Room for Thought pairs two computer-generated video installations by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer that reveal a fascination with internal landscapes of the mind. Hahn’s single-channel, interactive video projection Luminous Point (2006) allows the viewer to take a self-guided tour of a virtual simulation of the artist’s Manhattan apartment, using a remote control to navigate a gamelike labyrinth of spaces derived from digital manipulations of photographic and filmic records. Where Hahn’s hybrid space incorporates images of the real world, Netzhammer presents a poetic world of pure invention. Premiering at SFMOMA, his new three-channel, site-specific installation Furniture of Proportions (2008) incorporates highly stylized wall drawings, animation, and sculptural objects to create an intricate spatial narrative.

Organized by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA’s curator of media arts, the exhibition occupies adjacent galleries and represents two generations of artists who have consciously worked with the computer as a formal artistic tool and means of expression. Both Hahn and Netzhammer combine a variety of traditional media with computer techniques in order to articulate a deep concern with the histories of philosophy and art. The artists also share an interest in human thought processes and the interplay between external images in the world and internal images in the mind. Undertaken as an open-ended investigation, their art is concerned with transience and states of change, and deals in surrealistic effects, associative thinking, and temporal multiplicity.

Alexander Hahn: Hahn (born 1954) is widely regarded as a pioneer of new media. His experiments with digitally reworked animations combine documentary film and video, photography, and computer-generated imagery, conflating reality and fantasy. Filled with associative, often cyclical image-streams, his work generally revolves around problems of representation—specifically rules governing individual and collective memory—and raises questions about what it means to perceive, store, and recollect visual knowledge in both time and space.

Yves Netzhammer: Zurich-based artist Netzhammer (born 1970) has become known for his graphically dynamic drawings, animations, and sculptural installations that explore the interconnectedness of things. Dealing in extremely reduced forms, his mainly figurative imagery intentionally blurs the hierarchy among humans, animals, plants, and iconic objects. This abstract pictorial lexicon—or, “thought-imagery” to use the artist’s term—functions more akin to a system of encoded signs that, uprooted from reason and familiar context, stand in opposition to the world of everyday images.

Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Support for this exhibition is provided by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

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.

Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the “meme”. Started from a metaphor used in Richard Dawkins popular writings, it has later turned into an approach in the study of self-replicating units of culture. In The Selfish Gene (1976) Dawkins used the term “meme” to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings” “it has causal agency” and can propagate.

Based on this concept Hocking developed a game prototype where the characters “shout” at each other “expelling” words as if they were fire breathing. This work uses interactive 3D graphics and a recombinant narrative system, with touch-screen interaction. When a character is hit by a words’ stream, he incorporates those words in his database of ideas. So characters will start to say similar things, and they’ll evolve till the entire community will end up saying the same things. “When the simulation detects that this endpoint has been reached, the screen fades to black and everything starts over from a random distribution of ideas, repeating the process of the society’s homogenization” Hocking says.

What’s missing here is the definition of memes as variance. Indeed memes are information copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and so human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by mimicry, and they compete for space in our memory and for the vital chance to be copied again. Since the process of social learning is different for each person, the mimicry process can’t be an accurate reproduction. The same idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. So the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. This is why Memetic Simulation no. 2 is more likely a metaphor for mass communication aggressive behaviors then a metaphor of the society’s coalescence. More properly it’s a “shout them up” game. - Valentina Culatti, Neural.

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.

Space Race #1 is a 3d simulation in which teams of autonomous elements compete for a mysterious green fuel, that allows for a spaceship, the only possible way of escaping, to take them to another planet, the next level of the game. The team members are always organized and operating according to the team’s internal logic, either it being looking for the spaceship and running to it, gathering fuel and working either together or independently. Each member is characterized by unique features and each group is organized in swarms that perform the required tasks in order to achieve their goal, conquering the spaceship and traveling to another world. When they arrive to the new planet, they alert the local population that they are ready to compete with them in search of fuel for the next spaceship that will, once again, transport them to yet another planet.
Space race #1 follows and repeats this logic endlessly, taking on the structure of an abstract computer game, where accomplishing certain tasks and defeating the enemy allows the team to reach subsequent levels. But reaching another level never brings the teams closer to the end of their missions. This space race has no visible end or any kind of possible gameplay for us to interact with it. It is an abstract generative fantasy that explores the language, codes and strategies of contemporary computer gaming.

André Sier works as a media artist-programmer. He has a degree in philosophy but studied also painting and sculpture. Sier creates objects involving audio-visual programming languages and has been showing them since the late 90’s , as well as collaborating with visual artists, performers and musicians. He teaches audio-visual programming since 2002.

