The DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. The conference theme this year is to promote discussion around new collaborative environments, collective knowledge and redefining disciplinary boundaries.

The aim of the conference is to: * Establish a site for mutually creative exchanges of knowledge * Promote discussion around new collaborative environments and collective knowledge * Encourage and celebrate the connections and tensions within the liminal spaces that exist between the Arts and Humanities * Redefine disciplinary boundaries * Create a forum for debate around notions of the ’solitary’ and the collaborative across the Arts and Humanities * Explore the impact of the Arts and Humanities on ICT: design and narrative structures and visa versa.

There will be a variety of sessions concerned with the above but also with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and theorising around practice. There will also be various installations and performances focussing on the same theme. Keynote talks will be given by our plenary speakers who we are pleased to announce are Sher Doruff, Research Fellow (Art, Research and Theory Lectoraat) and Mentor at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, Alan Liu, Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara and Sally Jane Norman, Director of the Culture Lab, Newcastle University.

In addition to this, there will be various round table discussions together with a panel relating to ‘Second Life’ and a special forum ‘Engaging research and performance through pervasive and locative arts projects’ led by Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham. Also planned is the opportunity for a more immediate and informal presentation of work in our ‘Quickfire’ style events. Whether papers, performance or other, all proposals should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA.

The Deadline for submissions will be 30 April 2008 and abstracts should be approximately 1000 words.

Cambridge’s venues range from the traditional to the contemporary all situated within walking distance of central departments, museums and galleries. The conference will be based around Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Site, particularly the West Road concert hall, where delegates will have use of a wide range of facilities including a recital room and a ‘black box’ performance space, to cater for this year’s parallel programming and performances.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” Rex Bruce, director of the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, will be screening a video he directed that uses public domain imagery from the US Military (also playing at the Centre Pompidou).

Holly Willis, Director of Academic Programs at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, will be presenting on art in Second Life, focusing on creators who are cognizant of the formal and ideological implications of virtual worlds.

Jack Lerner, Acting Director at the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, will give a talk on research he has been conducting in relation to music sampling that looks at defects in the market and proposes changes.

Finally, we will be joined by multimedia designers Chris Weisbart and Michael Wilson who will explain how they are using open source technology in museums and will give a live demonstration of a holographic projection system they’ve recently built into an interactive exhibit.

All the presenters of course will touch upon the interaction their various topics play with CC licensing. So come out and join us for what is bound to be an eye opening night, and yes, there will be free (as in beer) drinks.

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects, including Guy Debord and Gilles Ivian (also known as [Ivan Chtcheglov). A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism’s theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for “player” navigation and transformation of urban “psychogeographic” zones (what we might call “ludic architecture”), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity. These proposals all have direct relevance to what MacKenzie Wark calls our contemporary condition of “Gamespace.” (MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007)

Lesson 1: Freeing play

A promising tactic for the early Situationists was the unpredictable yet forceful potential of play — what anthropologist Victor Turner termed the “liminoid,” or the freeing and transformational, moments of play when the normal roles and rules of a community or society are relaxed (via Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures, Open University Press, 2006). After these temporary (TAZ like) situations “players” settle once more into fixed roles. The Situationists proposed to adopt this liminoid “subjunctive mood”, when anything can happen, the carnival, Anarchy Online the RPG, the Society of Creative Anachronisms, into a more general approach, a way of doing and being in the everyday, in order to transform material life with ludic actions.

