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

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

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

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.

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. SLURL http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife//219/65/3438

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