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.

New Basic Viewer for Virtual World Second Life: Video Glimpse

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"

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

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

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

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

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