Professor Loire's Virtual Adventure

Breaking Barriers: "Transformation: Virtual Art on the Brink" Wins Awards & Other UWA News

2011-12-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

Transformation: Virtual Art on the Brink Receives a SPECIAL AWARD FOR BREAKING THE BARRIERS IN THE MachinimUWA IV: Art of the Artists Competition & MEJOR OBRA DE INVESTIGACIÓN / OPEN THIS END AWARD OF EXCELLENCE FOR INVESTIGATIVE FILM

Several people have asked me for the written transcript of the voice over, and at last I've edited the script I wrote so it matches what ended up in the film:

It is not surprising that much of the virtual world is modeled on what we know--physical spaces like art museums, or that art in it draws on what's come before--each new medium does that. but the best virtual art is a new kind of new media, using the particular properties of the virtual world to make metaphors manifest.

The avatar, the visual representation of the spectator, separates or connects our point of view to the avatar's position with the mobile camera, the virtual kino-eye.

When the avatar approaches Misprint Thursday's video art and music installation "Digital Glove," we only see and hear when we enter the space and turn on the media stream. This is kind of like augmented reality.

Virtual art has to stand on its own, as this piece does, but it also gives us a glimpse of augmented reality, not either virtual or physical, but layers of visual, kinetic, and haptic, interfaces overlayed on the actual world. The physical world becomes part of the interface, or vice versa, recasting the material world as another level of data to be combined with what can be seen only with some kind of device.

"The matter of ideas" by Gleman Jun uses a script to put the visitor's name in the piece, as if you were the person on the bench. It reminds us that matter in a virtual world is data. The ideas which can be realized, the metaphors manifested, are manipulated in a different way than when gravity, scarcity, and other physical limitations are involved. When we use an avatar, we position ourselves both in front of and within the virtual art, and toggle between them literally and metaphorically. Seeing the person with your name on it generate an image of itself, calls our attention to the work of art in the age of virtual reproduction.

In "Here Comes the Sun," Sledge Roffo makes a piece the spectator can not only see, but change, choosing colors, setting off sunbursts, triggering sounds. It raises the questions of whether pieces like this are interactive or reactive, and maybe that depends on whether you experience it from in front of or within it. When we play the piece, we perform it, and enter into a new relationship to the artwork, and the environment in which we experience it, as a performer.

My piece, “One and Four Timeboards” takes an imaginary prop from a film I shot in Second Life and installs it like Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 piece One and Three Chairs: the object itself, a photograph of the object where it is installed, and a definition of the word. But this is a virtual piece, so it is clickable, and yields, to the user, an unknown and unpredictable result: being teleported to a sphere above the gallery which mimics the timetravel sequences in the movie. It is meant as a moment of disruption, of instability in one’s perceptual field, and to suggest that in virtual art, there is a fourth aspect of meaning to consider: transformation.

I could click on it because nothing's gonna happen--WAIT! What? No!

Ohh, no and spinning, where is this? So familiar . . . it can't be . . . this is the time lab, but that's not a real place, it's the set I built for making machinima. and those are the other time boards, those are my avatars, my characters! OHHHHHHH!

Misprint Thursday's "Digital Glove"

One of the installations featured in the film, Misprint Thursday's "Digital Glove," took the top prize in the entire Year-long UWA 3D Open Art Challenge. Misprint is one of the artists in the exhibition I'm currently curating at LEA4, InterACT! (and she shared 5th prize with another InterACT! artist Glyph Graves), and her work is continually connecting video, music, 3D virtual art, computer mediated communication, and traditional art technique. I'm delighted "Digital Glove" was recognized because the piece is works so well on many levels--as an installation, as a video installation, as multimedia combining virtual installation, an original song with lyrics and music that make connections to the virtual and digital medium in which they were created and in which they are experienced, as a piece that uses the specific affordances and properties of the virtual world. When I was editing the footage I filmed of "Digital Glove" for "Transformation," I loved being with the piece so much that I cut a video for the entire song, and here it is:

Iono Allen's "Virtual Love" Also Wins a Machinima Prize at UWA

Virtual love also won one of the top prizes. This is an inspired film about an artwork, because of the way it both shows it and also transforms it, making a film that enters into dialogue--or dance--with the piece, rather than only documenting it. It is in that way an original piece of film art, standing (or dancing, or plunging) on its own.

InterACT! with Mixed Reality at LEA4: 11/26/11

2011-11-26T05:35:00.000-08:00

Tonight you can see for yourself the mixed reality performance/participatory environment that is Senses Places at InterACT! on LEA4. I've been experimenting with two of the ways of interacting with my avatar from outside of the Second Life interface: the webcam interface and the wii mote. These are not really spectator sports, but something you do and experience, but I think that when we do them together at the event on Saturday night, it might be really fun and interesting. For the wii mote, you need a mac computer (that is the platform the program you download was written for), but for the webcam, all you need is the webcam, and the HUD available at Senses Places. Instructions are at the environment, too.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR WEBCAM, LIVESTREAM, & WII MOTE ARE AVAILABLE AT THE SENSES PLACES ENVIRONMENT

WEBCAM INTERFACE --this is what it looks like in your web browser when you use the HUD in Second Life and the web interface with webcam. Only you see this on your computer, but your avatar responds to what you do.

SENSES PLACES

MIXED REALITY PERFORMANCE & PARTICIPATION EVENT

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 26
5-7pm (PST/GMT-8)
AT InterACT! on LEA4

InterACT! art exhibition entrance SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA4/21/10/21 (There is a teleporter there to go up to Senses Places environment or go directly to: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA4/53/144/301

SENSES PLACES
Mixed Reality Participatory Performance Environment

With livestream video of performers in Portugal and Japan who will also be in SL, as well as the opportunity for you to participate in SL, with or without a mixed reality component of your own with webcam or wii mote. If you have either of those, you can manipulate your avatar from outside SL. Come over and experiment with other people who are doing that, too, and see what it's like.

Instructions and a HUD are available at the Senses Places environment,
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA4/53/144/301

See the LEA blog for more details. http://lindenarts.blogspot.com/2011/11/mixed-reality-participatory.html

SENSES PLACES
By Butler2 Evelyn/Isabel Valverde & Toddles Lightworker/Todd Cochrane
with Anisabel/Ana Moura, Lux Nix/Clara Gomes, In Yan/Keiji Mitsubuchi, Island Habana/Yukihiko Yoshida, Jun Makime, Yumi Sagara and others

InterACT!
A Linden Endowment for the Arts exhibition showcasing interactive virtual art

Virtual art can invite, or even insist, that you interact with it. The artists in this exhibition cleverly and creatively make art out of interactions between data, objects, actions, and people within and beyond the virtual world in a stunning array of installations and experiences that stretch the possibilities of virtual art. Expect the unexpected, and click whenever you can. #interactLEA

Installations by:

Eupalinos Ugajin

Glyph Graves

Lorin Tone

Maya Paris

Misprint Thursday

PinkPink Sorbet

Selavy Oh

Interactive environment for audience participation & interactive mixed reality cross-cultural performances by: Butler2 Evelyn/Senses Places

With: Mesh by Sage Duncan, Machinima Mutoscope Viewers by FreeWee Ling, Twitter Garden by Frans Charming, Inner Tube Ride of Your Life by UzzU Artful

Curated by L1Aura Loire/Lori Landay, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Visual Culture & Interactive Media, Berklee College of Music

Transformation: Virtual Art on the Brink -- New Mixed Reality Film

2011-11-13T18:58:00.000-08:00

LEA 1-4 Art Shows Open Mid-October

2011-10-03T19:30:00.001-07:00

The Linden Endowment of the Arts is an official Linden Community Partnership program whose purpose is to help new artists, cultivate art in SL, and foster creativity, innovation, and collaboration within the art community.

The Linden Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce four art shows opening in mid-October:

On LEA1: The 2011 Survey of Hyperformalists in Second Life, curated by DC Spensley AKA DanCoyote

Opening October 15

The Museum of Hyperformalism, founded in 2006, to promote the unique genre of metasculptural abstraction in simulated space.

featuring the metasculptural artwork of:

Josina Burgess

Oberon Onmura

Ray FX

Sabine Stonebender

Selavy Oh

Suzanne Graves

Velasquez Bonetto

On LEA2: The Path, curated by Bryn Oh

Opening October 14

Based off the Surrealists exquisite corpse concept, each artist was randomly given a scene to compose. A narrative is begun by artist one who then passes it on to artist number two. Artist two adds to the story and passes it on to three and so on until the narrative reaches its conclusion at artist number eight.

Artists in order by scene

1-Bryn Oh

2-Colin Fizgig

3-Marcus Inkpen

4-Desdemona Enfield / Douglas Story

5-Maya Paris

6-Claudia222 Jewell

7-Scottius Polke

8-Rose Borchovski

On LEA3: FAST ART: Competitive Build Improvisation In The Virtual World, hosted by Solo Mornington

A series of speed build competitions, until the sim is full.

Twice-weekly events, with a number of options for artists in all time zones.

On LEA4: Interact!, curated by L1Aura Loire/Lori Landay

Opening October 15

Installations by:

Eupalinos Ugajin

Glyph Graves

Lorin Tone

Maya Paris

Misprint Thursday

PinkPink Sorbet

Selavy Oh

Interactive environment for audience participation & interactive mixed reality cross-cultural performances by: Butler2 Evelyn/Senses Places

With: Mesh by Sage Duncan, Machinima Mutoscope Viewers by FreeWee Ling, Twitter Garden by Frans Charming, Inner Tube Ride of Your Life by UzzU Artful

All four art shows will run for three months.

Also, on LEA6, ongoing, monthly, the LEA Full Sim Art Series

and the first Wednesday of each month, 7 pm SLT, at the LEA Theater, the Month of Machinima Screening Event, with conversations about the films with L1Aura Loire & the filmmakers

Check back here for more information about opening events, schedules for LEA3 speed builds, performances, and more . . . including some big news from the LEA.

Thinking about Virtual Art: One and Four Ways

2011-05-16T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about virtual art, about art in virtual worlds, between teaching about it, making it, being a member of the Linden Endowment for the Arts Committee, and working on a paper and presentation for the Media in Transition 7 Unstable Platforms: The Promise and Peril of Transition conference at MIT. The paper ended up growing beyond a conference paper, the seed of a major project for me, and I focused on virtual art for the presentation. (Presentation I gave at the conference is here, the part of the paper about art is here, and the bigger paper is here. Both papers are PDF files and take a little while to load.)

As I often do, I made something while I thought about my ideas, or maybe I thought about the concepts while I made something: "One and Four Timeboards."

This piece, offered tongue in cheek, takes an imaginary object, a prop from my machinima "Time Journey," and installs it according to the instructions for Joseph Kosuth's "One and Three Chairs." Kosuth certainly was not the first one, in 1965, to destabilize the meaning of the object in the gallery, but his piece was part of the crystallization around Conceptual Art that called those categories into question, and emphasized process and transition, in both art-making and meaning-making.

Plus, because we are in a virtual world, there is more. Click on the timeboard. Your experience suggests a fourth aspect to add to the object, image, and word to which Kosuth called attention in 1965.

The piece is one of the ideas I have for installations that connect "art" and machinima in virtual worlds. More of these from me in the future, especially around the time travel idea.

Slurl to teleport to the piece at UWA in Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/UWA/63/132/249

AND, when I went over to Cyland to install "One and Four Timeboards" in the virtual FutureFluxus exhibit, where I'll add an audio dimension (the piece should evolve each time, I think), I got completely sidetracked by the Carrot teeter-totter Man Michinaga has there. But the timeboards will be there soon. For more on FutureFluxus, see: www.futurefluxus.org

http://www.donaufestival.at/festival-en/programm/11/future-fluxus?set_language=en

www.cyland.ru/index.php

virtualcyland.blogspot.com

See the Centaur Surf the Chronowaves!!! Time Journey -- UWA Machinima Challenge III -- L1Aura Loire/Lori Landay

2011-05-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

Visualizing Theorem: New Virtual Art Exhibit (with Catalog Foreward by me!)

2011-04-02T05:34:00.000-07:00

Visualizing Theorem is a group show in Second Life that is international, transdisciplinary, multi-media, and interartistic, drawing on tracks from a music album, Theorem, (itself inspired by math and science concepts), as a starting point for each virtual art piece. I was pleased to write the foreword to the catalog for this excellent exhibit.

Visualizing Theorem Catalog--and the catalog itself is a cool object here on the web. There is a slider bar across the top after you click to see it bigger that makes the text larger or smaller.

Open publication - Free publishing - More theorem

And here is the SLurl to the virtual location of the exhibit in Second Life.

New Basic Viewer for Virtual World Second Life: Video Glimpse

2011-03-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

There is a new easy-to-use viewer--the program you use to access a virtual world--for Second Life. This means that a person can get going in a virtual world faster. Once you're comfortable, you can move up to the other viewer and learn some more functions. I think this is an excellent development, and so I made a quick, hopefully fun machinima video that shows the features of the new viewer that people can use for their students, friends, or anyone. It takes advantage of one of the amazing things about machinima (or the moving image in general): the ability to be able to show people what you have experienced or seen that they have not without them doing it themselves--yet!

IceOpal: A Virtual Interpretation of Amy Lowell's Poem, "Opal"

2011-02-27T16:12:00.000-08:00

My virtual art piece, "IceOpal: A Virtual Interpretation of Amy Lowell's Poem 'Opal," is at the University of Western Australia's monthly 3D Art Challenge in the virtual world Second Life, along with 70 or so other entries. The UWA art sims are the happening places in Second Life these days, with the most interesting art and artists converging on them. There is a sim where the past monthly winners are on display for the year, as well, so it is a terrific place to see some of the best virtual art (although it certainly is not an exhaustive collection, and pieces are limited to 100 prims, so are small-ish in scale in that way, and do not include performance art, or the performing arts). Some pieces (including mine) have sound and also machinima or video.

Above are some still images of the scultpure, and here is the machinima that plays on the little sphere in front of the big sphere, but the video does not include the sound that an avatar hears within the sphere, other than the music in the video itself.

Slurl in Second Life, only for a few more days!

SOUNDS ON

MEDIA ENABLED AND HIT PLAY

YOU CAN SEE MACHINIMA ON THE SCREEN IN THE LITTLE SPHERE IN FRONT or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trFWvxvV-JQ&hd=1

Sound in machinima: The music was created with rjdj's reactive music app for iPhone, which turned my recording of icicles dripping into music. You can hear the icicle drip sounds recorded at Drumlin Farm Audubon Sanctuary at the end of the video.

CLICK ON THE POSEBALLS AND HIT ESCAPE

Disclaimer: Not responsible for damage caused by falling icicles, cloudy vision, slippery situations, or irresolvable paradoxes of the heart or mind.

****

Opal

You are ice and fire,

The touch of you burns my hands like snow.

You are cold and flame.

