I think in general when people say "I know," they don't know, they believe. I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man as man shows himself to be a true individual. Only in art is he capable of going beyond the animal state, because art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space. To live is to believe; that's my belief, at any rate.
-- Marcel Duchamp, interviewed by James Johnson Sweeney for NBC at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1956 (more)
'construct' by Selavy Oh, is now on Magoo (Teleport)
I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to try to use the same aesthetics as painting which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing, and most important, insisted on attention to metaphor. Since film is not painting–and not simply because one moves and the other doesn't–I wanted to explore their connections and differences–stretching the formal interests to questions of editing, pacing, studying the formal properties of time intervals, repetitions, variations on a theme, and so on.
-- Peter Greenaway, quoted in Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi
It is one of the most important formal qualities of film that every object that is reproduced appears simultaneously in two entirely different frames of reference, namely the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and that as one identical object it fulfills two different functions in the two contexts.
The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas–for my body does not have the same ideas I do.
-- Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text Tr. Richard Miller
22 August 2010 (Preview)
Virtual Art filmed in Second Life® at Angewandte
Best viewed full-screen
LPDT2: Roy Ascott
Programming and Architecture: Selavy Oh
Architecture and Terrain: MosMax Hax (Max Moswitzer)
Avatars and Soundscape: Alpha Auer, Alpho Fullstop and alpha.tribe (Elif Ayiter)
Avatar Animations: Frigg Ragu (Heidi Dahlsveen)
i-DAT: University of Plymouth, UK
Simulator Host: University of Applied Fine Arts, Vienna
LPDT2 is being projected to Real Life throughout September 2010 in Incheon, South Korea during the Incheon International Digital Art Festival (INDAF) 2010 in Tomorrow City, Songdo.
Avatar appearances by Alex Arashi, Allegory Ordinary, Arahan Claveau, Category Silent, Erdbeermund Schnute, Eupalinos Ugajin, Fau Ferdinand, Hegemon Maximus, Mab MacMoragh, MosMax Hax, Sca Shilova, Selavy Oh, Solo Mornington, somerset Verne
'LPDT2 : The Second Life of La Plissure du Texte' is the Second Life® incarnation of Roy Ascott's groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte ('The Pleating of the Text'), created in 1983 and exhibited at the Musee de l'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
The title of the project, 'La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,' alludes to Roland Barthes's book 'Le Plaiser du Texte', a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation 'distributed authorship', a term coined by Ascott, has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2.
Sunday 13 June 2010: Amy breaks Brooklyn is Watching's simulated physics with her endlessly gushing Selavy Oh/Mosmax Hax pipeline art piece combining big bang scripting with Whitenoise freebies, discusses the art movement called Virtualism and how it could relate to several big pictures (info & info), and examines nerdy-funny robot art assembled with found objects by Cheyenne Palisades (who, by the way, has announced her candidacy for CEO of Linden Lab® here). Mab, who is definitely a nerd, has not had time to be inworld since last week so is illustrating this great Amy Freelunch podcast with an itty bitty slideshow made previously (above) and also a nice image (below) of a water skiing robot made by Cheyenne so you can squint your eyes and imagine seeing the things that Amy describes so well at Brooklyn is Watching.
Listen to the podcast here, or go to the SoundCloud page. The new podcast is currently in rotation on Soup radio inworld on the Soup sims. The radio is reset most days at 1PM SLT, which means that Amy's podcast can be heard at that time, as well as intermittently the rest of the hours. After a few days off, podcasts 1 & 2 will rejoin the playlist inworld again.
17 April 2010 doppelgänger Virtual Artwork filmed by Mab MacMoragh in Second Life® on Portrait Island
This video is an abbreviated look at doppelgänger, the virtual exhibition held by the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, on Portrait Island in Second Life® from 23 October 2009 to 23 April 2010. There are lots of texts in it that go by quickly, so the viewer is urged to pause the video as needed to read the various signs, notecards, web pages, and words incorporated into the artwork.