Burak’s work touches on a number of the topics discussed here on Serial Consign, and he and I have spent the last few weeks firing emails back and forth that delve into economies of exchange, data portability, information visualization and how these themes are explored through his work.

Ever since your 2006 A Stock Market in Life project you’ve exhibited a fascination with incorporating the (data)aesthetics and interface of commodity exchange in a large portion of your work. You were one of the architects of OPENSTUDIO and also launched Meta-Markets last year. Both of these projects deal with trading and speculating on creative goods in quite distinct contexts. I stumbled across the word artonomics on the OPENSTUDIO site - could you discuss this term in relation to your ongoing project of creating platforms for economic simulation?

We made up the term “artonomics” to define the axes of arts, economics, and the participatory social web. In the PLW (Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab) we focused on building networked infrastructures for creative people, so that they can get economically more powerful and eventually affect politics. In OPENSTUDIO an artwork is a digital drawing. By the time a drawing is completed, it is in the market for sale. From your studio to the market there is no distance. When you buy a piece, you own a share in that person’s body of work. OPENSTUDIO members experience semi-ownership of creative capital. Well this type of living is the promised future right, what if you experience it now, future not only becomes more visible, but also actionable and debatable.

I am particularly interested in collectivity in creative work, which brings in techno-social protocols and economic models for self-organization of large groups of people. In such economic models money represents information. You buy things not because you need it but you show interest in it. In the end, I don’t necessarily consider this type of work as economic simulation or computer simulation, because participants spend real time and energy (aka micro-labor) within these systems. They draw, they click here and there, they decide on things, write comments, tag, mix, edit, vote, recommend etc. These are real relationships woven through experimental and modifiable protocols that organize network of social relationships and economic transactions.

I think today what we see on the social web is that the definition of creative work is changing. Is it an image, a movie, a sculpture, an installation, a process, a response? In this networked world, it is more clear to me that the substance of one’s creative work is not only a material, a recipe, or a code library, but it is also materialized information flowing in multiple layers of networks which are modulated by market forces, power relationships, past events, and future predictions.

[meta-markets performance & entity info for a bookmark of grand text auto]

Meta-Markets is essentially an exchange for social networking entities. In this simulation, social media like del.icio.us bookmarks or Feedburner syndication subscriber counts take on a life of their own and a community of speculators collectively determine the value of this data. I think one of the most interesting things about this project is that it creates a sort-of double presence for these services where users can determine the worth of individual articles of social media that stands outside of the generic web 2.0 chatter about valuation and venture capital. How do you see Meta-Markets in relation to the actual web economy?

The current web economy is not open enough. With Meta-Markets we aim to raise the bar of openness for existing social web services. I don’t mean the locked in data in Facebook or similar web services. I support efforts like DataPortability, these are very important steps to release our data from centralized databases. For us the problem is that the value of our labor is not open in the current web economy. In other words, what we get for our online work is not clear for us while it is clear for the service providers. This problem has been emerging because of the blurred boundaries between work and play, because information is no less real than physical matter, because information is commodity, because of the changing roles of consumers and producers, the prosumer phenomenon as discussed elsewhere. The solution is to have more transparent services, so that both the users and the service providers equally know the value of the work put in the services. Of course this is a complex task, that’s why we approach it collectively by creating a stock market for socially networked creative work.

[burak arikan / terms & conditions / 2007]

You posted an excellent commentary on the economics of Facebook which broadly outlined the disconnect between the bottom-up “social” investment by users and the top-down scramble by management to implement an efficient contextual advertising engine. You quite concisely identified the paradox as follows:

I work for Facebook everyday but I am not getting paid. In their recent Social Ads announcement Facebook says “It is an ad-supported service. It is a free service.” Pause. Did we sign a contract? How do you measure my labor and serve accordingly? I don’t know how you measure the value of my informational content, the value of my informational content uploaded by my friends to your server, the value of my relationships, the value of my activities…

Google’s OpenSocial begins to address the ownership that users are entitled to over their information and social connectivity. How do you see OpenSocial influencing the direction of Meta-Markets?

OpenSocial is hyper-modern politics, so is any other network protocol. Today defining standards and lobbying for the industry to adopt a standard are common political practices of the networked world we all live in. If standardization can happen by the participation of many voices, it becomes more democratic. Although I support current efforts to unlock the centralized databases, I don’t believe it is enough. The benefits of open communication standards are always publicly discussed from the point of view of the user or the developer, but who really benefits are the service providers. When you move your data anywhere, yes the user has the data anywhere, yes the developer builds write - once - works - with - any - other services, but the service provider is also happy because they have free context and free trust networks, which are generated by users’ labor in other places and carried to this service. We may call this distributed free labor. Data portability without ethics is the multiplication of the exploitation of micro-labor. When we use a service, the value generated by our action should be clear and open for all the involving parties. This is not easy, it involves political and economical struggles, but with the Meta-Markets community I believe we can make progress in this endeavor.