You are the crimson of amaryllis,

The silver of moon-touched magnolias.

When I am with you,

My heart is a frozen pond

Gleaming with agitated torches.

Amy Lowell, 1919

Ice Textures: SkyBeam Designs

Flower Textures: from photographs by L1Aura Loire

Freeze & Melt poses by L1Aura Loire

OPEN END: A Digital Silent Film Screwball Comedy about Irresolution

2011-02-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

Ta-DA!! At long last, here is the screwball comedy! Yes, I started it so long ago I don't want to say! It ain't called "about irresolution" for nuthin'.

OPEN END: A Digital Silent Film Screwball Comedy about Irresolution

When a distracted woman and her pink leopard crash their hot air balloon into a handsome rogue who is just minding his own business . . . well, you know how it will end. Or do you??

If you're a film buff, this machinima movie (digital video captured in a virtual world or other 3-d game environment) may very well entertain and delight. And if you like seeing people and a pink leopard chase each other, you will like it, too.

Written, directed, filmed in the virtual world Second Life, and edited by Lori Landay (L1Aura Loire). Starring KinoEye Galaxy, Mildly Nefarious, and L1Leopard Warrhol. With Arrow Inglewood, Kristine Kristan, L1Aura Loire, Maya Paris, Misprint Thursday, and Quixote Berwick. Original piano score composed and performed by Dan Gross, http://www.dangrossmusic.com

TRICKSTER PRODUCTIONS
http://www.tricksterproductions.com

The music is by Dan Gross, one of my former Film Scoring students. One day in The Language of Film, the sound wasn't working on the videotape of The Great Train Robbery. I asked if anyone wanted to try to accompany the film on the piano (every Berklee classroom has a piano, you know), and Dan stepped up. At that moment, he discovered something he really enjoyed, and is extremely good at, and went on to accompany silent films live at the Harvard Film Archive and in Los Angeles. You'll hear what I mean about his affinity for interpreting the visual story in his music, in his touch on the piano keys, in the piece he wrote and performed for the film.

You can also watch on vimeo.

Various Updates

2011-01-24T17:36:00.000-08:00

As is often the case, the blog action is over at the blogs for the courses I'm teaching this semester. I've got Digital Narrative Theory and Practice again, very exciting, and it is now required for two new interdisciplinary minors, Visual Culture and Interactive Media Studies, and Video Game Scoring. The students are smart and focused, and I can't wait to see the cut scene or game projects they create by the end of the semester that explore the concepts we will encounter between now and then. I don't have a blog for The Language of Film, a Film Studies course I teach in the Film Scoring department; maybe someday. And the new course I have is one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on, a seminar called "What Is Being?" It's the product of a National Endowment for the Humanities Enduring Questions grant, and plays off of the Berklee motto, "to be, rather than to seem," an interesting proposition in any age, but especially in our time of increasingly convincing illusion, and for our musician-students, in light of performance, both on stage and in every day life. The students in that seminar blew me away in our first full meeting last week, maybe profound connections between Cicero's essay "On Friendship" (the origin of our being/seeming motto) and questions about friendship in contemporary life, some unchanged from Cicero's time, and some quite new in the age of the facebook "friend."

I've been working slowly on an OpenSim region on the Education Grid, and that is exciting, but also makes me really appreciate all the content available in Second Life. I joined Pathfinder's Hypergrid Adventurer's Club and look forward to my virtual metaverse experience continuing to expand across the grids, and I've been nosing around on Craft, Jokaydia, and other places. All very interesting, and I do indeed feel like a pioneer. I continue to build, make virtual art installations, collaborate, and make machinima in Second Life as well. My Domestic Technology or, Never Alone installation is still up at the inworld Cyberfest, so check that out if you haven't, and I hope to have some new interactive sculpture sometime soon.

L1 in CYBERFEST 2010: Domestic Technology or, Never Alone

2010-11-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

CYBERFEST 2010 is happening now in St. Petersburg, Russia (see) and also in Second Life at the Cyland sim (slurl). My installation, which plays a new machinima and lets you reenact moments from it for yourself, is called: Domestic Technology or, Never Alone.

When I first heard the concept for Cyberfest 2010, "Housebugs," exploring technology in everyday domestic life, I knew I had to take a comic angle. The tools of domestic technology, like vacuums are great, but what I could really use...

All the promises of technology for improving domesticity, like so many of the images of domesticity in culture, are idealized fantasies very distant from my everyday experience. In a virtual world like Second Life, representations of homes and homelife are even more idealized than on film or television, and the necessarily messier reality beyond the computer screen conflicts with the idealized images on it.

Domestic Technology or, Never Alone: Cyberfest 2010, Housebugs from Lori Landay on Vimeo.

Click on Vimeo link above to watch larger movie.

WORKING ON CYBERFEST 2010

2010-11-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

I'm editing a new machinima for my installation for Cyberfest 2010, and pulling together music for it. Yes, I know a lot of real film composers, but I am always working so close to deadline, I am usually pulling things together from recorded sources, or bodging my own music in GarageBand (my screwball comedy, which has been in the works for a long time, will be a notable exception, with a live piano score by Dan Gross). I've licensed great music from Moby, and used pieces from Kevin MacLeod, and this time I think it might be from
Free Sound Effects Download thousands of free sound effects from PartnersInRhyme.com And if you, too, put this link on your site, you will get a free sound effects library :)

More about CYBERFEST 2010: HOUSE BUG: see & the Cyland blog

Caerleon Museum of Identity: "Somebody"

2010-10-15T08:18:00.000-07:00

Machinima of my installation, seen on Viewer 2 (see previous post below for details about that). Watch in full letterbox format on youtube.

The Caerleon Museum of Identity, and my installation, "Somebody," best seen with, yes, Viewer 2, with media enabled to play automatically, opens Saturday, Oct 2, at 12 pm PDT. SLURLhttp://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife//219/65/3438

Download Viewer 2 HERE

Feeling even more experimental??? Download newest beta version of Viewer 2 HERE

Mahalo

2010-10-08T07:35:00.001-07:00

I was editing machinima I filmed during the last days of one of the loveliest surfing sims in Second Life, Friends Beach at Mori Pwani, which I had already set to a reggae cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" (Alpha Blondy's "I Wish You Were Here") when I saw the announcement about the discontinuation of the discounted pricing for education and non-profit sims. I wish it would not signal an exodus, but I fear it will. I hate seeing creative and innovative people depart, and beautiful builds dissolve into nothing but memories and machinima. I guess it is time to move on to a new beach, hopefully to meet up with friends there, too.

UPDATE: Linden Lab sent a letter to its education and non-profit customers offering them a grandfathered price extension for up to two years, which may or may not make a difference.

Mahalo, Mori by L1Aura Loire from Lori Landay on Vimeo.

Filmed during the last week of Friends Beach at Mori Pwani in the virtual world Second Life, this video is for the places--and people--we wish were here, wherever here may be.

A virtual world is impermanent, ephemeral, and as quick as it is to create entire environments, they can vanish in an instant. People come and go, as well. And then there are the places and people you wish were really here, wherever you are, not only there in a virtual world.

Mahalo, in Hawaiian, means thank you, and also has some of the same connotations as peace or namaste.

"I, too, dislike it" or, Why I Built My Caerleon Museum of Identity Installation for Viewer 2--

2010-10-02T06:19:00.001-07:00

Why I built my installation at the Caerleon Museum of Identity even though I know you probably don't use it, and why I hope you will log in with v2 to see it.

The short answer: I am in Second Life to experiment with what is new, and to keep changing and evolving. Shared media in viewer 2 means being able to play more than 1 movie file on prims on a parcel as well as having a media stream for the parcel.

Here is the longer answer: I started to build for v2 for SL7B in the summer, but in the end, built for the classic viewer, because hardly anyone I know (that means you!) regularly uses v2. The way v2 can handle video is much easier and versatile than the classic viewer. It has more possibilities. As artists, we should see what those can do, even when the tool feels uncomfortable at first in our hand/on our screen/as our interface, or maybe especially then.

My piece for Caerleon is a video art piece, and the prims are screens showing video, and also a short mixed reality gag, as video installation. It plays with the idea of still and moving images by using video of an Emily Dickinson poem poised over Boston Harbor outside the Institute for Contemporary Arts and putting it on various prims (in addition to some other things going on in the installation.)

I turn your attention to the poet Marianne Moore; her poem about poetry, a poet's response to poetry: "I, too, dislike it" kept echoing in my head as I used v2 to create "Somebody," my Caerleon piece, and not only for the toads (that will make more sense when you see the installation.) If we think of "poetry" as any art we are trying to make or experience, with its limitations of form and just of any representation, then once again Marianne Moore has a lot to say to us, this time about v2 and the interfaces with which we experience and create the virtual world.

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Download Viewer 2 HERE

Feeling even more experimental??? Download newest beta version of Viewer 2 HERE

Thanks, Torley, for the great photo of my installation! See Torley's flckr

New Video: CLICK: Immersive & Interactive Virtual Art

2010-09-22T06:13:00.000-07:00

This machinima video showcases some of the prize-winning entries in the year-long University of Western Australia Imagine 3d Art & Design Contest held in Second Life. It focuses specifically on "clickable" art, that is interactive and immersive, to highlight a unique aspect of virtual art. I plan on using this in my classes as a quick way of introducing them to virtual art, so I put in a list of the formal elements of art: line, shape, value, form, color, space, and texture. In some of my classes, we'll go into a virtual world and have a workshop on how to build/basic scripting, but in some of my classes, machinima and slides have to suffice. I hope others might find this video useful, too.

To see the video in full size, go directly to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sf3Q2VAlKE

Virtual Subjectivity--Immersive Education MediaGrid Summit

2010-04-22T05:39:00.001-07:00

10 Questions to Ask about Technology

2010-04-12T07:27:00.001-07:00

Here is a post from my two course blogs this semester, for Approaches to Visual Culture & Digital Narrative: Theory and Practice. Both classes are now focusing on new media (Digital Narrative always has), and I worked up these questions more for the Art History class, to help us get our minds around how a new cultural form changes everything. Of course, as we've seen in our exploration of 20th century visual culture, this is nothing new, and as each medium was new, and then not, it was a lightning rod for cultural discourse. In order to understand the virtual art we'll be exploring and making next week, we have to dig into the opposition between "reality" and "artifice" that we've seen questioned all semester--in I Love Lucy even! (sly plug for my new book, available April 15 everywhere!) It is fascinating to think about SL in reading through these questions . . . and I'll be asking my students to do that in the coming weeks.

Here are Ten Questions (ok, there are more, because some questions are kind of nested) to ask about a new technology tool that help us think about it in its wider cultural context. I am working off of, as usual, Cultural Studies founder Stuart Hall's idea of the circuit of culture, in which production, consumption, regulation, representation, and identity are all mutually informing. When we combine this with the historical trajectory perspective I am always harping on--which puts any given cultural text (game, device, app, film, dvd menu, etc) in a lineage of antecedents, looks for its peak if it has had it yet, and then speculates wildly on what might come next--we will always have a lot to talk about when we talk about any new aspect of technology, beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down reaction from which we might start and then come back to at the end, perhaps more thoughtfully.

Ten questions to ask about a new technology:

1) What is its purpose?

2) What was its analog, if there was one? How does a mediated, digital, or networked version of the tool or technique change it?

3) Who uses it? How? When? Where? Why? Does the use change over time? Do different users use it differently?

4) How does a user learn how to use it?

5) Who makes it? Who profits? How?

6) How is it regulated?

7) How does it spread?

8) Does it create or fill a need?

9) What is the interface? Is it also an object? Or a practice? Both? (think cell phone)

10) How does the user change the technology as he or she uses it? (mods and hacks and appropriations) How does the technology change the user? How does it become part of a person's sense of self?

Rethinking Virtual Commodification--Machinima in JVWR

2010-03-02T05:24:00.000-08:00

The new Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is out and it is a special issue on Virtual Economies, Virtual Goods and Service Delivery in Virtual Worlds. I have a machinima piece in it, "Rethinking Virtual Commodification, or The Virtual Kitchen Sink."

The link to the machinima [used to be on the front page of the JVWR but that link no longer works now that there is a new issue. Here it is on youtube.]

The link to the pdf with the text of the narration AND then some Notes with some more writing about each of the four virtual commodities I focus on in the piece, Alexith and Shirah Destiny's plants, Maya Paris's burlesque items, Filthy Fluno's actual and virtual paintings, and Rayzer Haggwood's guitar animations is HERE.

This piece picks up some of the ideas I explored in an earlier JVWR piece from 2008. It is also the machinima I was working on when I deleted my SL office/house!!

SL Viewer 2: Media on a Prim!!

2010-02-24T19:12:00.000-08:00

Here is some machinima video I shot of my first attempt with putting web media content on a cube in Second Life with the new viewer. One on face, I am playing a broadcast I streamed on UStream from my iPhone, and on the other I have Twitter. I think this is amazing. I haven't really experimented with Flash on a prim yet, but that is next.

You may notice that yes, L1 is still in the non-house. I like it. Soon (I think), the piece I was filming when I accidentally deleted my SL office/house, which is about commodification and place and, um, houses in virtual worlds, will be published in The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, and I will post that link when I have it. Maybe it is a comment on that work, but I have not really felt the need to put a house back around all my virtual stuff and the new sculptures I am working on there. It's all still in a moon. :) See machinima of house deletion here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRI5JCGhafU

Falling for the MMIF Global Machinima Festival

2010-02-15T06:45:00.000-08:00

The Falling Woman Story is one of the movies in the 2010 MMIF Machinima Festival, starting Feb 20!!

MMIF 2010

MaMachinima International Festival
Saturday Feb. 20^th , 2010
MMIF sims (SL™) + PLANETART, Wibautstraat 150 Amsterdam (NL)

‘MMIF 2010′ is the second edition of an annual film festival in 3D cyberspace with a screening in physical space (‘RL’). A seven hour movie marathon with a two hour afterparty. MMIF 2010 can also be followed on the web via live stream broadcasts.

The MMIF is a celebration of ‘Machinima’: a new cinematic art form, created with virtual worlds and video games. On 3D Internet platforms like Second Life®, any kind of movie sets can be build for very low costs. The MMIF aims to bring machinima to a wider audience, online – and offline. Machinima artists from all over the world are present in real time at the virtual MMIF Theatre. They present over 50 short films and have talks with other machinimatographers and an international audience.

Audience in Amsterdam can follow the MMIF event projected live on a big screen at the PLANETART Medialab Artspace. They can bring their own laptop computers to interact with the show on the big screen. Free wireless Internet and electricity is provided. No entrance fee at PLANETART, however tickets are required - reservations must be made via email. Details at http://MMIF.org

The MMIF is a volunteer-run non-profit collaboration of MaMachinima withPLANETART , Volkskrantgebouw, Meta.Live.Nu, Pop Art Lab, VMax, AviewTV,Ystreams.TV, Metaworld Broadcasting, MetaMeets, Gallery Fermate, Museum Of The Bohemian, and many volunteers. MMIF 2010 is financed by donations and gifts. Virtual land sponsored by Linden Lab®. The MMIF was initiated by the Dutch film maker Chantal Harvey.