“We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it. Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type.” Guy Debord, (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Situationist games do not respect the boundary between play and work, leisure and non-leisure, between “real life” and Huizinga’s “magic circle”, the separation from “normal space” that facilitates immersion in games and play (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play). Situationist games are not sports and are not relegated to sports stadiums, arcades, or Playstation home entertainment set-ups. Situationist games bleed into the city, the workplace, the buyplace, the personal computer, the mobile phone, public and private transportation and communication, and into and inside escapist rule-based game environments themselves. In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

Lesson 2: Wretched winnings, or challenging competition

“The feeling of the importance of winning in the game, that it is about concrete satisfactions — or, more often than not, illusions — is the wretched product of a wretched society.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

The Situationists were critical of the competitive aspects of play, Callois’ “agon”. For them, competition was complicit with capitalism, with the British working class fan’s mindless absorption in football, with the struggle to obtain material goods, investing in lucrative defense stocks, doing whatever it takes to be the last Survivor on the island, playing to get the biggest family home in the Sims neighborhood. The Situationists, like avid gamers, rejected the capitalist derived division between production and consumption, active work vs. passive leisure. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that an element of competition might be necessary in their games:

“The only success that can be conceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its powers..[ ]..play cannot be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect.“ Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

In our adaptation of Situationist games, perhaps we allow for a degree of competition, among other motivating playful components. Moreover, for the Situationists, ludic actions were also ethical navigations, and therefore the goal of a competition should always be questioned. (Guy Debord, Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

Lesson 3: Virtual game worlds: Toward a ludic architecture

“The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism, October 1953 printed in Internationale Situationniste #1)

Situationist Russian architect Gilles Ivain imagined a “playful-constructive” movement through a city’s “psychogeographic” zones, urban zones defined not only by streets, buildings and businesses but also by how people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project. Or as Guy Debord later wrote, while describing the now famous Situationist notion of derive, or drifting through a city: from a derive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. High speed surveillance cameras tracking shopping patterns in stores like the Gap map these hidden currents, a time based techno-capatilist development of the study of psychogeographic zoning the Situationists did not forecast for their fledgling “science.”

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive, Les Levres Nues #9, November 1956, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958)

Beyond the remapping of existing cities as psychogeographic zones, new city forms were imagined. In “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, from the first edition of Situationist, Gilles Ivain describes a futuristic situationist city’s quarters, and public and private architecture that would be in continuous flux and modifiable according to the whims of the inhabitants, including zones such as a Bizarre Quarter — a Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — and a Sinister Zone. It is this last example that games have provided countless imaginings, and Ivain described the Sinister Quarter in a way that predicts the contours of many video game worlds:

“The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes, those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters, that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov, (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

In contrast to a current rule-based “algorithmic” emphasis in academic ludology publications, some game researchers such as Chaim Gingold and Henry Jenkins have made convincing arguments for the importance of spatial poetics in structuring game play. (Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons, Master’s thesis at Georgia Tech, 2003, and Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture in the anthology First Person, MIT Press, 2002) This latter approach can be informed by the psychogeographic characterization of the city provided by the Situationists. Rather than seeing games as solely algorithmic rule machines, there is a significant attraction in players’ exploration of virtual game spaces provided by games like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and the classic exploratory Myst.

Activities within these games incorporate spatial puzzles and goals tied to specific psychogeographic locations within the virtual game environment or city. For level design of more action based shooter games like Halo and Quake, ludic architectural design of multiplayer fighting terrains, (for hiding, for sniping, for jumping, for flying), and the placement of enemies and obstacles are a significant portion of game level design. The avid gamer’s extensive time involvement in level modification, as was once common with PC games like Doom, Quake and Unreal, is motivated by a desire to focus on and transform not the telic aims of the game but the paratelic space of the game world itself, invoking the Situationist’s call for modifiable, changeable architecture.

“Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

Lesson 4: Situationist games beyond the virtual: intervening in real cities

Situationist games are not necessarily confined to virtual digital game space. Guy Debord describes the original Situationists playful exploits into Parisian cityspace:

“Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the derive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive)

This description, like much of the Situationists’ practice, anticipates the emergence of new forms of game play as art practice today, most clearly in the example of the London-based artist collective Blast Theory. Blast Theory projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You reinscribe urban space with the rules and scenarios of their games. Can You See Me Now? players carry GPS modified devices which contain a simple graphical Pacman style game interface displaying the location of other players in the city. Running panicked through the city streets of Rotterdam in the first performance of Can You See Me Now?, players tried to escape these non-corporeal pursuers who were less restricted by the actual geographic and urban obstacles such as traffic and traffic lights, pedestrians and hills. Similarly, Uncle Roy All Around You repurposed existing city infrastructure like pay phones and car rides to play a mysterious detective style game on the streets of London. Clues and game play advance through text instructions to players’ mobile computers and planted “actors” (who seem like artificial intelligence players in a computer game played by humans). Blast Theory explained:

