VolaVola is a film about human beings, about emotions becoming inevitably dull, even while we resist surrendering to habit, even as we continue striving for more. At its core the film is about the human desire to keep love alive and preserved from natural decay.

The plot specifically aims to disorient the viewer. As the story unravels it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what is actually real and what is not. Throughout the picture real avatars and real people interpret themselves while fictional
characters, both computer generated and flesh and blood, all play different roles.

VolaVola also deals in a sociological and sometimes even surreal way with themes such as hacker ethics and the values shared in a virtual society. These topics are far too often left out by science-fiction in general. The main message of the film is to defend those shared values, as they play an important part in our cultural heritage, past, present and future, and are helping us to build a better place to live for everyone.

The entire film will be set in Rome - both as the actual city and as a virtual one – in a world where it is now possible to meet characters coming from different virtual universes. Carboni has put together an incredible team of people to work with him in the SL Metaverse - including Machinimatographer Evo Szuyuan, Production Manager Fau Ferdinand, Builder Stella Costello and Costume Mistress Honey Fairweather. Expect cameos and special appearances from many Second Life personalities.

Volavola is an open project if you want to read the script and/or try to take part in its realization please contact Fly Me/Volavola via the facebook group or on myspace page. Fly Me/VolaVola is scheduled for release on 12/12/08.

Press Contacts:
In North America
Liz Solo
whoisliz [at] hotmail.com
709.754.6662

In Europe:
Nello Bologna
nbologna [at] email.it

Worldwide
Arnaldo Guido - Producer
arnaldoguido [at] hotmail.com

This dorkbot session will be of interest to developers, performers, machinimators, animators, photographers, and just about anybody with an interest to bring more expression to avatars and more direct ways to interface with our embodied selves.

JJ Ventrella (a.k.a. Ventrella Linden) will present the avatar puppeteering project. A project motivated to bring more expression to the avatar, by enabling a more fluid and direct way to manipulate the ‘physical avatar’. This is a Linden Lab project that unfortunately was ‘put to sleep’ as Linden Lab decided to focus on the stability of Second Life and internal opinions differed over how compelling the feature really is. Last month however, Linden Lab released the client source code of this project, to allow other people to build on it (and convince them otherwise).

Philippe Bossut will present Handsfree3D, a project that enables to interface with virtual worlds via 3D camera motion tracking. Philippe Bossut has developed several demos to demonstrate how one can navigate and execute all sorts of tasks without the need for a mouse and keyboard, and over the last month he has been working on connecting his code with the puppeteering feature.

Please visit the dorkbot SL blog for full information on the event, the projects and the presenters:

IM Evo Szuyuan for questions (or technical issues you might experience during the event).

Defense Coop is a forum that connects Second Life artists and builders with public defense attorneys throughout the United States to help illustrate scenarios, using 3d graphic movies (machinima), for the defense of indigent clients at trial.

“When a defendant stands trial, it is an agonizing experience. She faces the accusations of the District Attorney, the police, and any independent witnesses the State brings to testify against him. The police are trained how to talk to and persuade juries. They know to come across as affable, good natured people; they know to look at the jury when the speak; they know how to answer the District Attorney’s questions in a way that effectively narrates the events in controversy. They have reports that they wrote just after the events in controversy, which they review prior to testifying. They understand the elements that the District Attorney must establish in order to convict a defendant. Most importantly, they testify all the time - they have lots of experience in the courtroom, and generally feel comfortable there.” — Laura Baldwin (Red76 member, and Portland, Oregon public defense lawyer)

A typical defendant has none of this and is frequently faced with limited resources, compared to those of the state, to make a compelling, memorable, believable case to the jury. This is where Second Life simulation / machinima can be of vital use.

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide events around the redefinition of a growing digital infrastructure of moving images in public space. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place at Federation Square, Melbourne. Federation Square is a unique cultural and community oriented multimedia precinct, centred around a significant 38m2 public LED screen.

CALL FOR FILM & VIDEO and MULTIMEDIA PROJECTS

The Urban Screens 08 exhibition is looking for Artists, Urban Poets, Filmmakers and Multimedia and Interaction Designers to submit film and videos or multimedia, interactive or participatory screen based projects. A large diverse urban screens infrastructure is available at Federation Square.

Criteria: We are looking for existing and potentially adaptable projects that interrogate screen media as a medium| content and tackle the festival’s key themes of issues of building community and sustainability in relation to water. These two complex themes aim to provoke discussion and spark questions such as: What is community in times of the high-speed, global flows of the new media scape? How can we explore the diversity of water, an element, essential to the existence of life on earth?