MMIF 2010 info, promo video, full programme, live streams, contact and latest updates and changes at http://MMIF.org

MMIF 2010 ARTISTS:
Gala Charron – Ogogoro - Lainy Voom – Draxtor Despres – Bryn Oh - Rohan Fermi – Toxic Menges – Tara Yeats – Phaylen Fairchild – Pooky Amsterdam & Russell (Rosco) Boyd – Poid Mahovlich – CodeWarrior Carling – Evie Fairchild – Graham Miami – Kronos Kirkorian – Osprey Therian – Chaffro Schoonmaker - SaveMe Oh - Dulci Parx – Chatnoir Studios – Paisley Beebe – Rysan Fall – Sol Bartz (phil Rice) – Rocksea Renegade – Cisko Vandeverre – Nitwacket (Pyewacket Bellman) – Chantal Harvey – Lowe Runo – Pia Klaar – Al Peretz – Halden Beaumont – Kolor Fall – Binary Quandry – spyVspy Aeon – Animatechnica – Miles Eleventhauer – Lizsolo Mathilde – Delgado Cinquetti – L1aura Loire – Iono Allen – Pyewacket Kazyanenko – Fort Knight – Luca Lisci – Larkworthy Antfarm – Beans Canning - Gtoon Jun – Tutsy Navarathna – Hadji Ling – Colemarie Soleil – Xineohp Guisse – Lorin Tone – Ian Friar – Suzy Yue – Claus Uriza / Emily Hifeng – Meta Lord, and others.

MMIF 2010 TIMES:
Saturday 20^th of February
19:00 CET (= SL 10 am PST) – DOORS OPEN
20:00 CET (= SL 11 am PST) – Opening ceremony + Machinima film screenings
03:00 CET (= SL 6 pm PST) – THE END + After party online in SL

PHYSICAL LOCATION:
PLANETART Medialab Artspace
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam (NL)

VIRTUAL LOCATION:
MMIF 1, 2, 3, 4
Second Life®

Teleport links via http://MMIF.org

If You Are in SL, Go See this Sim: Lemondrop's Forest

2010-01-24T19:31:00.000-08:00

I've seen a lot of amazing builds in SL, and had a lot of fun, but getting a tour from Lemondrop Serendipity, a fairy even more delightful than her name, of the imaginative, super-fantastical sim she and Photon Pink (also a name indicative of good things!) have built at Lemondrop's Forest was one of the most fun experiences at the most amazing places. (slurl) Lemondrop is one to run, not walk, and trying to keep up was a blast. The huge tree at the center of the sim has wonderful leaves, and the colors and phosphorescence if your settings are at Midnight are glorious.

Where the action is: DIGITAL NARRATIVE THEORY AND PRACTICE

2010-01-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

I will try not to neglect this blog, but I am pretty excited about my new course, Digital Narrative Theory and Practice, and will be posting on the blog for that a lot this semester. For the past 4 years, I have been teaching a course in the Film Scoring Department at Berklee that I designed for the film composing students, to help them better understand the movies that they will be scoring and be better able to communicate with the directors with whom they will be working. Now, with the explosion in audio for video games, reported on by the Boston Globe (with a great picture of my student Nazer who is President of the Video Game Music Club!) and picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, I've created a new class, Digital Narrative, to explore gaming and other forms of new media in their wider contexts, to provide the students who are working in this new field with a stronger background in storytelling and to start to think about what the people who make the games, DVDs, and immersive environments they will write music for are thinking about. In the Fall, we'll start having minors in the Liberal Arts, and Visual Culture and New Media Studies will be one of them, and I am completely thrilled to be developing this area at Berklee.

The Second Life component of Digital Narrative is something we are going to evolve together as a class. It is an easy platform for us to use as a group, to try out some gaming, computer-mediated communication, ideas about immersion and interactivity, synthetic camera, virtual subjectivity, etc. We can of course also use it to make machinima or for screen shots for comics for the the projects. We want to do some gaming together as a class, so I am trying to figure out the best ways of doing that, without only doing what I already know. Should all be very interesting, and I invite you to see what we are up to on the class blog, and later, if all goes well, to check out the wiki we are going to make. I'll be using the blog to post things for students, and also projecting it in class as lecture/discussion resource.

Berklee Mixed Reality Panel on Music in SL

2010-01-18T22:15:00.000-08:00

Here are some snapshots from the mixed reality event last Monday at Berklee College of Music. You can see the live video feed of Pathfinder and me in the actual room behind the inworld panel. Thanks to Joyce Bettencourt/Rhiannon Chatnoir for running the mixed reality tech and for the use of the Vesuvius sim. Note the twitter garden showing tweets with the hash tag #BTOT10, which is a good example of how something on the web is flat and textual, but can be 3-d and more interactive in a virtual world.

L1 Had a Busy Week at Berklee Last Week!

2010-01-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

Last week, on Monday at Berklee College of Music, I was really thrilled to bring together an amazing panel of Second Life musicians inworld while Pathfinder Linden and I held down the fort in the physical venue at Berklee's annual faculty development conference, BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching).

Then on Wednesday night, I was just trying to show the new students what L1 looked like while I was welcoming them on behalf of the faculty at the Spring Entering Student Convocation, but you know her, she is not one to keep quiet . . . .

Virtual KinoEye

2010-01-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

My "Working Theory" piece, an essay with machinima and images, that pulls together much of my sabbatical work on Second Life, is now published in the Journal of e-Media Studies!! See

Virtual KinoEye: Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life

http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/340

Everybody Dance Now!

2009-11-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

In my Technology, Self, and Society class, we have been doing experiments with being in class in person and meeting in Second Life. One day, a student was sitting in class but her avatar was dancing in our class space in Second Life. As she stopped her avatar dancing, she muttered, "If I could dance in class, I would!"

I started thinking about this and haven't stopped. Why not dance in class? What would be the differences between dancing in SL and dancing in our classroom? (We are musicians and artists, remember, so this is not as strange to us as it might be to others!) So we have been. Twice now, half the class has been only in SL and the other half in the classroom, with me and one other person in both the virtual and physical class spaces. And we have been dancing! I am going to invite my students to talk about that experience first, and then I will chime in. But in the meantime, consider getting up . . . . putting on some music . . . . and dance!

Machinima!!

2009-11-16T05:49:00.000-08:00

Yes, I have not been posting, but look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRI5JCGhafU

What Is Second Life? New machinima by L1

2009-10-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

Watch on youtube here.

Burning Life

2009-10-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

The blog has suffered with my return to teaching, and some of my attention has been focused over at my Technology, Self, & Society course blog. I have also been pretty busy, with the Burning Life festival. Here is the slurl to the theme camp joyously and wackily built by Maya Paris and myself, Fembot EggBounce & Pangirl Fries.

My part of it is called "From the Frying Pan into the Fire," which sums up my SL experience! Actually, it is about a character I created called Pangirl, who is kind of a golem maybe created by Lucille Ball or Lucy Ricardo.

That is the Pangirl avatar, which my friend Uzzu made for me out of my Pangirl sculpture, so people can wear it and BE Pangirl.

Here is the story:

A moonlit night on the playa in 1959: a tall-red-headed woman with bright blue eyes raced through the desert in her big shiny car. Suddenly, a frying pan glinting in the moonlight on an abandoned campsite caught her eye, even through her tears of fury, and she screeched to a stop, dust obscuring the car's tail fins.

She flicked her cigarette into the ashes, flames jumped. She picked up the pan, and dropped if fast--somehow it was hot! What she didn't see was the little piece of the pan that chipped off, nestled into the flame and the ash, started to change as she walked away.

Thus was Pangirl created, glinting in the playa moonlight. She staggered out of the embers, made her way to a town, then a city. She tried so hard to fit in, to play nicely in the domestic constraints of American culture in which she found herself, but her fire nature, or maybe her iron nature came out, and she could not. She tried to have it all, to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, ever, let him forget he's a man, but instead she grabbed her rolling pin and purse, burned the house down, and lit out for the playa again, back to whence she came. There she stayed alone for a long time, growing ever bigger and harder, until one day a space ship hovered, and the Fembots joined her. She had a lot to tell them.

*****

Inspired in part by finishing my book on media history and I Love Lucy, and in part by my desire for Maya Paris's Fembots to have a friend when they landed on the playa, I created Pangirl. In the late fifties, Lucille Ball and her real-life husband were portraying a happy couple in their hit television show while all hell broke loose behind the scenes. I imagine the gap between reality and illusion, always an intriguing theme, must have been hard to bear. Maybe she even wanted to burn some stuff down.

It made me wonder what kind of golem, a magical Yiddish folklore creature made of clay, might have arisen out of women's experiences of the gaps between how the media portrays their lives and how they experience them, whether they are involved in the kind of large-scale public charade Ball was, or just their own. On the one hand, I think a lot has changed in fifty years, but then I look around at the images of women in Second Life and then I wonder. Maya created her Fembots because she didn't see images of female robots that she could relate to, and perhaps together our installation calls attention to how we choose to image ourselves and others in here. Oh, and out there, too.

---

There is machinima that plays on the television screens at the installation, which is not meant as a standalone piece, but to be seen at the installation. Nevertheless, I will post it here.

The way I made this one is kind of interesting, because I improvised with the Freud chatbot at The Theorists Project (slurl) as well as having some scripted lines that I shot there. I shot some of Poid Mahovlich's fires at two of my favorite beach sims, Monkey Cove and Knowhere, and intercut those with the "session" with Dr. Freud.

What I Learned in Second Life, So Far

2009-09-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

SABBATICAL FINAL EXAM

Part One: I learned . . .

I learned how to do a lot of things, including how to make machinima (a slow process, and like any kind of filmmaking, one that is never fully mastered), to build the objects I wanted to build in a virtual world (and how to find the ones I could not build myself), to get to know people in a different way than I had previously, to make my own particular kind of virtual art based on an evolving criteria of what I think is distinctive about virtual art, how to find other like-minded and also incredibly different-minded people, and to amuse myself and others seemingly endlessly. I tried a lot of things as ways of being or thinking through the virtual world, like taking metaphors seriously, or following coincidence and synchronicity to see where it led me, with mixed results. Oh, and I learned how to make a whole array of new social faux pas in the new country of the virtual world, without ever really learning how not to repeat them.

I learned that I really liked meeting the people I had met first in Second Life in the actual world, and that even when there were big differences between their avatars and their physical embodiments, I still enjoyed interacting with them more in the virtual world after meeting them in person. Even when the gender didn’t match up, I could still see or hear the person in the avatar, and “toggle,” my term for moving between the virtual and actual image in my mind’s eye, sometimes so fast as to blur the two. I met some of the people I am closest to in SL in person, but not all of them, and some I have “met” through telepresence on Skype or google video chat, in addition to the phone and voice chat. All these forms of communication, connection, interaction, and ways of knowing are incredibly interesting to me, and I look forward to extending these explorations with my students. I am very curious about interacting with people who I know first in the actual world as avatars; I do some of that, but maybe they are too close to me to be good experiments, or often they are with me in the same room, and we can just talk to each other instead of being together only in the virtual space. I also learned about myself that I do not ever really take the avatar as only an avatar, a virtual presence, but always think of the person on the other side of the computer, and make all kinds of assumptions about them, and sometimes those assumptions are way, way off. Botgirl finally taught me that one.

I also learned something I already knew, but maybe had forgotten a little, and really is the take-home lesson of my sabbatical: that in order to be creative, one has to be open and receptive, even vulnerable, make mistakes, explore and experiment. I could see this most clearly in the inworld art I made, particularly in the installation I did for SL6B, the 6^th birthday celebration of Second Life. I was in way over my head, and luckily have friends who helped me. I was able to learn enough new skills to make something that expressed the ideas and images I imagined, and even imagery I hadn’t quite imagined, but made as I worked on the sculptures, experimenting with shape, movement, color, line, space. As I explored SL, especially going to the places suggested by Bettina Tizzy in her Not Possible in Real Life blog or inworld group notices/notecards, the creativity, innovation, and wild unleashing of the human spirit in Second Life never stopped amazing me or inspiring me. I feel incredibly lucky to have made friends with whom to trade ideas and collaborate, with whom finding our ways in the virtual world as artists, thinkers, designers, and builders is serious play, of the best kind.

Part Two

Here are some conclusions I have reached.

1) Everyone is in Second Life for their own reasons, and there is no point in generalizing. That said, I will! In a way, SL reminds me of the Peace and Justice Center I was involved in when I was a graduate student in Bloomington, Indiana, because people came to it for a lot of different reasons, and often found other ones for staying around. I do think that, as I have suggested with the fourth aspect of virtual subjectivity I formulated, "virtual agency," that so much depends on what a person chooses to do in a virtual world; as one discovers or develops new skills and interests, reasons can change. Because of the highly individualized nature of a virtual world, because virtual subjectivity is so, well, subjective, even as it is intersubjective and we create that virtual sense of self and place in our interactions with others, no one's experience of a virtual world is like another's. I have also seen quite a few people leave or drift away from SL, and that is interesting to think about, too, as I end my research time and wonder how my relationship to the virtual world will change now that it is not my primary focus. Is there a threshold of time spent that makes a difference to one's experience?

2) Although I am no Freudian, I found myself thinking a lot about Freud’s categories of id, ego, and superego, and wondering where the hell the superego is in SL. At one point, in the screwball comedy, that is what the heroine is looking for! Maybe it is the game-like environment, or the relative anonymity, or the intense visual stimulus, but people act in some pretty interesting ways, unencumbered by the internal censors that ruin so much of everyday life/keep civilization intact. At the same time, the “emotional bandwidth” of communication, to use Pathfinder Linden’s supersmart concept, is lower than in face to face communication, whether in the narrower pipeline of text chat or the wider one of voice. It is absolutely true that a great deal of actual world interaction is now computer-mediated, but in a virtual world, that’s all you got, and somehow, when combined with the relative absence of the superego, people’s interactions and actions take on a different flavor altogether.

3) A virtual world can be an extension of the actual world, and I think it will be increasingly so. It used to be that making a telephone call was a big, huge deal, involving stationary machines and an operator. Now we stop talking on the phone because we are walking up to the person we are talking to on our cell phone. The transition feels seamless. I believe that in the future, we will move in and out of virtual worlds like that, seamlessly, and our avatars will be another aspect of who we are. Combine this prediction with the observation noted in #2 above, and the future might be kind of fun!

4) There is an aura in a virtual world, and it is in the object of the avatar. I am working this up in a more detailed way, but that is the conclusion of L1AURA Loire. (Add this to #3 and #2, doing some weird insight math.)

5) There are great possibilities for both music, education, and new ways of being in virtual worlds, and Berklee should get in there!!

