 2 site and connected to a Greenaway project, "Big Bang."

So find your way through this door while you can. Burn 2 ends soon and we all wonder what, if anything, will follow it in 2011.

I don't mind the sadness of Oh's work, especially this fall as so much seems uncertain about this particular virtual world. Whatever happens to SL and its maker, Oh's work will remain important (and ephemeral) moments to what is not otherwise possible.

Burn 2 at the Stilt Bitches

Location: Dizzy as all get out; Bozo is in worse shape

I wandered aimlessly through Burn 2 today, since my time there this year will be limited. I ran into Firery Broome, an educator in the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable. With Burn 2 ranger SkyCat Ranger we did some juggliing.

Firery had designed costumes for the Stilt Bitches Flying Circus, and when I went there I had more fun than most mortals are permitted.


Attractions include a big swing outside, a fortune teller's tent, a flying carpet (I've yet to ride that), and in the big tent a trampoline with the funniest sound effects of "boing boing" I've heard in a while. While lovely female avatars Betty and Amalthea bounced up and down I cavorted on stilts and juggled burning clubs.

Then I got to punch the snot out of Bozo the Clown. Just what I needed today.

Go by and be a little kid for a while. Bozo can take it.

Standing Corrected About Linden Lab's Support For the Arts

Location: In front of big plate of crow

Top-hat tip to Viv Trafalgar, who alerted me to this old but vital news item

Image: Burning Life 2008, closing day

I don't follow developments in Second Life as readily as many of my more connected colleagues who stay better plugged into various forms of communication, so I missed the Feb. 23 announcement of the Linden Endowment for the Arts.

The initiative makes me qualify the angry words I've sounded, from time to time, about the Lindens pissing on the creative classes while they cultivate suburban lifestylers. Could there be room for a virtual gallery district as well as virtual cul-de-sac burbs in SL? It seems so, and Linden Lab follows a clear precedent: corporations have long supported the arts.

Of course, there are some in SL's resident base who are terminally indignant. They will see this initiative as something akin to arbitrary promotion for selected artists. To you I say: wait to see what happens.

From my perspective, it's high time that Linden Lab reaffirmed the role artists have played in fulfilling Philip Rosedale's vision of a place where one could revel in self-expression and, given the low overhead costs, make a bit of spending money doing so. Of particular interest to me, as with the Svarga revival, is that the Lab understands the best immersive work merits archiving in some form, so future SLers can experience it.

If the Linden Endowment goes to those making subpar work or only to those who toady to the Lab, the discontent from others in the community will be long and prolonged.

And I'll report it right here. Meanwhile, this has me looking forward to Burning Life 2010!

Update May 19: Reading Prokofy Neva's post on this issue, especially Desmond Shang's comments about how it will affect sim-owners who have rented space to artists, complicates what I posted here.

Let's hope that we don't come to see those artists outside the 70-sim arts cluster treated as second-rate or those inside pressured to create content that meets LL's standards. Again, it will be a wait-and-see game, since the decision has been made.

Why Svarga Still Matters

Location: Chamber of the Oracle

I was delighted to get word, via New World Notes, that Svarga, site of my first "aha" moments, has again opened to the public. In a very real sense, this is Svarga (and SL) 2006, before sculpted prims and Windlight changed the experience in-world for all of us.

Laukosargas Svarog, the original creator, largely left SL, but Linden Lab has apparently purchased the content from her and opened Svarga as a sort of national park. I love this idea for many reasons, and despite some mean-spirited (and not unexpected) carping from Prokofy Neva over Socialist tendencies (yawn) Svarga still matters.

History of Technology: Saving Svarga sets a precedent that, while making some builders uncomfortable, could preserve signature work in the history of virtual worlds. Those of us who study the history of technology lament when monuments in its development do not end up in the Smithsonian or its equivalent overseas. It is instructive to have an actual Xerox Alto, Apple I, and IBM 8088 PC to show to students, not to mention Chuck Yeager's X-1 Glamorous Glennis, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of Saint Louis, and the Apollo 11 command module Columbia.

With virtual technologies, however, it's harder to preserve things, so Linden Lab presents future historians the chance--if they keep Svarga around in future iterations of SL and whatever comes after--for us to explore. Code may change, but there's a better chance of my students seeing a "heritage" sim as it was meant to be seen than taking a ride on a Saturn V.

Svarga may seem dated, compared to amazing builds I've seen in SL and, more recently, Heritage Key. Yet it provides a touchstone for those works, a bar to be topped. We need Svarga to remind us of what is possible.

A Place to Dream: What use is beauty, in a capitalist sense? Can it be made a commodity? Yes. Does it lose something in the process? Can you tour it on the back of a giant wasp?

I go from the purely pedagogical to the aesthetic and Romantic here. Since my arrival in early 2007, SL has steadily become more professionalized; Philip Rosedale noted that the Burning Man era had ended, after he stepped down as Linden Lab CEO. Of course I hope Linden Lab makes the money to keep SL afloat, but it needs a space to inspire the arts.

Cultural creatives online should not be elbowed out of the way to serve the bottom line. When they do, like art-district bohemians when a warehouse area goes condo, only a shell is left without the "edge" to produce interesting art. This has occurred all over Richmond, VA, and it pains me to see the pattern replicated in virtual spaces.

I suppose Linden Lab had to become more corporate, but along with the Burning Life festival, I'd love to see spaces like Svarga kept around to inspire content creators.

So as long as Svarga stays open, I'll go back, put 25L in Taras Balderdash's oracle (all money supports charity) and see what it portends. The oracle produces random advice, like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy cards.


Today it told me, "Offer a teleport to a friend." I'm going to do that--and bring them to Svarga. So here's a teleport link for all of you!