For a detailed description of the event and curatorial framework see
www.urbanscreens08.net/art-+-events
For a detailed description of Fed Squares infrastructure see
www.urbanscreens08.net/technical

The projects should preferably employ one or more of the listed existing infrastructure of urban screens of Fed Square and should consider and adapt to the special circumstances of outdoor public spaces, transforming urban spaces to foster dialogue and community engagement. We are looking for:

A) Film and video such as

- Video art, text art, animation, animated slideshows, or fictional advertisements and community information (under 3 min.)
- Silent works especially for the joint broadcasting or daily screenings in-between (under 3 min.)
- Short experimental films, documentary and journalistic content (under 15 min.)
- Small curated programs of the mentioned type of works

B) Interactive, performance based or participatory projects such as

- Interactive software applications for urban screens
- Participatory community projects using creative digital practices
- Live media art merging performance and new media
- Community displays for education and exchange
- Virtual/real world hybrid projects using streaming content
- Real-time generated content
- Screen related sound experiments
- Digital storytelling projects
- Mobile games using urban space as social and educative playground
- Connecting mobile culture of locative media with urban screens

CALL FOR POSTERS

To bridge the Conference and the Multimedia Exhibition, we are looking for posters about the latest development of Urban Screens. They will be displayed in a public exhibition in the Atrium next to the conference venue. Conference will be encouraged to get in exchange with the authors during the breaks. Eight submissions will be additionally shown in an experimental presentation on the four outdoor I-sites around Federation Square. These are equiped with an integrated screen, which offer the possibility to present remotely via scheduled skype sessions, while the audience gathers in groups around them.

Criteria: Posters are aimed at presenting the latest development in this interdisciplinary field of Urban Screens. Posters are ideal for presenting speculative, late-breaking results of ongoing research projects, drawing important conclusions from practical experiments, for giving an introduction to innovative art works or new practical design applications, reports on cutting edge technologies and content management systems under development.

Posters will be reviewed by the Poster Committee, soon to be announced. Authors of accepted submissions must provide a one or two page summary for publication in the conference proceedings. Selected submissions will also be published on-line on the International Urban Screens Association website.

APPLICATION AND DETAILED CALL

Please have a look at the detailed calls and the official online forms for application, available here.

CONTACT: exhibition [at] urbanscreens.net (please use the subject “USM08 - question concerning the CALL”)

Best regards,
Mirjam Struppek

URBAN SCREENS MELBOURNE 08
Artistic Director

International Urban Screens Association
Rheinsberger Str. 68
D-10115 Berlin

A panel discussion and virtual performance event, From Cinema to Machinima will explore the many ways in which the digital medium has reconfigured, even transformed, the moving image and thereby redefined concepts of cinema. Whether through software processes or interaction by the viewer, image sequences have become discrete units that can be remixed in new constellations; indeed, once digital interactivity became connected to databases, the possibility of assembling and reconfiguring media elements from a compilation of image sequences opened the way to a host of new cinematic forms.

These emerging cinematic forms include database cinema, interactive narrative or non-narrative films, and machinima — filmmaking within computer games or 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life, in which characters and events can be controlled either by humans, scripts, or artificial intelligence.

The discussion will be followed by a short performance event in Second Life, which will be broadcast in the Lecture Hall. The panel and Q&A with the audience will be streamed live in Second Life.

Henrik Bennetsen works as research director at the Stanford Humanities Lab. He’s also the head of the Lifesquared research project, which is building a 3D immersive archive of the art of Lynn Hershman Leeson inside the virtual world of Second Life. The work was recently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and is planned for exhibition at SFMOMA in 2008. In Fall 2006 he was a part of the Stanford course The Human and the Machine, which used Second Life as a teaching tool. Bennetsen holds a MSc in Media Technology and Games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc in Medialogy from Aalborg University. He has a strong side interest in creative self-expression augmented by technology.

Char Davies is internationally recognized for pioneering artworks using the technologies of virtual reality. Originally a painter, she transitioned to digital media in the late 80s, becoming a founding director of the 3D software company Softimage. Her virtual environment Osmose (1995) is considered a landmark in the history of new media art. Davies has also published numerous essays on virtual space and in 2005 she completed a doctorate in philosophy (from CAiiA, University of Plymouth, UK). A monograph on her work Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality came out in 2007. Davies’ practice has expanded from “virtual” to “actual” place. She is currently shaping another immersive environment, on 500 acres of land in Québec. Davies lives in San Francisco.

Scott Kildall is a crossdisciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture, and performance. The core of his artwork is formed by material he gathers from the public realm. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Brown University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain, and Romania. Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Christiane Paul is the adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and a revised version of her book Digital Art (2003) as well as the anthology New Media in the White Cube and Beyond will be published this year. She teaches as adjunct faculty in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Digital and Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design, SFAI, and UC Berkeley. She has curated a number of shows at the Whitney Museum, including the online exhibition CODeDOC (2002).

