Gekitora choreographs both dancers and avatars. It is fantastic experience for him to choreograph avatars, because artist can share only pure movement of motion with many users in Internet. Now, A series of four dances can be tested with the dance-pad. A free body expression act is done in the weightless space. Those expressions reminds users of the space suit of “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

I think that Metaverse tends to imitate space recognition of the physical-world with gravity, and those expressions might be able to works in more multi-dimensional environment after the development of virtual environment, such as Second Life. This challenge produces the space recognition with the movement of the body without the wall and the floor might be a prototype of “Architecture in Metaverse”. The activity of Gekitora in the future will come to be excited.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjEvpq1m7Q

Everyone can test it freely at NikkeiBP here.

In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments. The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces.

SwanQuake is a surreal semi-abstract inhabited world, home to a series of potential encounters. These may be theatrical and dreamlike, sometimes uncanny perhaps even frightening, at times quotidian and familiar. It’s these interactions that inspire curiosity, wonder and the desire to continue looking and sensing. However, despite the title ‘mashup’ of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here.

SwanQuake: The User Manual opens the project up to discursive reflection and expansion through its selection of articles and essays. In the first section, the User Manual takes you through some of the processes of making SwanQuake including sound composition, choreography and computer animation work. Also in section one is a modicum of do-it-yourself instructions and two views on Igloo’s work in relation to the wider field of digital arts practice and culture. In the second section, the User Manual broadens the scope of the discussion to include the ontology of game art, analysis of perspective in 3-D spaces, ‘uncanny’ realism and collisions between game artistry and commerce. With essays by Johannes Birringer, Helen Stuckey, Shiralee Saul, Bruno Martelli, Ruth Gibson, John McCormick, Katharine Neil, Alex Jevremovic, Adam Nash, Helen Sloan, Stephen Turk, Marco Gillies, Harry Brenton & David Surman. Reviewed here.

Igloo make intermedia works exploring the poetices of time, space and natural phenomena. Questioning the reality of nature and how it can be influenced by individual experience and collective mythology. Employing many of the tools of the military EC recently they have investigated the role of the’real’ in virtual environments.

Igloo are Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli who have earned a string of accolades for their artwork including a NESTA award for SwanQuake, a commission from the Royal Opera house for Goodbye Venus and a BAFTA nomination in 2002 for WindowsNinetyEight.

The idea of a separate set of needs for ones Second Life is both absurd and fundamental. Abraham Maslow provides an interesting hierarchy for us that other than a few differences lays over the synthetic world very nicely, however avatars are not the people they represent and as such do not have the same needs. The Virtual Environments class at UCSD takes a look at the difference and similarity in this space, this borderland between avatar and human and reflects on different aspects of need for both.

The exhibit runs the gamut from a reflection on need in classic video games to views on identity and a left handed look at our surveillance society. Projects also tackle loftier more abstract subjects such as the positioning of governance and faith in the synthetic realm.

There will be a scheduled “end of life” performance at 7:30, and musical accompaniment throughout the night. We have a limited amount of “Free Parking” available on a first come first served basis and the unusual snackbar included.

Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

CUTTING THE EDGE. Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, Sandy Baldwin and Gary Manes have been working for the past several months at the Virtual Environments Laboratory, West Virginia University, Morgantown. Sondheim will be presenting the results of that research, which involves avatars, human modeling, phenomenology of virtual lives, choreography, motion capture, and a host of other issues.

Some of the work has been completed with renowned dancer / choreographer Foofwa d’Imobilite, based in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. The modeling includes distorted and misconfigured mappings, crystal and other radio mappings of the environment, and other material which literally cut the edge, live on the edge of software, hardware, and real-life environments, including Second Life, Brooklyn, West Virginia, and spaces internal to 3D modeling programs. This work is supported by National Science Foundation (WVU) and New York State Council On The Arts grants.

The prolific Alan Sondheim has been a regular part of the Personal Cinema Series for many years and this program contains his usual collection of surprises, sexual meditations and formal adventures. He has been constructing audio and video, performing, and inscribing within cyberspace since 1994. Since that time he has been working on an “internet text,” a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body and virtuality.

Brooklyn is Watching is a project sponsored by Popcha, a New York based media technology company, and taking place simultaneously at the art gallery Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, New York and in Second Life. A performance space and presentation / sandbox in Second Life have been set up for this. (Teleport directly from here) An avatar, in the shape of an eyeball and under the name Monet Destiny will view and project the goings-on there at all times onto a large screen monitor at the Real Life gallery.