“The city is an arena where the unfamiliar flourishes, where the disjointed and the disrupted are constantly threatening to overwhelm us. It is also a zone of possibility; new encounters.” Blast Theory

Converging ludic activities and “real” cityspace are not the exclusive domain of Situationist inspired artists. The Situationists did not foresee that mega-players within the “superstructures” would also engage in playing their games. For instance, during the annual E3 game industry conference in 2003 in Los Angeles, the United States Army staged a “playful” publicity stunt for their free recruitment shooter game America’s Army. They catapulted soldiers from a helicopter into downtown Hollywood. Passersby on the street were confused and frightened, and civilian city space became militarized through an intervention blurring the distinction between a soldier’s job and playing soldier in a game. The use of game tactics and play to equivocate and familiarize urban warfare has become increasingly common. In one of the most extreme examples of the post-9/11 military shooter games, KumaWar presented gaming as analogous to soldiering.

This episodic game enterprise released shooter game missions based on current American military events in Iraq. In KumaWar, whose designers regularly solicit advise from a retired United States general, the player always is an American soldier battling “insurgents” in Iraqi cities. Distinguishing civilians from insurgents becomes an important skill for success in the “game”. Again city space (civilian space), military space and game space are conflated.

A Situationist-style game more covertly complicit with militarization of civilian space through ludological means was the innovative I love Bees designed by Jane McGonigal. Microsoft hired McGonigal, then a doctoral candidate in ludology at the University of California at Berkeley, to design a viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for their upcoming X-box release of Halo2. In public places like pay phones, players of I love Bees retrieved information and advances in the game story (a sci-fi “War of the Worlds”-like scenario leading into the storyline of Halo2). When they received game information players would make an ironic military salute (echoing the gestures of futuristic American style soldiers in Halo) and were thus able to identify other I love Bees players in public places like concerts and streets. ILB players posted many photos of this military salute on the web. Overall, the civic space of the city became militarized — even if for a fictional conflict.

Lesson 5: A dash of Dadaist negativity: illegality as play

“The dadaist spirit has nevertheless influenced all the movements that have come after it; and any future constructive position must include a dadaist-type negative aspect, as long as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten superstructures [..] have not been wiped out by force.” Guy Debord (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Debord, after describing the role of Dadaism in combating “stale bourgeois culture” and fascism in post-WWI Europe, postulated that a dadaist-type negative aspect would be a necessary component of Situationism as long as undesired social structures were still in existence. These conditions continue today — rapidly globalizing capitalism, imperialist exploitation and increasing militarization, border closures and increasingly hedged in civil liberties in the post-9/11 War on Terror are some powerful present day “rotten superstructures”. Beyond the apolitical or complicit works described above, Situationist tactics have also been adopted as tools in activism.

One artist group who have been playing some urban interventionist, Situationist-like games with a dose of Dadaist negativity is Yo Mango, an Italian/Spanish art collective based in Barcelona. Yo Mango, slang in Spain for “I steal”, regularly stage playful actions such as potlucks where every dish must contain an element of stolen food, Tango dancing in a chain supermarket while stealing, and distributing stylish Yo Mango patches to cover the holes left in stolen clothes by cutting out the plastic security clip. (They recommend stealing only top designer brand name fashions.) Some members of Yo Mango are also loosely connected with the European Squatter Movement, an organized youth movement in opposition to private property who also participate in other activist activities like protesting against gentrification.

