"Roberta Breitmore was for 9 years a private performance of a simulated person. In an era or alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction."]]>
Strange Culture - actors Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan
On Monday 22 January and Wednesday 24 January our experimental facility in the online world Second Life will host the première of Lynn Hershman's new movie "Strange Culture" as part of the Sundance Film Festival.
In 2004 artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a MASS MoCA exhibition that would let audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife's body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison.
Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia.
We have chosen to screen the movie on our island in Second Life because we are committed to exploring the intersections of the arts, humanities, science and technology, reaching out beyond the academy to address such matters of common concern.
Guests will include Lynn Hershman, Steven Kurtz and Howard Rheingold.
]]>Visit the new gallery space at Cayuga (105,122,72).
Scripted objects allow tracking visitors, altering the roomscape, etc.
Press clippings as billboards along "Columbus Avenue."
In "Room 47", wrapping up the meeting.
Seifert begins implementing some post-meeting ideas, constructing corridors in the Dante.
This plan could serve as a platform for a partial build, erecting just the portions of the rooms that will be the main focus (reg desk, room 116, and connectors) and leaving the remainder of the plan in place in this outline form. This relic could be accompanied by a more polished and immersive build across the street, constructed as re-enactment in contrast to the floorplan-based “recovered” structure. This might allow more freedom from the constraints of verisimilitude to adjust the immersive, interactive, "theatrical" version for usability, while the recovered ruin built on top of the floorplan serves more of a static preservation role...
At the dig, giving some thought to next steps...
]]> 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.
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
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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).
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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.
“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. ]]>