A computer at the gallery will run the Second Life application at all times when the gallery is open (every day from 9am to 3pm SLT, except for Tuesdays and Wednesdays) – via the eyeball avatar Monet Destiny - and when visitors to the gallery so choose, they may drive the avatar and take it wherever they want. The BiW avatar is scripted to follow anyone who approaches the stage, if its not receiving any commands from a person at the gallery. The stage itself, is rigged with a giant spring that raises the stage suddenly and violently when someone in the tower presses a special button, catapulting anyone on it, off it immediately. This creates a ‘gong-show‘ effect where people in the gallery can express their displeasure or boredom with the activities on the stage.

Avatars will be able to send a jpg snapshot to the gallery and anyone inside the gallery will be able to email snapshots back to the BiW avatar. A dedicated blog will document the exchange and other activities.

A weekly podcast called Brooklyn is Watching will be recorded at the gallery featuring ‘guest stars’ from both the Real Life art world and Second Life. The format will be unabashedly patterned after Diggnation, a popular podcast about tech-news.

Jay Newt: Brooklyn is Watching is about “cultural colonialism,” marketing, the attention economy, critique, dialog, power-relationships, and the difference between potential and actual with four parts spanning the virtual, 3d space of Second Life, the two dimensional “traditional” Internet and the ultimate hipster mothership, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is an artwork, an entertainment product, a venue for critical dialog and a marketing vehicle. It also will be a hell of a lot of fun…” Continue reading Brooklyn is watching (us) by Bettina Tizzy.

A series of artworks were completed during the research to aid in understanding the nature of virtual surveillance; as a method to examine outcomes; and as an experiential interface for viewers of the research. The artworks investigate a series of surveillance perspectives including parental gaze, machine surveillance and self-surveillance. The outcomes include considerations into the influence surveillance has on player behaviour, security issues pertaining to the extension of corporations into virtual worlds, the acceptance of surveillance by virtual communities, and the merits of applying artworks as proposition.” From Avatars and the Invisible Omniscience: The panoptical model within virtual worlds by Christopher Dodds [PDF]

Becoming Dragon: Stage 1 - Overview: I am interested in exploring the question of how technology can facilitate new somatic practices of gender and sexuality beyond male and female and even beyond the limitations of what we consider human. Using a conception of identity and a process of social interactions and feedback loops, I plan to use the online public space of Second Life as the site of my investigation.

While Marshall McLuhan said that “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” I am interested in the time after that. What is the process by which we shape our avatars and then our avatars shape us and then we reshape our avatars and on and on? In the Lacanian Mirror Stage, an infant tries to achieve the image of themselves that they see in the mirror when they mistakenly think they are standing on their own. How does this process continue in a feedback loop and develop into new conceptions of self beyond our current conceptions of our own limits?

“The becoming-woman serves as a point of reference, and eventually as a screen for other types of becoming (example: becoming-child as in Schumann, becoming-animal as in Kafka, becoming-vegetable as in Novalis, becoming-mineral as in Beckett)… There is no such thing as woman per se! No maternal pole, no eternal feminine… The man / woman opposition serves to establish the social order before class and caste conflicts. Inversely, whatever shatters norms, whatever breaks from the established order, is related to homosexuality or a becoming-animal or a becoming-woman.” - Felix Guattari, Becoming-Woman

The Performance

I would like to experiment with long durational performances of non-human characters in Second Life. How much immersion is possible? Transsexual people are required to live for a year as their chosen gender before being allowed by their psychologist to get their Gender Confirmation Surgery. Could this be replaced by virtual living?

Many contemporary performance artists claim to be doing performances “in second life”. I would like to try to get a little closer to this claim by waking up and falling asleep “in second life”. My initial plan is to do up to 30 days “in second life”, but I may have to scale back to 14 days.

There is a long history of durational performances in performance art, such as Teching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980 - 1981 (Time Piece) [5], Marina Abramovic’s “When Time Becomes Form” [6] and her series of durational works, Joseph Beuys “I Like America and America Likes Me“, and Chris Burden’s “White Light/White Heat” [7] where he lived in the gallery. How does the duration of the performance change its effect? Can the identification with an Avatar or a virtually constructed identity be pushed farther than it is with frequent users of these environments? Can one live “in second life”?

During the performance, I would be available to an audience both in Second Life and in the physical space of CRCA at Calit2. There are a number of interesting options for audience interaction such as the display wall, having multiple screens / computers in the performance space and even having an additional immersive environment where a viewer could participate. How can technology facilitate a powerful, interesting, compelling performance simultaneously in physical and virtual space?

