art:21-code as concept and responsive art

Second guest blog-post by Nettrice Gaskins on virtual art this week on the fantastic art:21 blog! Viva!

Selavy Oh and Glyph Graves, both part of the Brooklyn is Watching 30 Best and Final Five last year (and both Lovers Lane Studios artists), are prominently featured in today's blog post by Nettrice Gaskins, along with Brooklyn is Watching SLon des Refuses (and Lovers Lane Studios artists) Sowa Mai and Banrion Constantine.

Second Life® virtual medium artists Wizard Gynoid, Opensource Obscure, AM Radio, and theorist Georg Janick (Gary Zabel) are also mentioned.

Using scripts, artists can transform objects into virtual robots inhabited by software agents that work behind the scenes while human-driven avatars interact or become immersed in the art.

art:21 blog- Nettrice Gaskins "Responsive Art & Evolving Artificiality in Virtual Worlds"

read more (link)

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About Art21:

Art21 was founded in 1997 with the mission to increase knowledge of contemporary art, ignite discussion, and inspire creative thinking by using diverse media to present contemporary artists at work and in their own words.

Art21 produces the Peabody-winning PBS series Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century, as well as books, internet-based resources, and public programs. What makes Art21 a bold new endeavor is not only the caliber of the artists featured, but the media in which they are presented. The accessibility of television and the Internet makes it possible to reach an extremely large audience.

read more (link)

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Full episodes of art:21 on PBS can be viewed here (link)

(crossposted)

Final Five: Selavy Oh's The Final Show

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.


The Location

East of Odyssey (slurl)


The Artists:

Arahan Claveau– "Adrift"
Dekka Raymaker– "Artbortion"
comet Morigi– "*~comet Morigi Bio 090804"
Oberon Onmura– "Fight for Order"
Misprint Thursday– "Suspended Hang-Ups"

Curation and Space:

Selavy Oh

Update: Read MonCherrie Afterthought's parsing of Selavy's overtones and pitch on the Brooklyn is Watching blog (link)

SLon: DJ Party Update- SLon artists shown in RL Gallery- Some Background

Sowa Mai's Ghost Story is currently displayed in SLon des Refuses on Magoo, Dekka Raymaker and Mab stand at the end

Soup blog will temporarily be taken over by SLon des Refuses virtual world events and documentation. The usual sporadic but enthusiastic Soup postings will continue after SLon is over or as time allows. Mab sometimes tweets (link), if you would like to follow along, but only in the most irregular way as she has the attention span of a cat.

This is the (corrected) notecard that was sent out this morning to the Slon group in Second Life®:

Thursday 6 August 2009

Hi SLon Artists,

We're experiencing technical mire so the DJ party-on-the-grass with Arthole's Arahan Claveau (link) for Thursday's (today's) opening is postponed. We hope to get things straightened out and have it on closing day instead, which is Sunday 23 August. We're disappointed but such is life. We will keep you updated.

Update: Shirley Marquez will be DJ! Look for her on the green grass and enjoy the picnic! Arahan will be closing for us!

SLon Central on Magoo SIM (slurl)

The 2009 Unofficial Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 International SLon des Refuses (that's YOU!) will open in a relaxed and beyond casual way at 1PM SLT 6 August. The exhibition will occasionally be viewed live on a RL (Real Life) 52 inch mega-monitor screen by RL gallery visitors in the front space of the highly regarded RL Jack the Pelican Presents art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, along with the SL 30 Best show hosted by the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas SIM ( KU ART to the South). To the North of 30 Best is the Impermanence SIM, also hosted by KU ART, where the new incarnation of Brooklyn is Watching now makes its home. So come to Magoo or KU and show off your avatar-as-artwork! Brooklyn will be Watching!

30 Best show on KU (slurl)

Brooklyn is Watching Now on Impermanence (slurl)

The RL Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery (link)

As you can see YOU are mentioned thusly (from the Jack the Pelican Presents website):

"Is virtual art for real? What is the nature of the medium? How do you talk about it? What are its conceptual and social-critical opportunities and limits? These are just some of the questions that Brooklyn Is Watching has been actively asking for the last year and a half.

Inside the gallery are five monitors, each featuring a virtual copy of the real space occupied by a different virtual artwork. These are "THE FINAL FIVE," created for this context by the nominated and elected best from hundreds of virtual artists who have exhibited in year 1 of Brooklyn is Watching.

This is an "official" show of virtual art. So much is at stake, it has already spawned a Salon de Refusés of over thirty virtual artists who didn't make the final cut."

The Final Five exhibition is being prepared inworld on East of Odyssey SIM. The opening is on Friday 7 August 4-6 PM SLT. The Final Five Artists are Bryn Oh, DanCoyote Antonelli, Glyph Graves, Nebulosus Severine, and Selavy Oh. They have each been given a replica of the RL Jack the Pelican Presents art gallery, recreated virtually by our own talented Dekka Raymaker, for their use in making new artwork for the Final Five show.

Final Five on East of Odyssey (slurl)

If you're nearby Jack the Pelican Presents in RL, join in the RL festivities and happenings which will occur simultaneously (they include commissioned work by Juria Yoshikawa, Oberon Onmura, and Jeff Ertz). Say hello to Jay Van Buren (Jay Newt inworld) and kiss Kristen Galvin (our very own beloved hardworking MonCherrie Afterthought)! Or vice versa.....

Read the Brooklyn is Watching blog for updates to the 30 Best and Final Five shows, as well as coverage of the panel discussion on virtual artists by Pavig Lok, Lori Landay, and Stacey Fox; and keynote speaker Jerry Paffendorf (Destroy Television).

Brooklyn is Watching blog (link)

Read more about these exciting RL events in this press release (link)

Although all the Slon Artists on Magoo are winners by virtue of being requested to be in the SLon in the first place, there are further rankings to be determined in the Official Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 Festival, including the awarding of the People's Choice and the Golden Eyeball. The People's Choice will be made by online poll and the Golden Eyeball will be presented to one of the Final Five on the basis of votes made by RL visitors to the RL Jack the Pelican Presents gallery, not all of whom will be familiar with SL art or its intrinsic nature. The Final Five works will be shown for this purpose over the term of the exhibit on their own wall-mounted monitors in machinima form (link) by filmmaker (and SLon muse) Penumbra Carter.

Details on People's Choice and Golden Eyeball (link)

For those of you not familiar with Brooklyn is Watching even though your artwork was nominated to be in the 30 Best of Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 (hey, it can happen!), here is a concise description by Juan Rubio from the press release:

"Brooklyn is Watching, conceived of by Jay Van Buren, executed as a collaboration with Boris Kizelshteyn and the Popcha! development team in February 2008, is a breakthrough relational art project that invites interaction between the two thriving art communities of Second Life and Williamsburg, Brooklyn accentuating the power relations between and among them. It consists of a series of inter-related spaces for artists, audiences, and participants. The primary spaces are a square parcel of land (sim) in Second Life where artists are invited to leave their work for one week (when it is automatically returned), and an alcove in the Williamsburg art gallery–Jack the Pelican Presents where the sim can be viewed on a large monitor and entered via an avatar."

Brooklyn is Watching will also make a machinima appearance at SLCC in San Francisco, 15 August, in the Grand Ballroom (link)

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