Howard Rheingold is the author of the acclaimed books Tools for Thought (1985), The Virtual Community (2000), and Smart Mobs (2003). He has been the editor of Whole Earth Review, and The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, the founding executive editor of Hotwired, and founder of Electric Minds. Rheingold has taught classes on participatory and social media and virtual community at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is a visiting professor at De Montfort University in the UK. His current projects include the Social Media Virtual Classroom, an online community for teachers and students; the Cooperation Project, aimed at building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation; and Participatory Media Literacy.

Scott Snibbe’s immersive interactive artworks have been installed in over 100 art museums, performance spaces, science museums, and public spaces worldwide. His awards include the Prix Ars Electronica and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. He is the founder of two companies: Snibbe Interactive, Inc. and Sona Research. In 2007 he was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant for research in Interactive Narrative. Snibbe holds a BA in Computer Science and Fine Art and an MA in Computer Science from Brown University. He studied experimental animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught media art and experimental film at Brown University, SFAI, the California Institute of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and UC Berkeley.

Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Utterback’s extensive exhibition history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. Recent projects include a large-scale interactive projection on the San Jose City Hall commissioned by ZeroOne and the City of San Jose. Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College and an MA from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

In gaming parlance, what does "QQ More" mean? How does this relate to the concept behind your program "QQ More"?

QQ is an emoticon that means crying or sobbing - think two big round eyes with lil' tears. The program contains a few real tearjerkers hence the title "QQ More."

When and how did you start working on "QQ More"?

I've spent quite a few too many hours watching fan made machinima from MMOs on fan sites, most of which I would call "vanity videos" -- short films of players' tributes to -- themselves, set to emotionally charged music. Then one day I stumbled on a video called Rest in Peace Ignoramus -- a Norwegian World of Warcraft video made by a few guild members to commemorate a fellow guildmate's death -- the video's intended audience appears to be Ignoramus's family and his online friends. The video is uncomfortably intimate, and the production is very amateurish - it runs way too long, has terrible camera control, sappy music and no editing whatsoever but it still will bring you to tears. (Oh pathos, I cannot resist thee!)

After unearthing Rest in Peace Ignoramus and watching the infamous video by Serenity Now about the memorial massacre, I started a more systematic search through fan-made WoW videos and found a few other oddballs -- the selection for QQ More represents some of my finds that could be appreciated by gamer and non-gamer audiences alike. Last year, I compiled a shorter version of the screening for the Australian Machinima Film Festival in Melbourne, and since have added a few finds.

What do you see behind the development of this "real-world" genre of machinima? Do you feel like this is a phenomenon specific to gaming? For example, to my knowledge, this narrative genre doesn't exist in home video culture. Why would users gravitate toward this sort of video in the world of gaming?

The emotional attachment that playing MMOs for extensive durations forces a melding of the player with their playe character that essentially collapses the premise of roleplaying. That is to say, the hardcore players are no longer taking part in an act of "roleplaying" but are essentially playing as themselves in an alternate world as the relationships with real other human beings bring out..well..real emotions. In a single player game, say when a player character is disrespected, or in turn revered by an automaton NPC - the emotional weight of the encounter is emotionally inconsequential (unless it affects game progress in which case we are getting into another issue altogether..). In an MMO when real humans do the disrespecting -- there are emotional consequences for the players. All of this is old news in multiplayer virtual worlds -- think of the emotional attachment of players in text-based MOOs as narrated by Julian Dibble's wonderful book My Tiny Life.

What I find interesting about the machinima that reflects these more intimate and intense emotions is that they are made public outside of the game's immediate diegesis -- yet thanks to the internet and MMOs operating as a kind of feedback loop, do find their way back into the game world. Especially true in the context of World Of Warcraft which has gone mainstream or "post-geek" and represents a new type of fantasy based world in comparison with earlier MMOs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot -- which represented cordoned off sub cultural islands with very little dialogue with main stream culture.

Many of these videos represent elements of gamer culture that are still "officially" kept out of the game world -- sex, drugs, real violence, death, etc. -- but fan-based machinima, and forums postings become the spaces where these aspects of the gaming culture find an outlet, their expression in-game is repressed by the game companies censorship - they offer a glimpse into the subculture of the subculture.

RE: The idea of "vanity videos" or narcissistic self documentation that I mentioned earlier -- I think there do exist analogous practices outside of gaming, in mainstream culture and in subcultures -- look at surfing and skateboarding videos that show off physical feats, vanity videos made by soldiers, and the now ubiquitous form of the music video -- the band recording and then editing itself performing.

Your work similarly channels the slippery divide between fantasy and reality proposed by games like World of Warcraft. (For example, Tekken Torture Tournament, 2001) Can you comment on the connection between the quandaries explored in your own art practice and the "real-world" genre of machinima?