This conversation about transparancy and data portability is very interesting given your recent MYPOCKET project for Turbulence (pictured above). In this work, you’ve developed an algorithm to predict future purchases based off the analysis of an archive of receipts. Credit card companies employ similar algorithms to flag sudden shifts in spending habits so that potential credit card fraud can be prevented. I guess it is safe to assume you’re not doing R&D for Citibank so what exactly are your goals with MYPOCKET?

Spending habits are not only for prevention of frauds, but also for modulation of living. With MYPOCKET I see what my spending behavior is, this is probably what a financial analyst sees. I share it with general public to raise awareness and to make closed-door-analysis of our spending behavior debatable. MYPOCKET is also an exploration of the bidirectional adaptation between human and software. Between my behavior and the prediction process there is a feedback loop. Both negative and positive feedback. Positive feedback happens through confirmation of a prediction, which increases weight of that category / item in the database. Negative feedback happens through certain transactions, which have rules. For example a $40 ATM cash withdrawal means that I will not need cash for 4 days, approximately every $10 cash = 1 day, or a $70 metrocard spending (monthly unlimited ride for the NYC subway) means I will not buy a metrocard for another 30 days. These rules, some obvious some specific to me, are added as negative feedbacks in the loop. Over time the software will make smarter predictions about my spending behavior. Sometimes I verify the predictions, sometimes I don’t mind, sometimes I am not conscious, sometimes the predictions determine my future choices, creating a system in which both myself and the software adapt to one another.

[burak arikan / tense / 2007]

All of my questions have approached you as some kind of artist-economist - that is not entirely fair as it is clear you are interested in addressing other issues with your work. You obviously have an interest in the aesthetics of information, networks and connectivity. This is evident in the projects discussed thus far, but many of your other works (i.e. Meta-Control, Tense, Arb, etc.) Could you discuss your approach to visualization?

My interest in geometry ties my seemingly separate practices. Geometry provides instruments not only for organizing space but also for understanding concepts in political philosophy. I started creating dynamic visual compositions in 2002. Since then I work directly with the code, write processes that modulate the geometry and the kinetics, explore the micro relationships, observe the macro behavior, tune, play, contract, scale, stare, change, iterate. My early dynamic compositions are repurposed as peformative artifacts in Meta-Control. Arb and Tense are the same processes, an exploration of growth in networks. From few to many, from simple to complex, from instant contractions to subtle settlements, while the network is being built, nodes push and pull each other, connections paint the color of the forces.

I create systems, they are not visual, visualizations are the visual manifestations of an instance of a system. My OPENSTUDIO visualizations show relationships built in the OPENSTUDIO economy, Micro Fashion Network visualization shows relationships of colors based on how I generate the data. Rather than creating visualizations based on other systems’ data, I prefer to create the system on my own or through collaborations. Like Meta-Markets and OPENSTUDIO, these systems can be living processes which involve many people’s time, energy, and intellect. Manifestations can also be in physical or in other forms. MYPOCKET is a living digital/physical process, which is manifested in three core forms for information: a list, a graph, and an object.

More recently I understand that the systems I create are vectors, vectors as McKenzie Wark, or Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker use the term. A vector is a medium in which information moves. I hope and work for more people to create such liberated systems. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]

One week before the municipal elections, Fred Forest begins his think take for the future project. On this occasion, an initial theme will be developed from aesthetic, ethical, philosophical and social angle: Sustainable Development. In the the form of a simulated model calling out to our collective imaginations, Fred Forest furthers his Territory of the Artistic Square Meter project, first elaborated in a physical space (Anserville, 1977), then converted into a Network Territory on the Internet (Imagina, 1996), and now moved into a virtual space (Second Life, 2008). In order to access this space, you must first be on Second Life by making an Avatar of yourself.

Political personalities are invited to express and debate their positions on this question in accordance with their electoral agenda (A later press release will provide a record of these positions. Journalists will have to request to have their credentials approved in order to ensure their Avatar is present in real time). Aside from the presentations offered by various political personalities, access of the Experimental Territory Center and Social Laboratory is open to all.

Following the elections and over time, the Experimental Territory Center will advance other themes for debate thereby constituting a worldwide technology-assisted brainstorming thanks to the implementation of the capucine.net authentification card.