Mexican Artist Rene Hiyashi is another artist creating ludic interventions in public space. In India and Argentina he has realized playful architectural structures for street children. In 2006, in collaboration with Mexico City based artist Eder Castillo, Rene Hiyashi created Guatamex, an imaginatively constructed island with computers with Internet access for illegal immigrants, floating on the river dividing Mexico from Guatemala. (His own laptop keyboard was water-damaged during this project.) Like the anti-corporate antics and publicity stunts of the Yes Men and Rtmark, the older public interventions of Critical Art Ensemble, and many of the political art actions that took place during the 2004 New York Republican National Convention, Yo Mango’s and Rene Hiyashi’s artwork can be described as ludic activism in which societal rules (the laws) are willfully broken. Within activist culture itself, maybe since the anti WTO demonstrations in Seattle of 1999, Dadaist humor and ludic activities are more prevalent. (Brian Holmes, The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance, Nettime 2003)<

Lesson 6: Games inside games: Interventionist tactics in virtual spaces

In their handbook for game designers, Salen and Zimmerman repeatedly emphasize the importance of the “magic circle” and the investment of the player in a separate, pretend space of play (whether abstract or photorealistic, virtual or non-digital). They stress the pleasure in following the rules of games within the clear-cut boundaries of this magic circle. Situationist gamers, however, are more akin to the creative cheater, the game “griefer” or the hacker. They blur the peripheries of the magic circle, taking pleasure in changing the rules of the existing gamespace, which they see as problematic in a fixed state. Situationist mods and hacks intervening inside preexisting games can be more entertaining than the original game.

For instance, the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Second Life has been playfully manipulated by the avatar Gazira Babeli, one of the members of the Second Front collective of Second Life artistic hackers. Her Gray Goo hack was an infestation of Second Life space with out-of-control repetitive self-replicating objects, inspired by nanotechnological disaster scenarios. Grey Goo took various forms, from endless Mario character replications to rampant Velvet Underground bananas. It was so effective it slowed down Linden Lab’s game servers, interfering with game play system-wide.

Babeli’s COME.TO.HEAVEN similarly exploited a loophole in Second Life which allows players to create gigantic avatars in proportion to the Second Life world, resulting in unexpected interesting glitches. While the identity (identities) behind the Babeli avatar are kept secret, the code for her Second Life interventions are always made public by posting it online so others can learn from it and reuse it.

A similar, Situationist-themed interventionist game strategy is offered by Pierre Rahola, a French gamer and DJ. During the early phase of the US war on Iraq, Rahola and his collaborators would spray anti-war graffiti inside online shooter games. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2005, he admitted that “intervening in games is more fun than playing the game.” Around the same time Pierre and his friends were playing online shooter games with an activist edge I began a body of work I would describe as situationist gaming. In collaboration with the artists Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, we initiated Velvet-Strike, tagging the then-popular online soldier shooter game Counter-Strike with anti-war graffiti. Velvet-Strike was not only visual modification but also included “recipes” for disruptive actions designed to interfere with regular Counter-Strike gameplay, like one for making friends with your enemy. Recipe for Friendship:

1. Find a Counter-Strike server with 0 or 1 other player on line. (If you go to an empty one most likely someone will show up to see who you are.)
2. Shoot a few times at your enemy.
3. Tell them you are newbie and ask them to show you how to plant the bomb.
4. Ask them which country they are from.
5. Ask them all about themselves.
6. Arrange to meet another time.