And here are some highlights of things I did during the sabbatical:

"Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life" Journal of Virtual Worlds Research [Online], 1 10 Nov 2008 https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/355/265

“The Falling Woman Story,” machinima http://blip.tv/file/1838833

“TOGGLE,” machinima, published on the PBS Frontline Digital Nation website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/participate/ & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRX_bt99xgs

with additional commentary on: http://www.tricksterproductions.com/toggle/

Presentations

“Virtual Art, Virtual Aura.” Presentation for Panel Discussion, Brooklyn Is Watching Best of Year One Festival. Jack the Pelicans Presents Gallery. Brooklyn, NY, July 2009.

“The Future of Virtual Subjectivity.” Inworld presentation/discussion, SL6B, Sixth Birthday Celebration of Second Life, June 2009.

“Boston Is Watching: Virtual Subjectivity.” Presentation, Boston CyberArts Festival, Boston Public Library, April 2009.

"Virtual KinoEye: Mutability, Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life." Paper, Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission, MIT, Cambridge, MA, April 2009.

"Keynote Presentation, "Digital Transformations and Conversions in Art- Web 2.0 and Beyond: Virtual Subjectivity," NMC (New Media Consortium) Symposium on New Media and Learning, March 2009.

Inworld installations:

L1Aura’s EduGolf: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boga/211/45/44

The Future of Virtual Subjectivity, Fiteiro Cultural

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fiteiro%20Cultural/103/55/21

Podcasts for Brooklyn Is Watching: http://brooklyniswatching.com

Professor Loire’s Second Life blog: http://ll2ndlife.blogspot.com/

IN PROGRESS:

Rough cuts of the screwball comedy and a music video

Machinima piece for Journal of Virtual Worlds Research on virtual goods and services

Multimedia essay on virtual subjectivity

Bouncing on my toes in preparation for the Burning Life land grab

Sabbatical Final Exam!

2009-09-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

I have been working on my course syllabi for the Fall semester, and looking at the description of the take-home final exam, which explains that it is important to sit down, reflect, and be forced to perform a synthesis of what you have learned, even as you have one foot out the door and you are running around busier than ever (well, it doesn't use that language exactly). It occurs to me that I should have to do such a thing before I rush off into teaching and committees again, put the seat of the pants in the seat of the chair (as my professor Susan Gubar always said was the only way to get work done) and answer the question: What have you learned this year, studying virtual subjectivity on sabbatical in Second Life?

I post this here and now I have to do it.

L1 & Sage Discuss Pieces from the SLon des Refusés

2009-08-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

L1Aura Loire & Sage Duncan talk about about some pieces in the fabulous SLon des Refusés, part of the BIW Year One Festival, curated elegantly by Mab MacMoragh, Moncherrie Afterthought, Dekka Raymaker, and Arahan Claveau.

See the SLon show here for an extra extended week, until August 30: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Magoo/128/128/2

We discuss pieces by: Azdel Slade, four Yip, Man Machinaga, and Robin Moore.

Review of several works in SLon des Refuses 2009

That ain't no woman! It's a man, baby! Reflections on Botgirl's Identity Reveal

2009-08-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

Botgirl Questi, AI, had teased that the actual world identity reveal was coming, and I was really looking forward to it. I don't know her very well, but I admire her, appreciate her work and tweets, and enjoy it when we do talk. Who was she? Did I already know her? How cool was she going to be in her human form?? I can wax pretty enthusiastic about my virtual friends, and think pretty highly of Botgirl (still do). When we started chatting on gmail chat and met inworld, talking about a collaboration, I was excited. She tweeted and blogged a couple of my blog posts, and I was thrilled. I am very interested in the virtual band, plan on following it, and think my Berklee students will be interested in it, too. And when we chatted, and talked about our kids, well, we were two techno-savvy, comic-lovin', avatar-inhabiting, mothers connecting.

Oh, right, except that Botgirl is really a man! Read the post here. Yes, as my friend said to me last night when I was telling him about this, there is a lot of that going around, but nevertheless I was really surprised. This is actually the second time a cool woman avatar friend, hip to technology, great to talk with, someone I had been hanging out with, has turned out to be not woman at all. It is a strange feeling, to find out that the assumptions one naturally has made, that one has been encouraged to make, are false, at least on one level. Yeah, yeah, in the virtual world, what difference does gender make? All avatars are really substitutes or alts for the actual person, or the typist, if you will, masks, exaggerating some characteristics, hiding others. Blah blah blah. The revelation still stung.

In the post revealing his identity, David wrote:

The short answer is that the pseudonymity that initially facilitated free expression is now a box that constrains creative growth and the development of more fully realized personal relationships. For the first year or so, social interactions were strictly from Botgirl’s perspective and consciousness. She adamantly refused to admit to having any human aspect. But over time, as a number of acquaintances moved towards friendships, it began to feel like withholding all reference to my human identity was inauthentic. So I started to intentionally inject more of my human self into the conversations. No identifying information, but personal anecdotes that were relevant to a conversation. The problem this created was that although both Botgirl and I feel “real” as unique individuals, we are pretty much a sham as a morph.

Those moments of personal anecdotes were the ones that leaped to mind immediately, because I thought they were from another woman. See, I am hung up on the gender. I really, really am, no matter what I would have thought I would have said, how I thought I would have responded. Not that it actually makes a difference, when I do think about it--two parents talking about their kids, not two mothers, so what?--but I am examining my initial emotional response. I tweeted glibly that she is still Botgirl to me, but that was wishful thinking. Maybe it is no coincidence that my laptop logic board failed right after I found out about Botgirl/David! Something short-circuited for a moment! Do I lose that woman friend, then, the one I thought I had? Or who was never really there anyway. Another piece of the frakking virtual world illusion that I am willing to believe in and then it is gone, baby, gone, and I am just an avatar jerk standing there, looking where there once was something that is never going to be there again. Oh! (Insert David Byrne, "Once in a Lifetime"-type smack on the forehead!) It was never really there to begin with! Yes, yes, the actual world is like that too. Blah blah blah on that one, as well. (Once I have my laptop back, I will be back to my usual optimistic self. Perhaps.)

OK, I am all for people experimenting with gender and other aspects of identity in SL. I think that Azdel Slade's project Becoming Dragon about gender and other transformations is fantastic; link here and slurl for SL inworld installation until Aug 30th here. I am happy to call you "she" if you have a female avatar, and be your girlfriend, participate in making that real for you, even if sometimes I look at you and see you reflect back to me what I see as an idealized, essentialized version of my existence. But, you know, the thing about gender, about SEX, about having a female body that you guys running around in your big-boobed, wasp-waisted "girl" avs don't and will never understand, is that having a female body is not only a social experience. It is not only about how people treat you, but it is also about what it is like to live in that body, physically, biologically, phenomenologically, without stepping in and out of it at will. It is not all about "empowerment" and "sexiness" because of boots and clothes. It is not only manipulating the construct of femininity, the performance of gender. It is also what it means to be afraid that you are not safe simply because you are in a female body, that your sexuality is not always defined by yourself, or that your worth as a human is judged by your appearance and value as, basically, a sexual or breeding object. It is to notice how you are responded to when you are one size, and how that changes if you are another. The whole issue of idealized feminine appearance is one big trap, and so easy to fall into in the virtual world. L1 is up to her shiny eyeballs in it; she may have to become a centaur or something to get out of it. But to be female in a virtual world is not the same as being female in the actual world, and being female in the actual world is very different depending on where, when, and who you are.

This actually brings me to an extraordinary sculpture I saw yesterday, Grand Odalisque, by 3D Soup, at the Rezzable sim The Black Swan, which is departing Second Life for their own OpenSim very soon. Our loss. I didn't intend on including these pics here, but I guess they fit remarkably well with the ideas I am trying to express. And I love her face.

It is unprecedented to see an image like this in Second Life, not just because of the hyper-realism (a topic that came up tangentially in the panel discussion I was on with Rezzable's Paviq Lok and Stacey Fox last week, see previous post), which I see as one of the ways virtual worlds will develop, not because of the skill it must have taken to make the sculpties for this piece. We don't see this kind of non-idealized image, especially of the female body, because most people are not interested, and in fact as I stood in front of Grand Odalisque with a few of my friends, the crowd shifted dramatically, from a quietly appreciative one (mostly in Instant Message, I think), to a rowdy bunch making fat jokes and using local voice chat. Yes, the virtual world is impermanent, ephemeral--that is its nature. But the way it is superficial and false is a choice, the consensual hallucination we create, that makes something like Grand Odalisque so unusual to our eyes, so out of place.

Back to Botgirl: I was prepared for Botgirl to really be Grand Odalisque. We are all more like Grand Odalisque than the idealized avatar, and seeing both in the same virtual space reminds us of that, maybe brings us up short (literally, given the gap in size between us and her! Interestingly, it is with a similar disproportion in size that David chose to illustrate his reveal, BIG David face, smaller Botgirl. I, in contrast, tend to show L1 and myself as the same relative size in the pieces I have done.)

I just wasn't prepared for Botgirl to be Botguy. In the long run, it doesn't make a difference. There have always been good authors who have written good characters of the opposite gender, and I interacted with one. Initially, I felt a little duped I guess, and it makes me wonder about authenticity, integrity, in virtual worlds when so much can be obscured. I am not one to throw stones, and I am getting over it. I could toggle, knowing that behind Botgirl is David, interesting in his own right, and think that through. Mostly, I don't want there to be no more Botgirl, the one in my head (and if I ever needed confirmation about what computer mediated communication can do, this is it.) And this is where I wonder if I am willing to stand here as the virtual jerk with nothing really before her but illusion. Not sure. My sabbatical is over. I would like to give the virtual world a little kick while I stand here. Anyone got a good animation for that?

Footage & Pics from Brooklyn Is Watching Panel at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn

2009-08-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures from last Saturday's panel discussion at Jack the Pelican Presents, along with a couple of inworld pics Sage and I snapped of the virtual simulations of JTPP, built I believe by Dekka Raymaker, for the Final 5 show of the BIW Year 1 celebration. That's Sage and I, in both avatar form and as the real people we also are. See more of that here.

This video clip is the piece of my talk that ended up on my camera, and so I post it!! Audio of the entire panel discussion is available here, from the Brooklyn Is Watching blog.

Going to Brooklyn!!

2009-08-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

Saturday, August 15, 6pm at Jack the Pelican Presents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there will be a panel discussion as part of the Brooklyn Is Watching Year One Festival! With me on it! Details here.

I will be talking about virtual art, about the criteria I use for evaluating it and making my own. I'll frame my presentation with Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura, because that's what happens when you get an avatar named L1 AURA to do something.

Can't wait to see THE gallery, especially after being in the Final 5 virtual spaces of it. I am also wildly excited to meet Pavig Lok, big fan of Greenies that I am, and, of course, to meet Sage in the actual world.

Masquerades of Endings

2009-07-27T06:46:00.000-07:00

Clever botgirlq tweeted, "Avatars are like costumes we wear to the perpetual masked balls we call Virtual Worlds." I like this. There is hardly anything I like more than a masquerade ball, the way people behave in slightly different ways as they don the mask, even, or especially, when you already know each other. I had a masquerade ball for my 40th birthday, or rather for my 40.5 birthday, because when I turned 40, the heavens opened and there was a record snow storm, canceling the party. It took 6 months for us to get it together to reschedule, and it was no longer a birthday party, just a masked ball, but a good time was had by all, and there was waltzing.

I ponder the differences between the actual and virtual masked balls as I perform some triage on the mountain of machinima footage I have amassed during the past year of my sabbatical. (See pic of Kino and L1 reviewing footage.) I can see how L1 has changed physically, how my interests have shifted, how the people and places I have filmed have shifted and persisted. And what to do with it all?

One piece, the screwball comedy, has been particularly elusive to me, starting out as one idea, becoming ever more complicated, and suffering from a serious lack of denouement. I never shot an ending!! Tons of footage and no ending! I did make a trailer for it back in the Spring:

Somehow, as I worked on it, I got lost in the details, lost the narrative. Suddenly there was a crowd scene to shoot, a first for me who had pretty much only worked with my own alts before, but what did that scene have to do with the story, and what was the story at this point? I am into going with the flow of things, tend to have the experimental approach of: I wonder what this will be like, but I am not sure this is the way to get a movie done. Maybe what I wanted to say shifted around, more than once. Whose story is it anyway? Kino's? The leopard's? The leopard has the voice over, but I found the purring damnably difficult, and only let a few people hear it, who said I sounded sleepy. Not the tone I was going for.

Now I am faced with trying to make something out of what I have, or shooting some more, writing a new voice over . . . starting again really in order to end. It makes me think about the making of Bringing Up Baby, of course the inspiration for my screwball comedy, way over budget and schedule, with Howard Hawks' improvisational style, screenwriters on the set rewriting constantly, much confusion and hilarity, frustration, but also great creativity and sparks. Someplace there is an intersection of my interest in the conventions of the screwball genre and in SL, but I am still not sure where that is. I can only hope it will emerge in the edit.

Botgirl showed me her comedy about SL romance, which you can see (warning, R-rated) here.

It is cynical and funny, with a really good ending, and is slick, savvy machinima, with outstanding use of sound. And knowing that she has commented with characteristic insight and wit on this pattern, I will turn my attention in a different direction, maybe back to computer-mediated communication. Now there's a topic for comedy!!

One piece I know I want to nail down is the footage of my SL6B build that I took at the SL6B gloom sim, on the very last night before they took the sim away, a dramatic ending, really, complete with a mysterious visitor who didn't want to leave, just to stay there in one of my sculptures as the sim vanished. Whatever! I'll use that footage for a tour of the installation and as an explanation of some of my ideas about virtual subjectivity. I can film an intro at the installation at Fiteiro Cultural, and use that machinima for a presentation on my sabbatical work.

So my endings are really masquerades of endings, because the footage lingers, needing to be cut, maybe reshot, simulacra of closure, with a window left open off on the side of my screen, in case.

See the wind

2009-07-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

comet Morigi, an artist from Tokyo, has done some amazing work in SL. Now comet has a 4-sim piece at the Wind Observatory at Orange Island that will--can't resist--blow you away. comet uses the SL wind to move particles; several pieces have graced Brooklyn Is Watching and caused wonder and awe. What we have here at the Wind Observatory makes an invisible aspect of the physics of SL visible, and beautiful, and on a scale hitherto unglimpsed. Bravo. The snapshots do not do it justice. Just go. Here is the slurl.

Brooklyn Is Watching Panel at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn

2009-07-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

I've been following the Rezzable departure from Second Life for their own OpenSim, and so was over at Greenies to check that it was still there. I love the scale, the sense of play, involved in being in that build. I logged off there and so logged back in there, right after, in one of those serendipitious synchronicities that delight, amaze, and sometimes perplex/chill me in SL, I was delighted to find out that not only was I chosen to be part of the panel discussion for the Brooklyn Is Watching Year One Celebration at the Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in Brooklyn on August 15, but so is the artist who built Greenies, Pavig Lok! And also, Superhero/Fox Sage Duncan/Stacey Fox. We are working on some kind of SL component, too, because we love mixing that reality!