Artists:
Cao Fei (China Tracy)- iMirror, 2007 (China) (See iMirror in its entirety part 1part 2part 3
Patrick Lichty (Man Michinaga)- CodePortraits, 2009 (USA) (See all 12 keepsake videos)
Gazira Babeli- iGods, 2009 (Italy) (see National Portrait Gallery's iGods video)
Adam Nash (Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (Christo Kayo), Justin Clemens (Jack Shoreland)- Autoscopia, 2009 (Australia) (See National Portrait Gallery's Autoscopia video)
Andrew Burrell (Nonnatus Korhonen)- temporary self portrait in preparation for the singularity, 2009 (Australia) (See National Portrait Gallery's temporary self portrait video)
National Portrait Gallery:
Online manager- Gill Raymond (Portrait Watanabe)
Senior Curator- Michael Desmond (Portrait John)
Architect/SIM Designer- Greg More (Dynamo Zanetti)
Podcasts of Gillian Raymond discussing this exhibition with Greg More, Patrick Lichty, Andrew Burrell, and the trio of Adam Nash, Christopher Dodds, and Justin Clemons can be listened to on iTunes
~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~
Art and Connectivity: Cyberforum
In association with the doppelgänger exhibition, the National Portrait Gallery hosted a panel forum on 23 March to discuss notions of identity in the digital realm, the possibilities of art in a connected world and the role cultural institutions may play in this environment.
The guest speakers for the discussion were: Christiane Paul, Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School, New York. Melinda Rackham, Adjunct Professor at RMIT University and Emerging Artforms Curator at Subtle Net, Melbourne, Australia.
Michael Desmond, Senior Curator, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia. Andrew Burrell SL: Nonnatus Korhonen Patrick Lichty SL: Man Michinaga
The one hour streaming video of this event can be viewed in its entirety on the National Portrait Gallery website (link). Mab transcribed the talk, abridging and adjusting it a bit for reading as text.
Sorry I don't have a SLurl to this yet, but I think it's part of the 'Through the Virtual Looking Glass' exhibition. You can read about that and see a longer video made by Nettrice Gaskins of this installation (link)
Update: Apparently, although Nettrice says the installation is for 'Through the Virtual Looking Glass', it's actually a part of Bryn Oh's project for the World Expo Shanghai 2010 'Open This End'
Avatar appearances by Allegory Ordinary (bot), Identity Absent (bot), Imaginary Difference (bot), Mab MacMoragh, Monet Destiny, Oberon Onmura, Solo Mornington
Brooklyn is Watching's Jay Newt (Jay Van Buren in Real Life) took part in a podpourri on the theme of 2.0 Digital Love at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn.
Jay only had a few minutes to present the Second Life® SIM to the Real Life audience steering through the eyeball avatar of Monet Destiny. Afterwards Monet was left with the poetry-bots of Selavy Oh, reciting lines from Charles Baudelaire's volume of French poetry, Les Fleurs du mal. Their recitations were intermingled with an interventionist text-bot by Sowa Mai and Banrion Constantine, from which green lines of prepared chat appeared to come from and to be about locally identified avatars. All this text dialog was interspersed with the improvised natterings of Mab MacMoragh, Oberon Onmura, and Solo Mornington. If Mab had been using the new Second Life® Viewer 2 with its shared media capabilities, the machinima would have shown the chat text generated from these three sources scrolling in real time on the walls inside the white box.
This is Mab's second attempt at Second Life® machinima (her first attempt, Selavy Oh's State of Formation, is still in bits and pieces).
Werner Kurosawa's Off Sim provides a way for Mab and Nebulosus Severine to sit together outside the SIM and contemplate the rotating ephemeral conceptual artscape created by artists on the Brooklyn is Watching SIM at Soup:Push, where anyone can build a temporary installation, art is in constant transformation, and the real art lies in the way the works appear and disappear as the artists collaborate (knowingly or unknowingly) changing the meaning of the immersive space over time much like the game Exquisite Corpse played by the early Surrealist artists.
Familiarities arise and themes emerge, growing and playing off each other as happens in the music used here, a fragment of Bach's Aria from the Goldberg Variations, performed by multimedia enthusiast and artist Glenn Gould in 1981.
(Teleport to Brooklyn is Watching at Soup:Push, walk to the platform in front of the big blue watchtower, sit on the seats you'll find there, and voila, you are orbiting the sim at 512 meters outside it! More than one person at a time can go!)
