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Posted by Matteo Bittanti
"The ZeroOne San Jose Festival will transform San Jose into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture by showcasing the world's most innovative contemporary artists. ZeroOne San Jose is artists making art and using technology as a tool to do so. It is not technology for technology's sake. ZeroOne San Jose is a multi-dimensional, startling and brilliant audience event - with exhibits, live cinema, performances, workshops, and youth activities. All are one-of-a-kind, many never-before, only-here experiences. Here are some details about what you will find at ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge."
GameArt is one of the key features of this amazing art festival that will take place San Jose, California, between August 7 and August 13 2006. Several artist are using games as a form of expression. One of the most interesting examples is The New West , "a virtual art park within the online world Second Life, designed to showcase these new forms of cultural production. Ludica. will solicit proposals for “site-specific” installations, performances and interventions from current Second Life artists and designers, the ISEA and electronic arts community, and international digital arts and game programs at Universities". The New West Ludica.
View image
Read more.
Posted by Henry Lowood
Henry and Henrik hosted a meeting of UCI's Game Culture & Technology Lab on our island this evening. Henry is a virtual resident at the Lab this quarter, as part of a quarter-long workshop funded by the UC Humanties Research Institute. The workshop includes a group of game studies scholars, artists, and others interested in exploring the possibilities of virtual collaboration around topics drawn from game culture and technology. The lab itself is described as follows:
The mission of the Game Culture & Technology Lab is to play with how game metaphors, design principles, and technologies can be utilized for alternative content and context delivery. The focus is on the next generation Internet and beyond.
The approach combines theory and practice, art and science, education and entertainment, to create an environment that supports diverse forms of expression in a wide range of applications.
The methods include sampling, misuse, hacking, appropriation, reverse engineering, and customization in the interest of open-source innovation and critical intervention.
The Game Lab is physically housed in the Art Culture and Technology building within the School of the Arts (SOTA), as well as in The California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (Calit2).
Research and development activities are conducted in both the SOTA and Calit2 facilities. SOTA consists of approximately 800 square foot of heavily equipped industrial style space (16 foot ceilings, concrete floors, projectors whiteboards, workstations); Calit2 provides an additional 8 special project rooms and 2 offices (high-end corporate cubicle style) dedicated to GCTL activities.
Both facilities are where students in the Concentration in Game Culture and Technology perform their independent research.
The Concentration is a jointly run intensive academic program between the School of Information and Computer Science (ICS) and SOTA.
We had a lively, if somewhat unruly meeting as our visitors explored the island in various states of dress (and undress). Here are a few screenshots to give a flavor of the evening:
Henry
Posted by Henrik Bennetsen
My oh my, such a brave new world this is. We just had a group meeting inside Second Life. There we were 6 of us on the island for one hour that saw some seriously speedy typing. You can see a transcript and the minutes in the wiki. We got through the agenda though it was a rough day to chair, but I lived to blog the tale :)
Posted by Matteo Bittanti
Gizmodo are reporting on Recursive Instruments' 3D Printing service for Second Life Residents.
This is genius. "Part of the goal of the project is to bridge the virtual and the real “by developing a cultural authority in the virtual that till now has been reserved for the physical,” Spartialian says. The service will allow residents to create physical objects that can take on personal importance or perhaps even come to have financial weight around the edges of SL’s in-world markets.
If you're interested in "porting" pixels into the real-word, the sculptural artist Bathsheba Grossman has published an informative PDF outlining her experiences and recommendations" (via Select Parks).
Link: Recursive Instruments' 3D Printing
Posted by Henrik Bennetsen
The other day I ran into Ren Reynolds inside Second Life. He is one of the authors behind the collaborative and always interesting Terra Nova blog. Ren is coming to California next month and graciously accepted our invitation to come visit us at campus. He’ll be here Monday the 5th of June at 10 and share his musings on digital identity and property and then we’ll have a conversation. If you’re interested feel very free to join us, just drop us a line for the details.
Posted by Henrik Bennetsen
If you visit our little island then you can see streaming video right there inside Second Life. I thought the “Chronicles of Narnia” trailer would be a good place holder for now, but lets get Lynn’s stuff up there first chance we get.
Posted by Henrik Bennetsen
After the good news of our funding the anticipation around this has been replaced by a more reflective mood in me. We started this project with a sense of excitement arising from the potential of the digital achieve to change how art is created and experienced. The scarcity effects of yesterday relating to money and finite spaces to display art are fading fast. Massively multiplayer games have taught us that highly social persistent spaces are accessible to people with a decent computer hooked up to a broadband internet connection. These worlds’ yield creative synchronous rich experiences that was impossible in yesterday’s world. But we know all this now, this can’t keep being news! What do we actually do with this and what are the challenges?