Endings & Beginnings

2009-07-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

Things change a lot, and fast, in a virtual world. This was one of the themes in The Falling Woman Story, and it has continued to amaze me. The SL6B celebration of Second Life's sixth birthday is long over now; that was my first installation that went up, and then had to come down. I had been dreading dismantling it. Not only did I grow to like it, and enjoy being a part of the larger project and group who exhibited there, meeting some talented and interesting new people through that experience, and learning so much about building, installation, etc., but I just hate endings. I don't know whether the moving date you have marked on your calendar that you can see all the way across the room is preferable to the date you look back on later, that swells with significance only in retrospect, the shudder later when you remember the swiftness with which that event snapped you out the door, forced an ending, when you look back and realize that that was the last time you were someplace, or with someone, but you just didn't know it at the time.

Luckily, in SL, there are always new projects, new beginnings, new places to discover! A fantastic new show opened at Caerleon, always a place to see some of the best virtual art in SL; this slurl will plop you in the middle of Al Lurton's piece at the Caerleon Future Project, and you can make your way from there. Brooklyn Is Watching has moved to the aptly named Impermanence sim, generously hosted by the University of Kansas and Sage Duncan/Stacey Fox, slurl here. My friends Alexith and Shirah Destiny opened an art gallery dedicated to the theme of nature above their garden shop at Destiny Blue; I have two clickable sculptures in it, and so do my good friends Maya Paris and Misprint Thursday, as well artwork by six other artists. From this slurl, you'll arrive at the entrance to the Destiny Blue Designs garden. There is a sign to teleport you up to the gallery.

But the most exciting development for me happened just days before the SL6B exhibition closed, Millagrosa Vella, asked me to install the Gloom Meteor build as part of the Fiteiro Cultural presence in Second Life, at Casa Millagrosa (slurl here). I could not be more excited, and love being over there. Builder extraordinaire kurie Erde is working on a ride between the sculptures, and we are cooking up something about point of view, too. So new beginnings!

Love to Sparkle

2009-07-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

Wanting to make the boundaries between the virtual and actual worlds more permeable? Itching to toggle just a little more between them? Then Sparkle is for you!! Sparkle is the delightful name of the iPhone app that lets you log into Second Life and use instant message with friends, participate in local chat wherever your avatar is (although you can't see the space visually), accept inventory offers, and teleport friends to you so they can participate in your local chat.

It seems to work pretty well, except of course that no one knows your avatar isn't "really" there, or is even less virtually there than usual. A while ago, standing around on my land, a mysterious stranger appeared who told me he couldn't see my, that he needed to relog with "eyes," and explained the various viewers and programs that people use for SL; he was using a messaging-only one at the time. It confused me no end at the time. So I try to tell people that I am on my iPhone, that I am Sparkling, or on Sparkle. "L1Aura Loire sparkles at space shuttle launch" I think there are some good verb possibilities here.

What is the point of Sparkling? As usual for these things, there are as many answers as there are people in SL, because everyone is doing something different. If someone is involved in a project and wants to check messages away from their computer, this is a good way to do that. I was glad to be able to answer a question about the build I am installing at the Fiteiro Cultural (see pic above, more on that completely exciting development soon) when I wasn't going to be inworld for a while. Another time, I was stuck waiting someplace and popped in, had an amusing conversation with a SL friend. I don't use text messaging on my phone, but I guess I used it like that.

But mostly the experience of using Sparkle on the iPhone is that it is yet another way that the virtual world creeps out of the computer and into the "real" world. There I am, walking around with the sexy little iPhone, but also "being" L1. Even though I can't see my avatar, she is there in SL, talking to someone, who can see her. I am really in two places at once, here and there, in a way that I am not when I sit at my computer. This is how I see the future of virtual worlds developing, so that over time, as the technology develops, toggling between the virtual and actual becomes as easy as making a phone call is now on a cellphone--wherever you are, with all the info at your fingertips, or braintips-- and we exist in both realities, sometimes simultaneously. And there will probably be more kinds of realities, experiences, and subjectivities, too, that make SL look like having a telegraph exchange instead of a face to face conversation.

Another experience I had recently used the avaline, a phone number for avatars. I called Sage Duncan on her avaline, inworld, from my home phone. She answered in her voice chat in Second Life and we talked. This blows my mind!!! OK, I know she is a real person--Stacey Fox at Kansas Univ--as well as Sage Duncan, superhero/fox as I like to think of her because she can do everything--with panache--and has helped me out more than a couple times when I had primmed myself into a corner. But still!! Calling her in the grid on a telephone! Mixed reality! Toggle! A new interface! Use that technology!

To Sparkle, then, is perhaps to have that double existence in the actual and virtual, to be both/and, to be on the cusp of the toggle, maybe falling over the edge into . . . .

BIW Best of Year One: Top 30 Opens Tonight, Friday July 10, 6pm EDT

2009-07-10T09:11:00.001-07:00

The 30 best of Year One of Brooklyn Is Watching are on the sim and just about ready for you to come and see them. The exhibition opens Friday, July 10, at 6pm EDT, and it is breathtaking. The pieces here demonstrate the possibilities of virtual art, and the range is fantastic. This pic here shows L1 in front of Oberon Onmura's Beacon at its transition to collapse, and also DC Spensley/DanCoyote Antonelli in SL magnificent piece Tower of Light. Here is the slurl. Come and see the many many more pieces by artists including:

Dancoyote Antonelli, Dekka Raymaker, Gazira Babeli, Glyph Graves, Juria Yoshikawa, Misprint Thursday, Patriciaanne Daviau, Oberon Onmura, Pavig Lok, Rachel Breaker, Rezago Kokorin, two time nominated Arahan Claveau, Comet Morigi, Ichibot Nishi, Nebulosus Severine, Selavy Oh, Solkide Auer, and three time nominated Bryn Oh and four time nominated Alizarin Goldflake.

There's No Confusion Like SL Confusion: Identity, Alts, & Other Aspects of Self

2009-07-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

L1's virtual head is spinning. She has often been confused in SL, as it can often be a confounding and quick-changing environment, but this experience beat all. First, I was talking to a SL friend inworld, then logged off. Then I got a friendship request in my e-mail from an avatar with the same first name as my friend, popped back inworld, accepted it, and said hello. I thought it was my friend, in a new account. I helpfully offered skins and shapes to the "noob"--what an insult, really, but of course only meant as a quick start! Because of the nature of SL conversation, perhaps, or various coincidences between my friend and this person, someone I know in the actual world, it took a while to unravel the misunderstanding, and we had a good laugh, and were glad to connect inworld.

But it made me think. Anyone could be anyone in SL, something I have not really understood fully before. No wonder some businesses are wary of SL, although I had previously thought about it primarily because of the general weirdness of the virtual world, the strong sexual content and the unpredictability of what can happen at one's shop or event. I have had a lot of confidence in my virtual intuition or something, and now I think that is a lot of bunk. Unless we choose otherwise, identity is shrouded in SL.

I had been thinking of this anyway, and the other night took a picture of some willing but wanting to remain anonymous avatars at a fun club I like to go to inworld, Flashmans, (slurl) a place with an excellent 20s and 30s music stream, fun dances, and a surrealist bent in the decor. The clever club owner put a smooching poseball in front of The Lovers, a 1928 Magritte painting that sometimes scares the crap out of me when I see it, prompting thoughts of hostages, torture, and claustrophobia, sometimes seems right on about the illusions of romance, and at other times seems too cynical. Kissing aside, the Magritte image speaks eloquently to an aspect of SL social interaction, one that on one hand allows for greater intimacy because of anonymity, and on the other, puts up barriers, or operates as a barrier that is already there because it is a virtual interaction. And then of course there is the whole element of computer-mediated-communication I have discussed here and on the Toggle page, which leads people to put idealized selves out there, interpret the sparse typed words how they wish, and create feedback loops that reinforce positives over negatives (until, perhaps, they become caught up in a negative feedback loop, when that would take over, and amplify the negatives). Like the figures in the Magritte image, we are all stuck in our own heads, mired in our own subjectivities, and maybe the filter through which we see is more opaque than we ever care to acknowledge.

This also brings me to another topic I have been thinking about: alts. Alt is, I believe, short for alternate account, another avatar with which a person logs into SL. There are a lot of reasons to have alts, and one of my friends and I made a list once. Basically, there are personal and professional reasons. Artists and business people use alts to test things, to make sure permissions work on avatars that aren't theirs, or to see if something works with two or more avatars, etc. Machinimatographers use alts as camera people, as cameras, really, or as actors. I have a whole cast who were in a science fiction piece I made last year when I was learning about machinima that was so bad I never bothered to cut it together. Avatars who are well known, inworld or in both realities, might want some of the anonymity that most people have in SL, and will use an alt for that, either to be able to be incognito, or check out the business competition. Professional people just might want a social alt, and all their friends know who that is, so little deception involved, except maybe to acquaintances, who could of course become friends, and that could be murky territory. And then of course there are probably as many personal reasons to have alts as there are people who have them: to play with different identities, to start fresh, to have more experiences, to have peace and quiet to work or explore, to compartmentalize identity, to be malicious, to have affairs, to hide in various ways inworld. People can experiment with an alt, and might have an alt of the other gender, or one for a completely different purpose, like role play or gaming, or to participate in one of the many subcultures, maybe to have a third or even fourth life.

My camera alt, Kino, started off as a camera holder. I shrunk the avatar and hid it in flower pots and things for shooting. Then, as my scripting teacher was working on my camera follower eye object for me, and I couldn't get it to stop following me, which was hilarious, I realized I could log in as Kino and send him a message from that account: "This is the eye. I am on the loose and L1 cannot control me." Hahaha. Pretty funny stuff. Hilarity ensues. Machinima is made about the eye. Then I start to get some ideas for a screwball comedy, but I don't think I want these humiliations to happen to L1. Aha! These things can happen to Kino! She needs some good hair, an outfit or two, etc., became more of a character. I filled out her profile, because in the screwball comedy, which takes place in SL, the characters look at each other's profiles. I also realized I could join some more groups, having filled up my allotted 25 as L1. At one point, I considered trying a role play game, and almost enrolled as Kino in Star Fleet Academy, picked up the application and everything, but they are very serious over there. I contemplated trying to get kicked out of Starfleet, but I wouldn't want to disrupt their game. I do not think I talk or act any different as Kino as I do as L1. If Kino is around, I will tell people to ignore her because she is my alt, or say funny things as her once they know. Sometimes, if I am in as Kino, I will tell people I am an alt, and leave it at that, not sure why, maybe because her profile is kind of crazy.

To be sure, alts are deceptive. I went to a philosophical discussion at Thothica--as Kino--about alts. I was going to say I was an alt, but I thought the moment to do so passed and it seemed too dramatic. I did send IMs to the people there who knew me. It is just murky territory, I think, with absolutely no parallel in the actual world. How could you be right in front of someone, interacting with them, having a whole relationship with them, and have them not know they had met you before but you had a different name, and face? That you were being two people with them? Or used to be someone else and now were this person and they didn't know that? Even if the reason is innocuous, or justified, or none of their business, even if the alt-perpetrator was not trying to put anything over on anyone, but alting for some other reason known only to him or her, it is a rotten thing to do to someone if it makes them feel bad, or if it would make them feel bad if they knew it, or if you thought it would make them feel bad if they knew it, but maybe they wouldn't care less. Does the golden rule apply? Or does that just tighten the burlap around our heads?

Except of course that it is in SL, in a context in which the social contract is often based maybe not on lies but not on truths either. It does not automatically include revealing actual identity in the way that a face-to-face interaction might. Alts may be deceptive, but so is SL, or it can be, even if no one is trying to make it that way on purpose. Isn't the avatar an alt for the actual person behind the computer, the typist? What difference does it make who else an avatar is, if we are interacting with an avatar on the level of SL?

I am sure there are all kinds of deliberate and malicious uses of alts, but my interest doesn't tend there, and it all makes me think of some of the scenes in the screwball comedies of the 30s, like The Lady Eve or The Awful Truth, or even the jail scene in Bringing Up Baby. The Lady Eve has an edge to it, in part because it is Barbara Stanwyck, so maybe not the best example here, although it is a sort of alt revenge now that I think about it. (And maybe there is a good machinima noir of an alt story, a femme fatale who is genuinely unknowable, maybe even to herself, lost between accounts!) I saw a production of the play The Importance of Being Earnest in Second Life, and thought that was a particularly resonant and funny play in the SL context. Shakespearean comedies, too, would have excellent significances, with the cross-dressing impersonations, mistaken identities, and overall investigation of self, appearance, and social customs.

And, yes, all this makes me more interested in what I call the mixed-reality works in progress of friendships, ones that bridge the boundaries of the virtual and actual worlds, and have been enjoying playing with some new gadget/applications that facilitate those border crossings. There is an app for my new lovely iPhone called Sparkle, that logs me into SL and I can IM or have local chat with the folks inworld with it. There are the new avalines, phone numbers for avatars, and yesterday I called Sage Duncan and talked with her with me on my home telephone and her on SL voice chat. Earth calling Sage, Superhero/Fox!! These are the kinds of technologies that make toggling between the actual and the virtual possible.

Imaginary Friends

2009-06-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

My former chair sent me a funny comic strip, as he does every now and then, and this one really made me laugh. It gets to the heart of one of the issues around computer-mediated-communication, which is the way we establish and maintain friendships and relationships in online communities and within virtual space. Certainly, one of the fascinations for me in Second Life is the social engagement; in such a rich visual and imaginative environment, where does my subjectivity end and that of the real people on the other side of their computers begin? It is a moving line, and maybe a liminal space that we share, at times, at the best times. That is my utopian vision, at least, and has been my experience sometimes, with some people, and so that is my story and I am sticking with it. It is the theme of TOGGLE, the piece I made for the Frontline Stories from your Digital Nation project, which you can see on their site here or if you want HQ, on youtube here. Mine is the top right bubble. I made the piece specifically for an audience not familiar with Second Life.

I fleshed out some of the complexities I thought I glossed over in the piece on this webpage. Basically, the "hyperpersonal" mode of computer-mediated communication that is fostered by the text messaging in SL, which allows for selective self-presentation (according to scholar Joseph Walther; see the webpage for more) means that relationships are forged between two idealized selves, with a feedback loop that tends to reinforce positives over negatives. It doesn't mean that those qualities aren't there in the actual person, because undoubtedly they are, but the selective self-presentation gives the typist more control over what is shared, even to the point of being able to erase what one is typing as you see what the other person has just said, an impossibility in voice chat or face to face communication. No matter how natural or relaxed one is being in text chat, there is always that element of control, and of the lower "emotional bandwidth," as Pathfinder Linden terms the low-cue environment.

