Thinking about Virtual Art: One and Four Ways

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

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

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.