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: 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.
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."
MaMachinima International Festival
Saturday Feb. 20th , 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 20th 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
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 6th 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