So given that, what does it mean to be an online friend? That question has so very many answers. Are they, as the comic strip snipes, "imaginary friends?" Who can have 1000 friends? Or how about followers, as Twitter terms them? There are as many reasons to "friend" someone in SL as there are people, so that question is impossible to answer in a broad way. Everyone has a different idea about what it means to have people on their friends list, and some people edit those lists, trimming away people, and some don't. I tend not to.

To turn to another online friend-space, I do not spend much time on Facebook, don't get the updates in e-mail, etc, but I do like it , and do check in now and then. I've connected with people with whom I have lost touch, and I do feel back in some kind of network with them now. They are right there, virtually. And all of a sudden, in one virtual place, are all the different chapters of my life, from high school (because it was a high school friend who got me to actually do more than put up an empty page on Facebook to begin with) to people I only know in Second Life. It makes me feel more integrated, like all those parts of myself mingle there on the facebook page, and a narrative forms for me. I have been rotten at keeping in touch with people, not for any good reason, and so I am glad to be reconnected, to be part of the web of contacts, to see their pictures and find out what they are doing. In some way, there is a little piece of me still there in Bloomington, for example, and I suppose it is there with the people who are there. Maybe that is what is left behind when we make a choice and leave someplace instead of staying; in my mind's eye, in a flash of memory, sometimes in dreams, all of a sudden, I am right there, in Bloomington, walking down South Stull to my house. I see some pictures, some faces, on facebook and it happens then, too, and I am in both places, here and there. It is a kind of virtual experience, mediated by technology, or prompted by it.

So what does that have to do with imaginary friends? I think it is in the same category, of a highly subjective, individualized, internal experience that is also connected to something real and external. In one way, all friendships and relationships exist in the imaginary; we are symbolic for each other. I do not believe that my SL friends are imaginary friends; I do not think that I have that good of an imagination. I am also sure that I participate in creating the image I have of them in my mind, the same way I fill in the gaps between the people I knew in the past and the current photos on Facebook. But even more than that, in the way that Bloomington is still there in my mind, or rather, how I am still there in my mind, then yes, I suppose that there may be a good place for imaginary friends, extensions of connections made. Do our interactions with the people we care about stop when we are not with them? I think not; our minds, our connections transcend time and space, and that is what imagination is for.

Desert Place Clickable

2009-06-27T05:32:00.001-07:00

This piece was really the turning point of the build for me, when some combination of the meteor gloom and unforeseen emotional upheaval reminded me of the Robert Frost poem, "Desert Places." I was inspired by Penumbra's "so much depends" piece, which interprets that Williams Carlos Williams poem in a virtual context. I also think of all the desert places, internal and external, actual and virtual, we inhabit, and how we cope with them.

There is a flower that holds the poem; click and you see it in local chat and are offered a notecard. The particle snow sparkles briefly in the night. The ice twist sculpture gives depth, and the swirling texture on the inside of the snowglobe destabilizes one's point of view. The poseball makes the avatar creep and climb around in the snow. Stand up and you will sink into it.

The piece also makes use of an experiment I've been playing with: using friends' rez dates for the numbers in particle scripts to make different colors and effects.

Desert Places

by: Robert Frost, 1936

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less--

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The Future of Virtual Subjectivity, or From the Gloom Meteor

2009-06-27T05:03:00.001-07:00

Here are some pics from my installation at SL6B, and here is the website I made, with the notecard info from it.

L1 IS TIRED!

2009-06-25T22:26:00.001-07:00

L1 has been clicking from poseball to poseball to get around the SL6B build, sort of swinging on virtual vines. This time she went from the waternap chair to the snowglobe, and ended up just lying down in the snow instead of creeping around. She worked hard at the presentation/discussion event tonight, so I just let her be.

SL6B: SECOND LIFE TURNS 6 & L1 CONTRIBUTES HER FIRST INSTALLATION TO THE CELEBRATION

2009-06-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

My build, "The Future of Virtual Subjectivity," which could also be called, "Greetings from the Gloom Meteor," is seen from afar in the above snapshot; it is the one with the spheres in the air and the marvelous dome on the ground (built by the talented and ever-patient Cinco Pizzicato). I took this snapshot at 2:50 am my time, just as the group notice went out that said: pencils down, and will get some better ones today when the exhibition reopens. The build time was over, and what is there will be my first virtual installation. Yes, there is EduGolf, but that has a practical purpose different from this piece, which really is my attempt to participate fully in the inworld virtual art making I have been around and experimenting with in various ways.

I learned a lot in making this piece. I banged my head against the limitations of my knowledge and skill constantly as I tried to figure out how to make the things that were in my head. I asked a lot of people for help, and they were really generous with me. That is one of the best aspects of SL, of course, and my friends are talented and patient. When the fourth skilled builder/artist I know came to my land, took a look around at what I was doing, and told me to simplify, that I was making things needlessly complicated, I really heard it, and so that became the thing I worked for this project when I got stuck, stepping back, remembering the focus, going for simplicity, and then of course ramping up the ideas and complexity again, because that is my nature. It was an interesting process, and maybe a dialectic I can play with inworld, with particles, textures, and other kinds of scripting and movement.

So, here is the short version of the narrative of my piece:

Here on the meteor, it is 2499 and we hurtle through space, bereft of sun, with barely enough water to keep us being civil to each other. Sometimes I think if I bang my head on the edge of the dome one more time when I'm cleaning up, I'll really scream. The gloom persists. But not too long ago, we found some fragments from a non-quite forgotten past, and they ignited our imaginations. Images, a poem, some sounds, a fragment of video, pieces of text, pulled off an ancient disc that somehow survived in space and floated to us.

What an archeological find! The motifs invigorated our design, infiltrated our dreams, shaped our virtual environments. The sun, the flower, the ripple, the snow. A poem that speaks to our experience here on the gloom meteor, my own desert place that I call home. But then of course I toggle into the virtual, and my eyes drink in the water, my skin sears with the heat of the sun, I am enveloped by the petals of the flower, and I turn my face and part my lips to taste the falling snow.

Part of what we found has made us think about the long ago past, how quaint it must have been when the virtual was so split from the actual, when it was not so effortless to shift between, when not everyone was moving between realities. On that disc, maybe corrupted because it doesn't all make sense, were some ideas about virtual subjectivity written by someone named Lori Landay in the year 2009, a primitive time of computer screens, something very bad called lag in an early virtual world named Second Life, and also I think a time of great hope and invention.

LINK TO SECOND LIFE LOCATION http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dimension/215/182/22

The installation has two parts, really: the part on the land, which is mostly Cinco's dome and Alexith Destiny's fantastic glowy thyme and meteor flowers. The domehouse is decorated on the inside with the images and video "found" on the disc, which I imagined as a back up CD or DVD I might make when working on a project, that somehow ends up floating through space. Yeah. The images include photographs from my garden, a photo of the sun from NASA, a picture of a peony from an online bulb catalog. These are the designs on the chairs, on the walls, the floor, in the dome.

A teleport object (with a super clever script by Cinco) takes you to an approximation of some of the experiences the meteor people have when they toggle into the virtual, immersive sensory experiences that provide them what they sorely lack on the gloom meteor. The images you saw in the dome as design motifs are the virtual environments themselves.

I wanted to have a ride take the avatars from one sculpture to the next, but I could not get that damned thing to work right. Misprint used it for the suck train at Brooklyn Is Watching, and I was over there with her when she was installing it, and it gave her problems too, I remember. She of course, fixed hers, but I ran out of time and patience, and so simplified, and people will have to fly around my build.

I am having an event, a short talk and then a discussion, at 5PM Pacific Time on Thursday, June 25. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dimension/215/182/22

New Art Shows in SL

2009-06-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

There are two promising art exhibitions opening today, Sunday June 7, at 4 pm EDT, so L1 will be a busy avatar later today after scooping up some actual world sunshine before then. The Evolution Gallery, at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cassowarry/89/111/61 and DanCoyote/DC Spensley in the actual world's Museum of Hyperformalism at http://slurl.com/secondlife/PiRats%20Art%20Network/129/127/29 are the places.

I haven't seen any of the Evolution pieces yet, but I snuck over to the Museum of Hyperformalism yesterday for a peek and ran into the talented Selavy Oh, who was putting the finishing touches on an as-yet untitled piece that really blew me away. See the pic below and check out the rest of Selavy's installation, as well as my friend Oberon's and Comet Morigi's s work. These three artists, all involved with Brooklyn Is Watching, are working in the most evocative ways with what virtual art can, might, and must do.

Virtual/Actual: Nose to Nose, L1 & Lori Go for a Spin in Lowell

2009-06-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

As part of my ongoing explorations of the boundaries between the virtual and actual worlds, I went up to Lowell last night to Filthy Fluno's gallery, where we had a good laugh standing next to our avatars in SL projected on the wall . . . and I just had to take L1 for a spin.

New Brooklyn Is Watching Podcast

2009-06-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

L1, encaped, on the new BIW podcast. Video here.

Actual/Virtual Gazebos, Memories, & Home

2009-06-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

I've had this gazebo as the entry point to my virtual land in Boga for some time now, and on my computer desktop, a different picture of my family in this gazebo in the little beach town where my grandparents lived when I was a kid, which we visited last summer. They are both "home" in the spatial metaphors through which we inhabit technology: the desktop picture, and the teleport point in SL.

But it took me a while of having both as "home"--in the ways that we make the impersonal technological spaces we inhabit our own, infusing them with meaning and resonances--to see that they were the same. I knew I had replicated the one in my memory from my childhood by putting my kids where I was at their age for the photograph; that was deliberate and conscious. But that I had already put that gazebo in Second Life eluded me, until I saw the desktop behind the SL window one day, finally saw they were the same, even though they had been juxtaposed so many times before. How does something like that escape someone, especially when they are so consciously in SL to explore issues of virtual experience? I am quite aware that my virtual couch is the same as my actual couch, the one that is now on its last legs, literally, after being such a proud purchase when I bought the floor model on my way out of Bloomington and to Macomb, IL. First I made one in SL, then bought a nice one with sitting animations, same teal color, and it will remain pristine, long after the kids and cat have really done the actual one in.

I am sentimental in SL, or nostalgic, perhaps, infusing my house and land with little references to my past and my virtual experiences that are meaningful only to me. Those visual cues pepper my machinima and pictures, blending memories of both realities, and are private, at the same time that they function as imagery and background, like any artist. That is inescapable, but I have embraced it, mostly consciously, but, as the example of the gazebo shows, also subconsciously. There is something evocative about the virtual space, about building within it, that necessitates a dip into memory even when it seems like that is not what is happening. In shaping one's land, it is not just land, but an extension of the self, in the way that anthropologist Jason Pine talks about "self-design" (An Emergent Second Life, Video. [28 min] Paper Tiger TV. Co- Producer and Director, Bianca Ahmadi; Associate Producer, Juan Rubio; Editor, Juan David Gonzalez; Content Director, Jason Pine. Watch at http://papertigertv.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html).

The actual gazebo is still in the town center, but even as a kid, it wasn't actually being in the gazebo even though it was the place to eat cotton candy, but its locus in my girlhood imagination, first of fairies and the like, then of romance. Now that I think about it, I see the gazebo as a symbol of possibility, of where fabulous things could happen, and it is interesting to me that when I was hurriedly getting my land ready for my first group of students, I chose the gazebo as the gathering place before we headed back to the EduGolf course.

Clickability, Part 2

2009-05-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

I found out last night from Penumbra, the artist who made the wondrous "So Much Depends" installation I discussed below, that the clickability quotient I so admired was added by the marvelous Mab MacMoragh. This is her second interactive intervention that I know of, and I suspect there are many more. What a good thing to be doing--adding pose balls to pieces that bring the avatar INTO the piece, because: why not?? This is one of the things we can do in Second Life, just smash the hell out of the usual don't touch, don't cross the rope, oh damn I set off the sensor again but I was just leaning over to get a better look experience of museums and galleries. In my spiel to my students when we go to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I include the caveat: Don't lean against the walls. Every now and then, there is a sittable piece of furniture with the welcoming tag of Please Sit Here, but of course that is the exception.

Why wouldn't there be a place in every installation for the avatar? It raises such interesting possibilities for point of view, and guides the spectator/participant's gaze to what the artist might want to show. AM Radio is really strong at this, and others experiment with it as well. Maya Paris is working on some new clickables at her Bluestocking Gallery, and Misprint Thursday's prize-winning gossamer tree (not its actual name) is even better because of her clever poseball.

So, nice intervention, Mab. I like that the poseball is called "wonder"--its ambiguity fits with Penumbra's piece and I was happy to hang out there, in wonder and wondering, getting a good look at the sprightly sperms wriggling single-mindedly onward towards their goal over my head.

So Much Depends

2009-05-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

At BIW (Brooklyn Is Watching), there is an installation by Penumbra Carter that interprets William Carlos Williams' 1923 poem:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The installation is interesting. It goes against a literal image of the wheelbarrow, the way I picture it, on a farm, rustic, Hopper-esque or Scheeler-ific. Definitely realism. I have taught this poem a long time now and, like the things I teach again and again, revisit it twice a year, sometimes with much to say about it and sometimes, despite all the discussions and lectures, as if I have never seen it before. There is a lot there, and there is nothing there.

What does he mean "so much?" Those are the only words that are extra, and the first two lines are the only ones that are not pure imagist; they give it context, theme, and position us as readers. The wheelbarrow is important; it is the crux of the farm. And for modernism, the thing itself, not the idea of the thing, to misquote the Wallace Stevens poem I always think of as the companion to Williams':

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF

Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Modernism hoped for a "new knowledge of reality" with its turn to the thing instead of the idea of the thing, but of course it could not escape the idea of the thing, was enamored with the idea of the thing even as it tried to get past it to the thing itself. That is why Williams puts in those first two lines. Nevertheless, the imagist impulse in Williams' poem--by 1923 an old trick perhaps in need of those first two lines--demonstrates, among other things, the possibilities of interartistic discourse, of when poetry becomes more visual, and, in Penumbra's installation, when a virtual art becomes poetic.

The content of Penumbra's piece can't go without discussion. It was a positive virtual art experience. I saw the notecard giver box outside the mysterious big box with the window, I read the poem on the notecard--hello, old friend! I cammed in, not realizing until later the walls were transparent, which made for a nice exploratory point of view excursion. And then, NOT the farm images I expected, but, well, SPERMY shapes!! Glorious, striving, glowing, wriggling spermlike figures reaching up and out the window, maybe to an egg, maybe to Comet's unreachable mountains. Oh, but sperm nonetheless. There was a nice couch and poseball to click on, and so I can check off the clickability box on my list of virtual art criteria, and when I slipped into mouselook, the sperm pov was good.

And the wheelbarrow? It was at the other end of the room, and there were no chickens, unless the sperm were proto-chickens, but the golden seminal fluid emanates from the red wheelbarrow, and indeed, everything does seem to depend on it, or at least "so much."