This reflection will take place under the auspices, authority and wisdom of the philosopher Plato whose cave shadows (in this instance, mathematical objects and entities) will be constantly present in the debating room in order to ensure, irony notwithstanding, that there is no clouding of judgement, clarity or authenticity.

The Internet users visiting the Center will have the possibility to appropriate the Territory’s interactive plots of land, visible on the ground, to pass their own message in the form of a hyperlink concerning the theme of the discussion. This page will be archived in a database. It will fill one of the Territory’s free plots of land. The Internet users are invited to communicate their URL to the following address: territoire [at] capucine.net. Only messages dealing with the subject at hand will be installed (settled) on one of the available plots of land.

The pink quadrangle at the center of the Territory, based on active plots of land, represents the original historical matrix of Fred Forest’s territorial matrix.

INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS

THE LABORATORY OF THE ARTS OF TORONTO (CANADA)
THE SLOUGHT FOUNDATION OF PHILADELPHIA (USA)
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF SAO PAULO (BRAZIL)
The LEBANESE ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS (LEBANON)
The UNVERSITY OF SALERNO (ITALY)
LEGROUPE AMI (FRANCE)
ASSOCIATION CAPUCINE (FRANCE)
GALERIE 10m2 SARAJEVO (BOSNIA)
FONDATION ITAU CULTURAL SAO PAULO (BRAZIL)

I’ll first give an overview of how the project works and then I’ll divulge into the nitty-gritty of being a menacing, virtual factory manager.

For Sundance, we set up a temporary store at the New Frontier on Main Street – Double Happiness Jeans. Designer jean styles include “No Pants Left Behind”, “MyPants”, “LowRider” and “Casual Friday” in either boot cut, skinny leg, relaxed or classic. Customers place their jean orders via streaming audio and video into the virtual factory. SL workers watch the stream projected on a wall of the factory Orwellian style. In an assembly line fashion, the first worker starts the production process that involves loading cotton bales into the Jaquard loom. Once the fabric is made it moves down the assembly line through each machine. Each worker stationed at a machine is responsible for selecting the correct option based on the customer’s order, men’s or women’s size for example. The worker also has a limited time to press the correct button otherwise the assembly line stops and the order has to start over. At the end of the production process, the jeans go through the SL to real life (RL) “portal” resulting in an output from a large format printer.

Customers at Sundance were able to watch the entire production process on a large flat screen installed in the physical space. Once in the real world, the jeans require simple assembly before being worn. Using what we call the pizza roller cutter, the jeans printed on a cotton canvas are quickly cut out and glue gunned together with stitched reinforcement on the crotch. (After many adhesive tests and many noxious fumes we found the glue gun to be the best and safest adhesive. Yet after sitting around in the jeans the glue became heated in the crotch area – need I elaborate further!)

So what was it like to run a designer jeans sweatshop amongst the stars? Well aside from the cheap thrill of having Robert Redford join my social network by signing my “MyPants”, the project raises some serious questions about the current cultural production of play and its relationship to outsourced, virtual labor. The project is based on research in motion economics, Taylorism and current goldfarming / virtual sweatshops.

In case you aren’t familiar with goldfarming, for over the past five years, virtual sweatshops have been springing up all over the developing world. These makeshift sweatshops, usually a small shop or apartment with dormitory-style housing, employ predominantly migrant workers and single mothers to work 12-16 hour shifts or more “playing” games. The job involves either digging/farming for virtual gold and other assets or leveling-up characters (power leveling). The virtual assets and avatars are then sold online for real world currency with the sweatshop entrepreneurs raking in the cash (a good resource on the topic and model of distributed filmmaking http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com and of course Julian Dibbell).

The role of play and use of game-based models in the workforce has become incredibly pervasive as exemplified in corporate culture (www.seriosity.com, www.thegogame.com), education (www.instituteofplay.org) and advertising (Chevron’s “Energyville” - http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energyville). As Deleuze states in “Society of Control”, society has evolved into a “school of perpetual training” where the educational system feeds the corporation and what better way than through the use of play and games.

We chose Second Life as our medium to explore the conflation of leisure / entertainment and labor within the context of play and game- based models. Second Life obviously does not follow a traditional game model. Although educational institutions are starting to populate the world for online training and archiving purposes (which I am not dismissing), SL is ultimately about consumption and simulating upward mobility. You can have your dream mansion, look like Anna Nicole in her good days and drive a slick hovercraft.