Penumbra Carter captures a slice of Brooklyn is Watching:Push
Dekka Raymaker: Misprint Thursday placed AM Radio's 'How Fast We Fly' shack, Penumbra Carter added a 'Sculptie Horse' by Nomasha Syaka in a doorway, Dekka Raymaker placed the thin red wedge, Oberon Onmura placed red toy taxis and road, Misprint Thursday then placed 'phonesplosion' Solo Mornington placed cannon and target
Update: Maya Paris (link) adds to the Scarlet Wave (you can see her Fillybot in the video above but why not come inworld and experience it for yourself? (SLurl):
Misprint Thursday- AM Radio's "How Fast We Fly" + her own "phonesplosion" Penumbra Carter- wall + Sculptie horse by Nomasha Syaka Dekka Raymaker-thin red wedge Oberon Onmura- road + taxi toys by Arcadia Asylum Dancoyote Antonelli- Sculptie horses (as above) Solo Mornington- Tree-ornament-shooting cannon + target Maya Paris- Fillybots made from same sculptie horses + my fembots L1Aura Loire- Sizzling frying pans + "Butter's carrot" by Jacqueline Bancroft
soror Nishi's spectacular The Temple of the Prim is ending its stay on Soup:Magoo with the turning of the calendar to December- hurry to see it if you haven't! (SLurl)
Mab has not learned to make machinima but offers this spiffy slideshow of images of soror's work in combination with the original music of Mack Gecko (link)
To see these images in higher resolution in a plain slideshow, large on black, look here (link)
The following lovely machinimas were made by kumi kuhr (link)
More on The Temple of the Prim (link) (link) (link)
To see this slideshow full-screen click here (link)
The Final Five artists in the Best of Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 Festival created new work using virtual copies of the original Jack the Pelican Presents gallery built by Dekka Raymaker. Finalist Selavy Oh chose to riff on the gallery itself much as a twenty-first century music composer might. The space was treated as theme and multiplied, with variation and the element of chance brought in to play by inviting friends to show new works of their own. Visitors shape their experience by exploring and interacting with the labyrinthine virtual galleries that disappear and reappear, some empty, some full, thereby becoming a part of and completing the art. The only way to fully experience Selavy Oh's The Final Show is to actively engage with it.
The Final Show machinima by Penumbra Carter
From the notecard by Selavy Oh:
In a virtual world, the notion of space has a different meaning. While a real gallery is limited by the size of the available space, a virtual gallery is limited by the number objects that can be shown.
A virtual gallery is not just a single space, but can be many parallel spaces. The gallery spaces can be exchanged, concatenated, they can be modified, they are only context but not requirement.
You may walk into the virtual gallery and see one exhibition, you turn around, and walk into the same gallery again to see something completely different.
Consequently, this exhibition features work by several of the artists whose work was chosen to be among the 30 best artworks of year 1 of Brooklyn Is Watching, but were not selected by the judges for the Final Five.
From the notecard for The Unkempt Hair of the Dead:
I have entitled my piece "The Unkempt Hair of the Dead" from a line in a Walt Whitman poem. He writes that the grass in cemeteries is the unkempt hair of the dead. I don't think he was being morbid, but just celebrating the fact that eventually we are swallowed back up by the earth and defacto the universe. The cycle of small matter to large matter, and back to small matter.
I have always been fascinated by people in the past who have tried to study and look at the universe and imagine how it all works. So I have paid homage to a few devices from the past created to explore and understand such things.
I have placed grass underneath my version of our universe and made a device that is the initial maker of stuff of the universe. Whales to me represent one of the few remaining ancient mysteries we have on earth, they seem to be more of a creature of the universe than the earth.
Penumbra Carter is a talented artist and filmmaker in both Second Life® and Real Life℗. Her machinimas can be viewed on Youtube (link).
*Walt Whitman, from "A child said, What is the grass?"
Selavy Oh's Dancing Mountains and Nested Cubes in Magoo (slurl)
She has managed to breathe life into the landscape in ways heretofore unimaginable. -- Bettina Tizzy on Selavy Oh's Dancing Mountains (read more and view machinima)
Bettina Tizzy of the Not Possible IRL blog (Happy 2nd birthday NPIRL!) showcased Selavy Oh's Dancing Mountains with an atmospheric machinima and thoughtful allusions to land artists Michael Heizer and James Turrell.
Soup is reminded as well of joy in the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose pieces incorporate laws of nature in ways that directly address time and impermanence, inescapable aspects of any environment.