There are strong compositional elements as well, nice framing of windows within windows, boxes within boxes, very much in keeping with the modernist painters and photographers who were Williams' contemporaries in the early 1920s. I think of some of the modernist paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, like Hopper's Drug Store, from 1927 or his Room in Brooklyn (1932), or Charles Sheeler's Spring Interior from the same year, or his 1931 View of New York, of those strong verticals and horizontals, the right angles, the boxes within boxes that make up those buildings and trapped their inhabitants, so often hidden from view.

Brooklyn Is Watching's Monet Destiny Interviewed on SL TV Show

2009-05-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

This is interesting in a few ways: you can find out all about Brooklyn Is Watching (one of the most interesting art projects in SL), listen to Jay Van Buren talk (always compelling), and see a very well-done "tv" show made in Second Life. Click here for the May 17 "Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe"

"The internet of things"

2009-05-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

Reboot!

2009-05-13T07:19:00.000-07:00

OK, this is more about my first life, or maybe Life 1.5, online and digitized if not in SL, but still . . . . these posters (made by Mike Carrera in the CTMI) for my Reboot Summer Institute on Teaching with Digital Media are fab.

Here is the info, but the Institute is only for Berklee faculty.

Teaching with Digital Media

Designed and taught by Lori Landay with support
from Mike Carrera and Madeleine Toh

Click here to apply.

Tired of hauling bags of videotapes, overheads, audiocassettes, and CDs to class? Ready to move into the twenty-first century and use digital images, audio, video in your teaching? Interested in making PowerPoint presentations, putting material online, or developing multimedia project assignments for your students? The Reboot Institute on Teaching with Digital Media will provide a framework in which you can acquire new skills and complete a project that will complement your teaching.

In this introductory level institute, participants will learn the basics of the different types of digital media (still images, digital audio, and digital video), the best ways to manipulate them, and what forms they can take in your teaching. During the workshop sessions, participants will learn about digital media, and get a hands-on introduction to software including iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iWeb, and iDVD), PowerPoint, Audacity, and Adobe Photoshop Elements applications. You’ll work with a mentor and the CTMI to create “learning objects” that make the most of the digital technologies available to us. The Institute is open to all faculty, regardless of prior experience with digital audio, images, and video.

To help develop the skills you’ll need to successfully complete the project, you’ll attend the kick-off dinner/planning session, a minimum of three workshops, and a project showcase at the end of the summer. In the first three workshops, you’ll find out about the kinds of media that will comprise your project, whether it results in a multimedia DVD or an aesthetic and interesting PowerPoint presentation. The fourth and fifth workshops branch out to cover resources at Berklee and to embrace forms of “user-generated” digital media associated with “Web 2.0” such as podcasts, blogs, and virtual worlds; we’ll also explore some ideas for developing digital media assignments for your students. You’ll work with a mentor (who will guide you through your project), resources (books and online resources), and the fine folks at the CTMI (who will help you acquire the skills you need to realize your project). We’ll conclude with a showcase of participants’ projects and a discussion of ways of enriching teaching with digital media.

As a gift, participants will receive a USB Flash Drive, a training book, and a 3-month subscription to Lynda.com to support their projects. Lynda.com is an award-winning provider of educational materials, including an online training library. Faculty will have access to video tutorials and online courses on a variety of software and design topics, such as Photoshop, Web Design, Logic Pro, Garageband and many others.

Dinner session:
Overview and Project Planning
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
6:00–8:00 p.m.
The Loft, 921 Boylston
Dinner provided
Lunch provided

Workshop 1: Still Images
Thursday, May 28, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Workshop 2: Digital Audio
Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Workshop 3: Digital Video
Thursday, June 11, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Workshop 4: Teaching with Digital Media

Thursday, June 18, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Workshop 5: Moving Forward with Your Project
Thursday, June 25, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Project Showcase
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
6:00–8:00 p.m.
The Loft, 921 Boylston
Dinner provided

NMC Virtual Art Exhibition: EXPERIENCE ART

2009-05-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

The NMC, which does an excellent job in everything it does, has a new show at @ Ars Simulacra on the NMC Campus, curated by Tayzia Abattoir. It brings together some of the best SL artists, including Misprint Thursday, Oberon Onmura, Glyph Graves, and Alizarin Goldflake. Above, pics of Misprint's and Oberon's installations. Here is the slurl.

I Click Therefore I Am

2009-05-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to click?

Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-11.) To think about a hyperlink as punctuation, as a connection, in hypertext and new media leads us to one way of thinking about interactivity.

In Second Life, clicking is even more than that, though, it is action and agency itself. Sometimes you know what is going to happen, and sometimes you don't. I have been thinking about this since I accidentally overstimulated Oberon Onmura's compelling piece "Awareness." I am often "near-sighted" in SL, cammed in on something and unaware of my wider surroundings. I was looking intently at Oberon's installation, at a glowing stick, and thought it was cleverly, ironically, saying in local chat: "Don't click this," not realizing it was the actual artist Oberon standing behind me telling me not to click it, because doing so would make more obelisk generators appear. Oh, well. You can watch the debacle unfold in the Brooklyn Is Watching podcast # 56 at around minute 25.
Brooklyn Is Watching Episode 56
We podcasters really liked Oberon's piece. Recently he showed me another, related piece that is installed at the NMC sim, where the avatar walks through the stationary obelisks and turns them a specific color instead of the obelisks moving around the space. His work explores how data moves through virtual space, and leaves traces; the pieces I have seen demonstrate a remarkable restraint and elegant minimalism in a medium and environment that too often invites excess.

If SL is more than a little like Wonderland, and when we see "Click Me," we do, it is with an exploratory perspective, and with the expectation that no real harm can come to us. In the same way that the kids today expect that toys will DO something and not just sit there quietly like a block, I am disappointed if there is nothing for me to click on. I want everything to DO something, want it to be interactive. I want to be able to get into an installation, and look for a pose ball or some other way to be a part of it. It all has a big "click me" sign as far as I am concerned. These days, I am sitting on everything if I can't find anything more interesting to do!

And that something would tell me, "Don't click this"--or someone, as it turned out--is a directive I interpreted immediately as ironic, as a challenge. Maybe that says more about me, or about L1 these days, than SL, but I think it speaks to an expectation--or hope--of what SL, and in particular SL art, can be. I want to have a playful, ludic interaction with my virtual environment and the objects within it. I want it to trick me. I want to be through the looking glass and be dazzled by Wonderland and its inhabitants. I want to be shown something new, and to have that be an immersive experience that grabs me, or at least my avatar, in the surprising ways that an avatar can be grabbed. When Oberon was showing me his piece at the new NMC exhibition (which also houses Misprint Thursday's bridge MAY, a must-see piece), he told me about AM Radio's Death of Marat piece, also fantastic, at NMC, and a click that does not disappoint.

The Ars Simulacra show at NMC opens on Friday, May 8, and I'll post the slurl then.

Boston Is Watching/Boston CyberArts Festival Presentation

2009-04-25T19:32:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation (clicking on slides 4, 6, 7, 11, 13 will take you to video on the web). If you click the last slide, you can see the "trailer" for the screwball comedy about SL relationships that I've been working on, which was not part of the presentation yesterday.

Biw Web

View more presentations from LoriLanday.

Boston/Brooklyn Is Watching/Boston CyberArts Festival

2009-04-22T07:51:00.001-07:00

There is a lot of looking and watching going on!!!!!!

Brooklyn Is Watching

Things are getting interesting as new machinima is underway

2009-04-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

L1Leopard helps KinoEye Galaxy get ready for her, gulp, date! Will screwball hijinks ensue, SL-style? Oh, I think we can count on it!

Look Out Virtual World, Hair They Come

2009-03-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

What are Maya Paris, KinoEye Galaxy, and Misprint Thursday doing and, to pose a more pressing question, what is their HAIR DOING? Stay tuned.

L1 in the Chilbo Road Press!

2009-03-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

L1 made the news! See the Chilbo Road Press here.

Video of the NMC Keynote!!

2009-03-28T06:42:00.000-07:00

Here is the video of the Keynote Nettrice and I did at the NMC Symposium--and here you can find the entire program with links to video. What a fantastic event! Also check out 2009 Virtual World Best Practice in Education Conference

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY--NMC KEYNOTE

2009-03-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY

Lori Landay/L1Aura Loire

NMC Keynote, March 25 2009

Definitions

Subjectivity is the experience of the “I”. Subjectivity can be defined, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, as “structures of feeling.” It encompasses a person’s feelings, thoughts, and perceptions; it emphasizes their individual encodings and decodings of their environment, social interactions, and experiences. The term comes from the French verb asujettir, which has a double meaning of both to produce subjectivity and also to make subject--it is both creative and restrictive.

If subjectivity is the first-person experience of the “I,” shaped by both individual psychological experiences and wider cultural forces, and it is intersubjective—created socially—then the people behind the avatars certainly bring their actual world subjectivities in here. However, once inworld, instead of having a body through which to experience the world, we have an avatar and visual and sound input that are not necessarily connected to that avatar’s position. There are "mirror neurons" in the brain that respond to what the avatar does, but it is different than direct sensory input. Therefore, the already blurry line between the self and the world is completely smudged in virtual subjectivity.

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY

In the rich visual world of Second Life, there is intense visual stimulus. Throughout the rise of visual culture, physical point of view and subjectivity have been connected; to some extent, all visual representation explores this, and as each new visual medium arises, that relationship is recreated and extended. In a virtual world, the viewer position is both immersive and detached, both connected intimately to our experience of the avatar—but also strangely outside of him, her, or it.

So, instead of an "I," now we have an "I/Eye" of virtual subjectivity, which is a mode of first-person experience in a virtual world that is founded on a fusion of visual and metaphoric point of view, shaped through "self-design" of the avatar and environment, reinforced and extended through social interaction, and enacted through virtual agency. Part of virtual subjectivity is the extent to which the mind/body connection translates inworld experiences into embodied sensations that feel "real." To sum up, there are four major factors that contribute to virtual subjectivity:

1) virtual point of view

2) virtual self-design

3) virtual social relationships

4) virtual agency

From the conclusion:

I also have a glimpse of something in here—a kind of virtual subjectivity that I would associate with the trickster—a shapeshifter who uses the avatar as a mask, a crosser of boundaries, culture hero or heroine who embodies and enacts central cultural conflicts. I glimpse a virtual subjectivity that would reveal all of the virtual world as installation space and oneself as a performance artist within it, calling our attention to the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds by finding new ways of crossing them, looping between them, shifting the borders, again and again.

Selected Sources

Battaglia, D., ed. (1995). Rhetorics of Self-Making. University of California Press.

Blakeslee, S. (2006). "Cells That Read Minds." New York Times. Retrieved 2009-03-23, from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.html

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton University Press.

Cooper, S. (2002). Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine? Routledge.

Curtis , A. "THE CLAUSTRUM: Sequestration of Cyberspace." (2007). Psychoanalytic Review, 94(1), 99-139.

Landay, L. (2008). "Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life." Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1(2). Retrieved 2009-03-23, from https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/355/265

Ortner, S. (2005). "Subjectivity and

Cultural Critique." Anthropological Theory Vol 5(1): 31–52

Steinberg, M. (2004). Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-century Music, Princeton University Press.

Vertov, D. (1985). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press.

Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1):3-43.

An Emergent Second Life, Video. [28 min] Paper Tiger TV. Co- Producer and Director, Bianca Ahmadi; Associate Producer, Juan Rubio; Editor, Juan David Gonzalez; Content Director, Jason Pine.Watch inworld at Brooklyn Is Watching 􀀂 or http://papertigertv.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

Not Possible in Real Life Blog http://npirl.blogspot.com/

Credits

L1's Eye/I built by Cube Republic (Cube Republic store, Crimson Night (155, 90, 22)

KinoEyePlane built by Alexith Destiny (Destiny Blue Designs, Destiny Blue (173, 15, 1369)

& scripted by Simon Kline http://www.klinelabs.com/

Interested in learning how to script? Find out about Simon's classes! http://www.klinelabs.com/

V-TV

Verbal Television

http://vtvart.webs.com/

Caerleon Art Collective (128, 74, 26)

Misprint Thursday

with collaborating scripts contributed by Oberon Onmura and Cinco Pizzicato

V-TV examines the beauty in both the visual translation of text and the limitations of text communications in these forms.

Digital text communication like chat, email and texting have increased our ability to share ideas with one another. The concept for V-TV, or Verbal Television, is to translate text communication to a visual form of communication. V-TV responds to text input by creating a digital art display which becomes a sort of visual poetry. The piece, is, however limited in its scope and function to respond which perhaps mirrors the idea of the limitations of non face to face communication.

SEE THE ENTIRE NMC SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM HERE

Misprint's V-TV

2009-03-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

L1, Maya, and Misprint dwell in the data stream at Misprint's installation. This picture and video are part of my keynote presentation at the opening session of the NMC conference.

V-TV

Verbal Television

Misprint Thursday with collaborating scripts contributed by Oberon Onmura and Cinco Pizzicato

This installation translates text communication into a visual form of communication. I e-mailed my idea--that "We create our senses of self in a virtual world through our interactions with each other. It is social and cultural, but it is done through computer-mediated communication."

I read around in cyberpsychology this past week and about CMC and it really threatened to ruin my second life for a little while. Made me worry that I was only talking to myself, or projections of myself, or idealized fantasies of others I projected onto the other avatars. But these gals are pretty real and despite my excellent imagination, I could not come up with them. Also I think that the critique of CMC that I was reading was based on asynchronous text, andin SL, the synchronous communication, strong visuals, immersive experience, my voice communications with some inworld friends, and extra-world communication like e-mail and non-SL IMs and chat go beyond the limitations described in some of the critiques I read, like this. Anyway, I think I don't care! Bring on the consensual hallucination.

Reading around in anthropology

2009-03-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

My excellent colleague, the anthropologist/historian/ethnomusicologist/multimedia artist DJ Hatfield, sent me in some intriguing directions for reading around. In particular, the essays in the book Rhetorics of Self-Making, edited by Debbora Battaglia, have prompted a lot of thought. In my house, we have a running joke that it is imperative that I start stories I am telling about what I did that day with a prefatory "In Second Life," or otherwise I say things like, "My friend Maya and I were both robots today," or "I spent the day falling again," etc. Even little Sammy loves to say, "I'm waiting for you to say 'in Second Life!'" Well, as I read the essays in the Battaglia book, I want to add, "in Second Life," because as I think through the various contributions to what she terms a critical anthropology of selfhood (2), they seem so fully applicable to how subjectivity and selfhood are created, circulated, and constantly recreated in a virtual world.