Operation Urban Terrain (OUT) was another project I initiated to warp an existing gamespace — the free US army propaganda game America’s Army. With OUT, I wanted to counter the convergence of military and civilian space with a kind of activism that merged virtual urban game space wirelessly with cityspace. I invited many people whom I had met online through Velvet-Strike to participate, including Chris Birke, one of the original Counter-Strike game texturers, Mexico City architect Luis Hernandez and Pierre Rahola. We projected our live performances onto the walls and surfaces of Manhattan and Brooklyn, connected wirelessly to five players around the world during the NYC Republican National Convention of 2004. I matched virtual locations within the America’s Army game servers with physical New York City sites, projecting a live performance of a virtual sit-in inside a tunnel with yellow taxis onto a building in midtown Manhattan, where there were many yellow taxis, and pairing a red brick warehouse in the game with a brick building in Harlem. For the last location I merged a live soldier dancing performance in the popular America’s Army map “Bridge” with projection onto the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Riot Gear for Rollartista, another game inside a game, was a series of machinima performances calling attention to European and British police abuse of Islamic and African immigrants, with players wearing padded “riot gear” costumes designed in collaboration with artist Talice Lee. In the first performance of the project, two player/performers roller-skated around the small Spanish city of Castellon projecting the Playstation2 games Narc and Mechwarrior from an ultra light projector attached to one of the player’s helmets, (technology had developed since the heavy battery and projector of OUT). At each projection location in the city, one player “roller-danced” and handed out flyers with stories of immigrant abuse to interested passers-by while the second player performed with a portable Playstation, controlling a dancing policeman character who violently beats up on civilian city dwellers.

Conclusion

The Situationists predicted an age of expanded ludic possibilities for artists and for anyone. Paraphrasing and remixing both gamer Rebecca Cannon and Situationist architect Gilles Ivain, we are bored with shooter games. We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. We are frustrated with our governments and the military superstructures that control gamespace. We don’t want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place. Anyways, even if we had fun playing those games to begin with, it is now more entertaining to mess them up, or to invent new unsanctioned games inside gamespace. If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it is time for Situationist gaming.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming will be resented next week at Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain. [via nettime]

Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them. — Plato, Meno

In September 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the recipients of its $20,000 artists residency in the 3-D online virtual world of Second Life. Dodds, Nash, and Clemens were awarded the grant to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork which explores the possibilities of literary, music / sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within the virtual world. The artwork is a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a computer interface.

[Image: left to right: Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman)]

BabelSwarm, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, uses voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3-D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The letterforms generate relationships with each other through a combination of visual and sonic manifestations, fragments of narrative, environmental / user awareness capabilities and through interaction with existing data generated within Second Life itself such as the virtual winds, sunrises and sunsets. According to Justin Clemens, Second Life is an already burgeoning platform for today’s art. ‘Every era has a form that exemplifies it: in Shakespeare’s time, it was the theatre; today, it’s Second Life. It’s a question of trying to meet the new challenges of a new time - and the new spaces that it generates, ”Second Life epitomises the innovations of contemporary technology and culture: an entirely virtual world that has entirely real effects,” Justin said.

According to artist Christopher Dodds, Second Life is a step in the right direction for Australia contemporary arts practice. “It is encouraging to see the Australia Council recognising virtual worlds as legitimate environments for artistic practice, and while we thought our idea was solid, we knew the grant would receive a lot of attention and some pretty spectacular applications,” Christopher said.

Read more here [PDF] and here.

To gain access to Babelswarm you need to register an avatar name, download the Second Life application software, and then log-in to see the virtual world. This can be done in three easy steps:
1. Go to http://secondlife.com/ and follow the “Get Started” link. This will allow you to register an avatar name, download the application and then log into Second Life.
2. New users go to an instructional island where they can learn to walk, fly talk etc.
3. When ready, click on (or paste into a web browser) the following link: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ACVA/119/180/295/ Follow the instructions and your avatar will arrive in the Babelswarm foyer.

Read Bettina Tizzy’s interview with Adam Nash here.

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.

Think virtually. Buy locally. Invisible Threads - a virtual sweatshop - will be operating live from Second Life and Eyebeam as part of the Synthetic Times Beijing Media Arts Symposium closing reception. The mixed reality performance explores the politics of virtual labor through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the online, 3-dimensional world of Second Life. Simulating a real life manufacturing facility that includes hiring Second Life workers to produce real world jeans sold for profit, the project provides an insiders view into current modes of global, telematic production.

