Life to the second power

Here are some photos of Friday's events, for those who couldn't be there. Links to more and higher-res versions will be forthcoming.

Posted by Jeff Aldrich at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Without a doubt one of the key ingredients in any evocative space is imagery. The placement and meaning of images in stories and other media that tell stories about experiences is likewise crucial. So it is hardly a surprise that screenshots play such a large role in game culture. In virtual worlds like Second Life the flexibility of consumer-created content is mirrored in the proliferation of stories and movies about experiences in world. NEWare you have been, there is a story to tell that can be captured in an image.

Posted by Henry Lowood at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cory Ondrejka, VP of Product Development at Linden Lab, will be a guest in my "Consumers as Creators" course on Tuesday, April 25th (tomorrow). Matteo, Henrik and I will lunch with them afterwards. Without a doubt we'll have a chance to chat with him about the project.

Henry

Posted by Henry Lowood at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have pulled together a project description on our wiki ...

"What is it to recollect - in a world of mediated and multiple presences? And with the prospect of even greater (bio-info-technological) intervention in our sense of self? Will your clone know you? Will your downloaded memories convey the experience of what was?"

[Link]

We are getting ready for a public event this Friday (28 April) - Tilda Swinton and Lynn Hershman will be talking with Peggy Phelan (our colleague at Stanford) about Tilda's films and art, her work with Lynn (they have made several films together) and about LifeSquared.

Pigott Theater, Stanford, 1.15pm.

"Teknolust - 2002 [Link]

Posted by Michael Shanks at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

San Francisco - lunch at Anjou, on Campton Place.

Life Squared is building an encounter with a past in SecondLife.com - a world of avatars.

Lynn and I were talking about the ambiguity, of course, of clones, models of oneself ... and my current obsession with dolls

Doug Bailey and I spent a lot of energy on this back when he was writing his book about prehistoric figurines - this theme goes way back when. [Link]

Today it was surrealist Han Bellmer ...

And have a look at this site in deviantART.com - [Link]

[Link]

[Link]

For the archaeologists out there - Barbies in ancient Crete - [Link]

Posted by Michael Shanks at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just got back from a trip away and a stopover in London.

Went to see the new exhibition at the Tate Britain - "Gothic Nightmares" - [Link]

The horror ...

Gothic Nightmares explores the work of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) and William Blake (1757–1827) in the context of the Gothic – the taste for fantastic and supernatural themes which dominated British culture from around 1770 to 1830.

Featuring over 120 works by these artists and their contemporaries, the exhibition creates a vivid image of a period of cultural turmoil and daring artistic invention.

The central exhibit is Henry Fuseli’s famous The Nightmare 1781. Ever since it was first exhibited to the public in 1782, this picture has been an icon of horror. Showing a woman supine in her boudoir, oppressed by a foul imp while a ferocious-looking horse glares on, the painting draws on folklore and popular culture, medicine, concepts of imagination, and classical art to create a new kind of highly charged horror image.

What has this got to do with us and our project in SecondLife?

Everything.

Our project - LifeSquared - is all about revisiting pasts that come back to haunt you, reworking themselves into your psyche, into your immediate present, and threatening your future (sanity) through those forms and characters so beloved of the Gothic - doppelgangers, the dead who refuse to rest in peace, monsters of our own creation, such as Frankenstein's creature.

We face the dread of incarceration in the prisonhouse of society and culture, trapped in our corporeal, abject selves.

And even fairies can lead you astray.

Lynn's work is full of these fears.

This is why I love Henrik's dolls - [Link]

More characters ...

The pleasant fairy world of a Midsummer Night's Dream - hardly!

Fuseli's Titania and Bottom c 1790 - [Link]

Aberant and threatening sexualities, metamorphic horrors, withches and changelings - the baby in the botton right corner.

Posted by Michael Shanks at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henrik has been working on some design concepts - through a new game he is making. [Link]

The characters he has created are wonderfully creepy baby dolls -

Lynn's telerobotic Dollie clones - Tillie and CybeRoberta - are connected to the web and let you look through their eyes - camera eye-cons - cyborg prosthetics, but in the distributed space of the internet.

Telerobotic presences

CybeRoberta and Tillie

I am fascinated by the double nature of the doll - familiar and cosy replica, but also and often verging on an uncanny creepiness - this is the word that seems to fit for me.

More of Henrik's monsters ...

Posted by Michael Shanks at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)