One of the most striking experiences I have had is when I have given my "shape"--the object that holds the dimensions of my body avatar's body--to my friend Shirah, who has put it on herself, adjusted the measurements, and then given it back to me to wear. It takes the idea of the girlfriend makeover to a new level! And shows how what anthropologist Jason Pine, in a fantastic television show available inworld at the Brooklyn Is Watching sim (slurl) calls "self design" can be so very social in SL.

Of course, as I read around, I return to my old standbys, the things that form the very backbone how I make sense out of my experiences in SL: Bartky, Goffman, Pelton, Hall, Benjamin, de Certeau, Foucault to some extent. Heidegger.

The Falling Woman Story

2009-03-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

Finally . . . a finished machinima! I think I found my "voice" making this one, and interestingly, it was not one of the pieces in my grand plan of inter-related interviews and think-piece commentaries.

I think of this piece as an anchor piece, an introduction to some of the issues I see as pertinent to an exploration of virtual subjectivity, and also of an introduction to L1. You're dropped in the middle of an intimate conversation with her, and suddenly she is telling you this incredible story, showing you how she imagines it, how she has played it out in Second Life, experiencing it for herself, shaping it into a performance, remaking it into machinima.

The Marvelous Maya Paris

2009-03-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

Mom in SL--5 days Later

2009-02-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

Here Scarlett holds court with two of my friends and me.

My Mom is the Cutest Newbie Ever!

2009-02-16T18:42:00.000-08:00

My mother has come into Second Life! This is after just a few weeks ago telling Ray Kurzweil that she thought I was wasting my time with "virtual world garbage" when I introduced her to him! Anyway, maybe he had an impact on her, or maybe it was Alex's flowers that caught her eye, but here she is in the Destiny Blue garden, really trying to move around! Since then, just 2 days ago, she's come a long way. We got her some nice hair today (she calls them wigs, and why not?) and a few outfits, and so she is well on her way. Next is a basic lesson in building, and we will scan in some of her drawings and paintings. Should be interesting to see what happens.

Rose Video--L1 Goes into Advertising

2009-02-12T04:37:00.000-08:00

Demo

2009-01-31T20:31:00.001-08:00

Click to Play

This is a 30 second demo of what a music video made in Second Life could look like. The song is from Tammy Patrick's fab new album, Red River Valley. http://www.tammypatrick.com/

CRASH!

2009-01-26T11:46:00.001-08:00

L1 just fell from a great height, because recently I have been enjoying falling, or watching her fall, secure in the knowledge that no harm will come. BUT this time, as she hit the ground, instead of getting up and dusting herself off with that cute animation, SL crashed when she did. Curiouser and curiouser.

This is FUNNY

2009-01-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

Find more videos like this on Atlantis Seekers

"Barack Obama is going to clean up the mess . . . in our house!" Sammy, 3 1/2 years old

2009-01-20T08:46:00.000-08:00

Well, Sammy's idea for how far Obama can reach might be a little overstated, but I guess he understands the general feeling that his mother has on this inauguration day. I feel optimistic and hopeful not only about politics for the first time in a long time, but about humanity. Enough people chose hope instead of fear, chose change instead of retrenchment, chose the future instead of the past. I feel great hope for race relations in America; Obama's election is a game-changer in that breaks open perceptions and creates new possibilities for collaborations and dialogue. Studies show it doesn't take much for people to drop their prejudices, and that tolerance spreads fast. We have an amazing opportunity to take huge steps that will make a big difference in our children's lives.

There is a Second Life angle to this: two of my friends and I hosted a party to celebrate the inauguration in SL this past Sunday. It was at lynsey Fleury's Woodstock sim, with a live performance by Angelndskyz Galicia. It was like a real party: I introduced friends who didn't know each other to each other, and, because it was SL, was able to keep dancing while I shot some video! Didn't have the space navigator hooked up, so the video is choppy, and it is just one take, no cuts, but it gives an idea of what it was like. You can see the awesome ice ramp Maya Paris created, with the congratulatory message to Obama that we all felt so strongly.

and now Joseph Biden is officially VP.

12:04 pm: Obama comes to the podium for the oath!

I Love Lucy moment in SL

2009-01-18T14:15:00.001-08:00

Can you see what is behind the fabulous Bryan Mnemonic, just to the right, on the floor? It is L1Aura Loire's hair!!! I went to shoot footage of him in his Virtual Harlem sim, where he is doing just about the most interesting and innovative teaching in Second Life, and this is what happened:

I turned off L1's user interface so it wouldn't show in the video footage. I clicked around and must have somehow detached her hair! So I hurriedly put on some more hair once I realized it, and of course Bryan was very nice about it all and we had a good laugh and did the interview. BUT I must have actually DROPPED the hair, not detached, because as soon as we were done and I eager went to check the footage, I could spy L's hair in the background. GASP!

L1 sent Bryan, who was teaching there in his Virtual Harlem space, an instant message alerting him to the abandoned hair, and being the gentleman and scholar that he is, he immediately returned it, hopefully before any students could see.

Only in Second Life. But this is what would happen to Lucy Ricardo if she were bumbling around in here.

First Machinima Footage Posting!

2009-01-07T05:36:00.000-08:00

Here is the a very rough cut of the footage I shot yesterday with Maya and Lynsey at the Bicylorama in Woodstock. The sound is not done, it is not really edited down to a real piece, which will be much shorter, but you can get the idea of what I am up to making machinima. There is a lot of footage of the bikes and the bicylorama in the middle, but some interesting interview takes with Maya towards the end. There will be a voice over throughout, maybe with Maya's narration, too, from a voice interview. Maya and I will also reshoot the interview, and maybe have a voice interview with Lynsey, too, to replace what we shot at our happy accident meeting late at night here/early in the morning there that I put at the end of this cut.

It has been a real learning experience getting this far with this piece. First time working with others, which is much more fun and rewarding than with my alt avatars, but also adds an element of pressure. Of course the lovely ladies in the video and who I am now lucky enough to have in my second life are nothing but supportive, encouraging, and well-humored no matter what time of day or night it might be in Holland or England, but I am relieved to actually have something to show them (and others) that gets this project out of my head and glimpsed by someone else.

I am also desperate to turn off L1Aura's speech gestures, which are no longer active, but persist. In a year when I have no students and I am not lecturing at all, my avatar is in constant lecture mode as soon as she goes into voice chat, gesturing and opening her eyes, leaning back self-importantly, blathering on and on, interminably. After a whole day spent filming her, trying to get her to look in the right direction, staring into her face with her flip-flapping mouth, I wish she would shut the f*** up. How's that for a person-avatar relationship? What's the Proteus effect there?

So here are some of my thoughts: Virtual subjectivity is even more individualized, more, well, subjective, than in real life, I think, because of how differently each one of can be seeing the same thing physically with the camera feature, how no one knows what any avatar is really doing or looking at. Add in the lag, and we are not really experiencing the same thing even when we think we are. I see the difference between my different avatars when they are together, what they see, sometimes what they are wearing, where they are in the space. We are liberated from so much of the mundane in SL, but we don't really have synchronicity yet. It is still a "consensual hallucination," as Gibson imagined in Neuromancer so long ago (1984!!!!) The gap between our own and others' perceptions and experiences is one of the elements of real life that is made literal and visual and played out in Second Life. OK, enough blathering with only 5 hours sleep (the really good stuff comes from 4 hours or less).

Been Busy!

2009-01-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

OK, I've been away from the blog for way too long, but if you notice the previous post, you will see that I bought a big piece of land in SL adjoining my original parcel, and so of course I have been very busy! I have been spending a lot of time inworld, immersing myself in the place and experience as if I had travelled someplace for my sabbatical year. I am living and working there.

Here are some things I have been doing, in no particular order, certainly not of importance:

1) Building an EduGolf Course for students to learn essential skills for being a student in SL

2) Making weird sphere sculptures that as often as not make me crash when I work on them

3) Experimenting with different kinds of video screens

4) Making some wonderful, very talented and creative friends and spending time with them

5) Meeting their friends

6) Making machinima single-handedly

7) Making machinima with others (as of yesterday)

8) Finding that having experiences in a virtual world is absolutely fascinating and constantly. I am taking the approach that the Australian aborigines do to dreaming: it is another kind of experience that you can have in a different realm, no better or worse than everyday life.

9) Spending more time changing my virtual clothes than I used to! It is fun after all.

10) Discovering that I am a terrible driver in SL, but I do it anyway.

11) Trying to adjust to how much and fast things change inworld--one day your neighbor has a big house, and the next day it is just gone. The landscape changes, buildings suddenly appear, land changes hands, people look different in the blink of an eye, and so much that you can count on in RL is mutable and unstable. It is beautiful and poignant and unsettling. I am trying to flow with it.

12) Slowly, cautiously doing some scripting

13) Put a camera script in a diamond earring stud and wore it around--fun and fashionable! I asked my artist friend Maya for help and just before she told me (in IM) to make a box for it before I started to edit the earring because otherwise I would lose it on the ground, I lost it on the ground! Fortunately it is a huge diamond stud. Every one should be so lucky; such diamonds really are a girl's best friend.

14) Gave L1 a makeover--new hairstyle, including a fair approximation of my silver streak.

15) Got a tour of the fantastic Virtual Harlem, where Bryan Mnemonic is breaking new ground teaching his students about the Harlem Renaissance and other topics in American literature and culture.

16) Been putting buildings in the sky, thanks to my neighbor's influence in showing me how nice things can be up there. So I have a SkyOffice for students to come to, with a big video screen (where I have been filming lectures, too), an Art Deco house that can become a hangout for the increasing party of real world friends interested in SL but who don't know where to go, and another building that I think will be a gallery space.

17) Had a fantastic conversation with two talented folks from Mass Art who are doing fascinating things in SL--my teacher from the summer, the ever-fabulous Nettrice, and Vu Sosa, who is a professor at MassArt and getting ready to teach some parts of her classes in SL. Her island, 4dmap, is an ongoing installation and an inspiration. So I actually did what I wrote about in the description of my land when I first bought it: used it as place for conversation about the possibilities virtual worlds and digital media.

18) Getting ready to interview Ray Kurzweil on the big stage at the Berklee Performance Center as part of the annual BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching) conference next week. He is interested in virtual worlds, so I hope that is a topic that we can explore.

19) Thinking about how the camera feature creates a totally new kind of subjectivity.

20) Playing with a pet wolf.

21) Celebrating New Year's Eve.

See, that is a lot. And there is even more.

Virtual Economy

2008-11-27T07:45:00.000-08:00

As I wait to see if I win my first land auction, I was googling around and found an article published not long after my piece on commodification in SL in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research that gives some numbers to back up some of my completely unsubstantiated speculation that consumerist desires might be channeled into virtual worlds: "At Least the Virtual Economy Isn't Too Bad Yet." According to the article, Linden Labs reports highest ever user hours in Q3 2008.

Socializing with Out of the Box Avatars

2008-11-21T16:01:00.000-08:00

L1 had her first surprise visitor of someone I actually know on the SL land yesterday, a very welcome one, the avatar of one of my colleagues who had read the JVWR piece and decided to check out Second Life. He picked the Male Musician avatar, which is the same one my husband picked when I convinced him to join me in SL for an experiment, and so I was doubly confused: suddenly someone else was there, looking just like my husband, but with some strange name. Eventually we sorted it out, but not after a little confusion with a few layers of identities: personal, professional, and virtual. Then we had a great time, teleporting around as we could do only in SL, also crashing and experiencing enough lag to make us occasionally asynchronous, which may have a real world analog, but it is not nearly so dramatic or visual. It was a blast, especially when his hair suddenly disappeared, and luckily he got it back.

One of the things I noticed is that when we were using text chat, it was our avatars talking, but as soon as we switched to voice chat, it was us. I wonder if that would happen if I were talking with someone I didn't know in real life, someone whose disembodied voice I wouldn't recognize. I certainly didn't recognize my friend in his avatar, at least not right away. I am also curious to meet people in real life whose avatars I've come to know.

Here are pictures of L1Aura talking with our colleague Tiak8 (who almost immediately mastered gestures like the shrug) and L1 with her husband Tich. You can see why she was confused and has since given Tich a makeover. The wonders of the virtual world. Tiak8's gesture below says it all.

CCK08: Click (finally), as it all makes sense

2008-11-18T04:35:00.000-08:00

The clicking sound you hear is the CCK08 material aligning with some work I'm involved in at Berklee, where we're developing a new course for first semester students. I've been working on versions of this course for 5 years now, from various approaches; now as part of a broad curriculum review and revision, it is moving along.

As I was cutting and pasting a lovely quotation about how a First Semester Seminar could be taught from an older concept document into a shiny new course proposal (see below), I realized many of the ideas and themes overlapped with our CCK08 conversation, especially echoing the discussions about teaching we had in the past couple of weeks in Elluminate with Howard Rheingold and others. It has to do with separating out the functions of the teacher as content expert on the one hand and facilitator on the other, so that process, thinking, and learning become central, not content delivery.

This is how Jerry Slezak, who blogs about his experiences teaching a Freshman Seminar at the University of Mary Washington, sees the unique purpose and method of FYE seminars:

Teaching a seminar-style course to first year students, where the emphasis in the course is on inquiry, rather than presentation or even exploration of a settled body of knowledge is quite different from either an upper-level seminar or a traditionally introductory course which enrolls first year students. The fundamental purpose of the FSEMs [freshman seminars] is not to teach content, but rather to introduce students to the life of the mind. At one level this has developed as an emphasis on teaching skills, but what we’re really [trying] to articulate is something more holistic, not skills per se, but rather a model of the process of intellectual inquiry, the art or culture of the intellectual life.
Jerry Slezak, http://jerryslezak.net/pedablogy/?p=442

For our students, our approach to the “life of the mind” must include creativity and the development of the individual voice.

I guess the insight I have to add after my "click" moment is that the technology is secondary, not primary. In the very beginning of CCK08, the sheer volume of people arguing over the definition of connectivism in a flurry of posts and blogs was overwhelming, and it was hard to hear past it. The technology can help make connections, or it can distract and divide us. How we use it is what matters, and I'm glad I stuck with it until the din died down enough to really hear the ideas.

When Howard Rheingold talked about having his social media students watch a video of him commenting/lecturing on Goffman instead of delivering that to them in class, that was really interesting. In class, he is the facilitator, inviting them (actually, it seems, requiring them) to take on the responsibility to teaching the course. I get a lot of resistance when I talk about making video resources like Howard is using, but I think there is a lot of value in separating the expert and facilitator functions of the teacher. I think he is also using his video commentary as a reading, or a reading supplement, but that is a different topic (shift from text to video).

All of this makes me realize that if we replace course content with the technological tools, we haven't gained enough, and it is an easy temptation to do that with all these fun, new toys. More importantly, we have to make sure our students know that we are not doing that. I'm sure that Steven and George never intended for the technology to overtake the ideas, but it is how it felt to me for a while at the beginning. Unless the learning and thinking, the life of the mind and the processes of creation, remain at the center and everything else we do is in its service, then its all a bunch of noise. Click click.