I am interested in all aspects of fantasy really, but I am specifically drawn to the moments and contexts where fantasy collapses unto itself unto "realism" in the various senses of that word, whether this uses the body as a site for this collapse, the sudden shock when humor turns to tragedy, fear, anxiety, or historical specificity.

RE: "QQ More" - I like these particular machinima because they represent this same sort of collapse of a seemingly banal and artificial fantasy world like World of Warcraft into something that, at least for me, succeeds in evoking an emotional response where 99% of fan-made machinima and the "narrative backstory" and "lore" of MMOs fail. [posted on Rhizome]

Beginning in the last decades of the 20th century, the increasing expansion of multimedia has made the digital synthesis of image, interactivity, non-linearity and intermediality not only ephemeral practices of contemporary art, but also prevalent and established characteristics of popular culture. These are also expectations and demands towards a contemporary cinematic work resulting in the creative processes, models of production, distribution and perception of a film art gradually moving away from traditional forms.

Do the contemporary experiments with digital techniques have a chance to invariably permeate the tools of film creators? How does the Internet change the appearance of film distribution? What influence will the narrative structures of interactive computer games have on the classic cinematic storytelling? Which of the ever-increasing repertoire of possibilities and promises of the digital media are liable to transform cinema as profoundly as did the expansion of video in the 80s?

The conference, organized by Media Desk Poland in programmatic co-operation with WRO Art Center is an attempt to present the consequences and possibilities that interactivity, mobility and multi-platform availability, along with the technological progression of communication tools, can contribute to film production and distribution.

Gathering arguments of artists, established international experts and practitioners from such interrelated fields as the theory of games, telecommunication industry, media sciences, sociology and media art, the conference defines the phenomena currently changing the state of cinematography.

Participants:

Richard Bartle, the co-author of MUD, the first multiuser narrative game; University of Essex, UK
Jakub Brzęczkowski, specialist in TV/VoD technology implementation, Orange/France Telecom, PL/FR
Mirosław Filiciak, media theoretician, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, PL
Paweł Janicki, independent media artist, curator and producer, WRO Art Center, PL
Piotr Krajewski, expert in contemporary art and media culture, WRO Art Center, PL
Michael Lew, media artist and research engineer, LEV Studio, CH/UY
Dawid Marcinkowski, creator of interactive music videos and the net-based film Sufferrosa, PL
Henk van der Meulen, television producer, musician and composer, NPS/IMZ, NL
Tom Putzki, author and producer of computer games, phenomedia publishing Gmbh, D
Aleksander Tarkowski, sociologist, Warsaw University, Creative Commons, PL

The summit, which takes place from February 8 - 10, at the USC University Park Campus in Los Angeles, will explore the incredible dynamic at play as millions of people flock to online video sharing sites like YouTube, Revver, imeem, Stage6 and Eyespot where they watch and contribute video content around the clock, 24/7. Webcast [Quicktime]; SLURL. More >>

Highlights Include:

• Panels and talks with speakers such as Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig and Howard Rheingold.
• Free public screenings showcasing machinima, documentary, video blogging, vidding, political remix, youth media, anime music videos and art videos.
• Lecture and hands-on workshops on video blogging, video standards, copyright, editing, machinima, animation, distribution, platforms and remix techniques.
• Networking and social opportunities at lunches, dinner, reception and birds-of-a-feather meetings.

The summit is the first event held at an academic institution to unite the creative minds involved in the spectrum of DIY video communities emerging in this new media ecology. The goal of the event is to catalyze relationships and dialog to further the public interest in independent video spaces as well as provide a showcase for new forms of work emerging from various amateur and grassroots video creation communities.

24/7: A DIY Video Summit is presented by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Screenings, plenary session and reception are free and open to the public. Academic talks and workshops require registration. See event details and registration information here.

Discovered via Bettina Tizzy’s Not Possible in Real Life blog, an already indispensable guide to quality content and artistic ambition in Second Life.

She’s built an early, “under construction” version of RMB City in Kula (direct teleport at this link), and just showed a version of it at the more recent Instanbul Biennale. This lovely machinima was actually created in another 3D engine, but it should give you an idea of what she’s planning to ultimately create in Second Life, a reworking of Beijing into a fantastic, dreamlike version of the city as it is, churning with new and old icons. I’d love to see this fully realized version in SL– and as it turns out, so would some major galleries in the art world.

“Paris Pompidou Centre and a couple major New York museums are planning to feature RMB City,” China tells me. But to make that happen, it’ll take a large crew of creators, which is why she’s looking for talented Residents to join the RMB City collaboration team.

She’s looking for builders and scripters, and if the project gets funding, some contract fees will probably be negotiable, she tells me. IM China Tracy or send email to sl.chinatracy [at] gmail.com. [blogged on New World Notes]