Technical Approach - Augmented Reality

The goal here is to develop a working, immersive Augmented Reality system, to port a motion capture and head mounted display to control a character in Second Life, an Online Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).

[Some Second Lifers use the term “Metaverse” over MMORPG to emphasize SL’s very different “Magic Circle”. In SL, the game is a very different one, less an escapist fantasy world of play, or a more mature projection of identity in an economy with real currency and a capitalist business culture designed to soften the connotations of gameplay … - BS] [8]

My initial conception of this project is to model my physical environment to enable me to live in the virtual environment for extended amounts of time. This is an approach of Augmented Reality, where the physical world is mapped into the virtual. Of course, Augmented Reality is a misnomer, because Reality itself is a mediated state, it seems a better term would be Augmented Bodies.

The plan would be to use the following components:

* An immersive head mounted display (HMD) The display would allow me to move around in my physical environment within calit2 and still remain “in game”. Head tracking would help to provide a realistic feeling of immersion and audio is built-in to the device as well.

* A motion tracking system. The Performative computing lab at CRCA houses a Vicon motion capture system, which allows real-time motion tracking data to be sent to a windows pc. Using these signals, I would be able to map my physical motion in the real world back into game space, so that, for example, I could easily get to my food source or to the restroom.

* A computer running second life, receiving the data back from my physical interface and sending them to my character “in game”, allowing me to participate in social interactions.

Limitations and Challenges

A number of “fundamental” components of “virtual reality” are not met by Second Life, or are hard to meet.

* One main issue is stereoscopic or true 3d vision. Can Second Life be augmented / configured to send out two video feeds for the same character?

* Another issue is the question of the Second Life API’s and how much interactivity they facilitate. How can we send the Vicon motion capture system signals to second life to map into “in game” gestures?

* Another hardware issue is the HMD. Many HMD’s are heavy and not designed for long term use. In addition, having screens so close to one’s eyes for an extended period of time is very strenuous. I plan to discuss the possible stress effects with a doctor at UCSD.

Timeline and Plan

In the spring 2008 quarter, I will be teaching an advanced elective in the Visual Arts Department entitled “Collective Art Practice - Networked and Performative Approaches to Challenging Power” with final projects in Second Life. If there are students who are interested in collaborating with me, they may work with some of the above mentioned hardware and software, collaborating and working towards the technical solutions to the above problems. You can read more about the class here.

I plan to develop the technical components of the project between June and October, with a goal of doing the performance in November or December.

Conceptual Background and Frame

For more conceptual background and to see the other stages of my Becoming Dragon project, see Becoming Dragon.

Footnotes

5. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-year-performance/video/1/

6. http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/28029

7. http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhbur75.html

8. BS - contributions from Brett Stalbaum

[posted on SPECTRE]

FatherBoard, The SuperAvatar @ Share 2008 - Robot Art
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YVgmJ16zhY

Participants include: Burak Arikan, Drew Baker, John (Craig) Freeman, Eric Gordon, Usman Haque, Drew Harry, Scott Kildall, Gene Koo, Pierre Proske, Michael Takeo Magruder, Victoria Scott, and David Steele.

Mixed Reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects can co-exist and interact in real-time.

Mixed Realities is an exhibition and symposium that explores the convergence—through cyberspace—of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks. Mixed Realities links and overlays the Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life). Second Life is a shared, synthetic, 3-D environment through which people can interact in real-time by means of a virtual self or avatar. Although it’s an imaginary place, it is often able to “masquerade as real” (Richard Bartle) because it approximates reality persuasively enough to facilitate player immersion. Audience members – who will be embodied as avatars in Second Life, browsing the works at http://turbulence.org, and/or be physically present in the gallery – will interact with the works and with one another. Thus, Mixed Realities will enable people who are distributed across multiple physical and virtual spaces to communicate with one another and share experiences in real time.

Five works were commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. specifically for the Mixed Realities exhibition (February 7 – April 15, 2007). Collectively, they combine sensor, video, sound, streaming, webcam, projection, processing, world wide web, and 3-D technologies to produce immersive, interactive and participatory performances and installations. They allow audiences to experience real and fictional places simultaneously in Imaging Beijing and The Vitruvian World; debate the value of virtual labor and currency in No Matter; communicate physical data from multiple sources through Remote; and question mediated communication itself in Caterwaul.

Twitter Fountain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF59hA8xIC4

Daden Limited is a Virtual Worlds agency based in the UK.