This got me thinking about precedence. After a while I ended up at cinema. When the ability to create two dimensional moving pictures was first discovered the potential was also obvious. You could make theatre available to a much wider percent of the population, so at first film was all about filming plays. Luckily this medium was further developed into the precious medium it is today. I believe that this is the task we have ahead of us. Let us try to do one better than merely translating Lynn’s art into something virtual. Let us discuss and investigate how we may come with a suggestion for a new language for art in virtual space. Because art that is native to this new medium deserves the respect its own language implies. This is what I believe we should be doing here.
Posted by Matteo Bittanti
In a sense, the digital self sees itself not in opposition to such a thing as a “real self”, but as an extension of our “first life”, that is, our existence in tangible, offline worlds. But our second life - the set of activities and practices that our avatar performs in digital spaces - requires by definition the previous one. Thus, one must not forget that there is a third life, which is the combination of the first and second lives. [yes, I am still thinking about Here, There, Noware]
The third life exists in multiple planes of realities. It occurs when we are simultaneously in first and second worlds. It’s the life of the cyborg, a human being whose body and mind is expanded by prosthetic devices and interfaces. A cyborg is not simply present: it is electronically present, dispersed, and multiplied. As Vivian Sobchack suggested in a seminal essay more than a decade ago,
“Electronic presence has neither a point of view nor a visual situation, such as we experience, respectively, with the photograph and the cinema. Rather, electronic presence disperses its being across a network, its kinetic gestures describing and lighting on the surface of the screen rather than inscribing it with bodily dimension (a function of centered and intentional projection)” (Vivian Sobchack, 138)
[from Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic 'Presence'," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfieffer (Stanford, Calif., 1994)]
Today, more than ever, our presence is distributed across a plethora of worlds. Our agency changes according to the conventions and limitations of the spaces we inhabit though our avatars. “Media determine our situation” wrote Friedrich Kittler in the introduction of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Kittler also argued that the subject speaks within discourse systems – and that discourse systems are constituted by the technological devices we create. It is not just a matter of technological determinism. The notion of the Heideggerian dasein (Being-There) needs to be updated because we are now living in multiple Theres.
Posted by Lynn Hershman Leeson
has anyone been able to create a place that alters itself each time it is entered? If we begin with the dante hotel, collapsing back into itself (as in the opening of the dvd) one could design it to collapse into itself and therefore time, and perspectives, but more about that tomorrow at 10 a.m. in sl
Posted by Matteo Bittanti
On May 2nd, 2006, I found myself scattered across various places and time zones. I should have experienced some sort of cognitive dissonance. On the contrary, it felt right
At 5 am, Pacific time and I was sitting on my desk in the Stanford Humanities Lab, headphones on, listening to the speakers’ presentations in Milan, Italy, for a conference on digital gaming titled games@iulm. One of the most intriguing lectures was Marco Cadioli’s insights from Second Life. Marco is a ‘net reporter’: he travels “across the net like a Japanese tourist in Europe, jump[ing] from a place to another” and taking pictures of everything he finds interesting. Marco showed his reportages from Camp Darfur at Better World Island, LOL-The Office, the worlds’s largest virtual architecture office (and here's Marco Cadioli’s essay from Digimag), Art in Second Life (and here's another article for you), and The Port, Second Life's artistic hub (here's more information). My presentation consisted in a live performance from Second Life, where I met Nosferatu Valentine, aka Valentina Paggiarin, a PhD candidate at IULM University. At 5 am Pacific Time = 2 pm Central European Time, my identity was equally distributed between the silent Stanford’s lab on the 4th floor in the Wallengberg building, an animated room in the IULM University’s sixth floor, and somewhere in Second Life. I was chatting to Nosferatu Valentine within the world of Second Life, while simultaneously answering the questions from the speakers via Skype, and using emoticons to interact with the audience in Milan. I was at Stanford, in Milan, and in Second Life: I was everyware and noware. Was it surreal? As I said, it felt tres real. It felt like being inside a Lynn Hershman’s installation.
PS
Games@IULM took place on May 2nd 2006 (9 am - 5 pm). Jeffrey Schnapp, Henry Lowood, and Fred Turner were amongthe speakers, albeit in video-interview. In addition to the conference, IULM organized a retrospective on Mauro Ceolin's game art. The exhibition, also staged at IULM University, will be open from May 2nd till May 12th 2006. Here are some pictures from the opening cerimony.
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