During the evening visitors will be able to order a pair of Double Happiness Jeans through the factory’s just-in-time telematic manufacturing process. Customers in the real world place their jean orders to the workers in the virtual factory via streaming audio and video. The workers, avatars controlled by humans sitting at computers around the globe, operate textile machines on an assembly line that produce the jeans. Styles include “MyPants”, “No Pants Left Behind” and the “LowRider”. Video.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a “cut-up narrative”. By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950’s-70’s as a method to “break the linearity” of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs’ The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life’s construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

Improbable Architectures deals with Second Life as a space without parallel in the material world. It is a project developed by Noema Gallery team for the exhibition Memory of the Future, produced by Itaú Cultural. In different terrains, we build improbable architectures: in suspension, transparent, without columns, using only liquid and aerial sources to compose original forms which allow to anyone to navigate in its interior and exterior spaces, crossing its walls and merging with its structures. We depart from Otto Rössler concepts about endofisics, and its unfoldings in the Chaos Theory, in order to produce a space that challenges our perception and react to the interacter’s presence, being reformatted and mutating by its guests.

Improbable Architectures is a project by Giselle Beiguelman and Vera Bighetti, with Juliana Constantino and Lalai Santos. Visit Improbable Architectures in Second Life.

Sites / Places / Spaces of collecting breath: These are website based entries into SL: it seems to work better with Safari. The locations may get flexible as we get going. We’ll be taking photos and machinima for Gallery exhibitions. You’ll recognise us, we’re the Breath Collectors!

1. East of Odyssey: (co-ord 66,27,39) - 5 minutes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/East%20of%20Odyssey/66/27/40

2. Odyssey_Art and Performance Simulator (85,12,22) - 10 minutes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/128/128/0

3. Ars Virtua Convening Space (5,56,41) - 15 minutes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/5/56/41

4. Caerleon Isle - the palace of memory) (137,49,32) - 10 minutes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Isle/134/51/32

5. ABC island (131,136,41) - 15 minutes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ABC%20Island/128/128/0/

6. The Junkyard (135,180,73) - 10 minutes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Wastelands/111/154/73

Likewise, humans have long sought escape from the physical world through both stories and invention, creating “imaginary objects”, which embody the tension between the ideal and the real. These shared cultural artifacts surface in mythology (Holy Grail, Trojan Horse), literature (Tell-Tale Heart), film (Maltese Falcon), thought experiments (Schrodinger’s Cat) and impossible inventions (Time Machine). Second Life, an online social environment, offers similar possibilities of the imaginary. With 3D-simulated space combined with a virtual currency and social interaction, this is a fully functioning economy of the immaterial.

NO MATTER reflects this tension between the imaginary and real economics by (1) commissioning 25 builders and artists to produce 40 cultural artifacts in Second Life space; (2) paying them in Linden dollars at an equivalent scale of $1.50 to $12.00 per object; (3) extracting the objects from Second Life — a closed system where 3D models cannot be exported; (4) inviting volunteers to reconstruct these as 3D paper replicas in physical space and paying them the equivalent wages in Linden dollars.

NO MATTER is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Mixed Realities exhibition. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Teleport to the Ars Virtua Gallery in Second Life.

BIOGRAPHIES

Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He has a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Brown University. In 2006, he received a M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain and Romania. In the fall of 2006, he finished a conceptual art residency called The Future of Idea Art at The Banff Centre for the Arts. He followed this with a six-month fellowship at the Kala Art Institute focusing on remembrance in simulated worlds. He also works with Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Victoria Scott is a visual artist who works with electronic media, sculpture and social relations, both materially and as conceptual metaphor. For over a decade she has researched and created large-scale installations, objects, digital prints and audio works. Her ongoing projects include the material depiction of personal simulations and psychological spaces within online environments and real life. She is also developing a series of batteries that are charged by emotional energy and microorganisms. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Victoria graduated from the New Media/Photo Electric Arts Dept., at The Ontario College of Art & Design. In 2003, she was awarded the full Trustees Scholarship to attend at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago within the Art and Technology Department. Scott completed her MFA in 2005. She has exhibited in Sweden, Mexico City, Toronto, Berlin, Boston, Miami and Chicago and is the recipient of grants from both the Canada and Ontario Arts Councils.