Throughout the project we learned a lot about our workers. In the early job interview phase, we asked workers why they wanted to work in our factory and what expectations they had. Common jobs in SL are either camping where you sit in one spot for a period of time to gain Lindens (SL money) or escort services that are very similar to real world adult entertainment. (If one has building or scripting skills, more money can be made but for now I’ll just focused on unskilled labor.) Almost all of the workers had tried the other jobs and wanted a “decent” job in their second life. Most treat their second life with the respect and dignity of their first life – they want a good job in order to live a good life with nice things in SL. Several had previous factory experience! Over several days of training sessions and throughout the work days at Sundance workers developed camaraderie, similar to what happens at RL jobs where you interact with the same people on a day-to-day basis. A similar camaraderie and the experience of fun on the job have also been noted in the world of the goldfarmers.

So how is our factory a sweatshop and furthermore, how do you create the embodied, visceral conditions of a sweatshop in a synthetic world? For the goldfarmers, the general worker demographic, the amount of hours worked, the dormitory-style living conditions and the pay (slightly more than agricultural work) closely resembles the scenario of many real world sweatshops. Plus we must consider the actual job tasks involved. Digging for gold and slaying virtual tigers for up to 16 hours a day is a very repetitive task that does not involve a steep learning curve. And I’m sure most people on this list are familiar with repetitive stress injuries such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and other neck and back strain incurred from prolonged computer use. Goldfarmers receive no health benefits either. At least not to my knowledge.

In our “sweatshop”, workers received 200 Lindens an hour, about $.80 USD depending on the daily exchange rate, for basically pushing a button. Workers also received a 500 m2 parcel of virtual land in front of the factory on Eyebeam Island that they can use for up to six months (TBD). This is about enough land for a medium size house and small yard. We set up the parcels with small shack-like housing to see how the factory village would evolve over the next few months. Some workers have chosen to keep the shacks while others have modified them to resemble more upscale dwellings or completely fantastical habitats. If we view this within the economy of SL, their lifestyle and salary could be considered blue collar to middle class. The worker could afford clothes (a pair of designer-like jeans in SL averages about 150 Lindens) and could work towards owning a small home but could not afford to own virtual property, the ultimate commodity in SL. Yet if we extend the virtual workers economics into the real world, they obviously couldn’t afford to live in the first world.

I realize our project is highly symbolic. Workers did not work full- time or overtime and worked from the comfort of their own homes. For the visitors/customers at Sundance, most not at all familiar with art and technology work or Second Life, the project got them thinking about how our products get made and about new models of production – telematic labor and a global, virtual workforce. Since the project resembled a retail store / kiosk, visitors were initially drawn to the crazy jeans hanging on our clothing racks. Everything you find on a real pair of jeans (pockets, belt loops, zippers) is printed onto the fabric but in exaggerated form becoming a characterization of the latest jeans styles – rips with knees sticking out, overly acid rinses (complete environmental hazard btw), the MyPants social networking jeans, the LowRider with boxers hanging out and a Double Happiness/Tommy Hilfiger logo (don’t worry Trebor we saved a pair for you). The jean prices were in both Linden dollars and US currency to show the relationship between the price of jeans and the workers’ wages. It was also interesting to hear feedback from visitors who had seen Alex Rivera’s film debuting at Sundance called “Sleep Dealers” that is also focused on telematic labor (and won 2 awards, yeah!).

What at first was the role of a retail sales person during the holiday season answering questions about size and fit evolved into a platform for discussing these critical issues with the general public (and many super smart kids!).

Although I could probably continue talking about the project for another 10 pages of email because it resonates on so many levels I’ll stop here. Our future plans include a potential showing at Fashion Week which I feel would be the ultimate success of our mission (if you have any contacts in the industry please send them our way) and an iteration that functions similar to mechanical turk is also on the table. Being good guys playing the role of bad guys has also made us think about ways to advocate for virtual workers rights, an issue Edward Castronova has been blogging about (http://terranova.blogs.com). I would also like to post / publish more about the project, specifically conversations with our virtual workers – job recruitment interviews, worker expectations, feedback on working in the factory. Maybe a virtual Studs Turkel’s “Working”.

And last but not least, I welcome your feedback on the project and thoughts/comments on any of the issues I’ve attempted to tackle. I’d be happy to share my resources/delicious links. More info about the project including press links is available on the project site along with SLurl: www.doublehappinessjeans.com

Visit the factory in SL: Eyebeam Island 204/43/27

My own site is www.pan-o-matic.com and my not-so-updated blog with related projects is at www.pan-o-matic.com/blog

Jeff Crouse’s work located at http://www.jeffcrouse.info (aka Supreme Hoodoo)

Look forward to continuing the discussion…

Cheers,

Stephanie Rothenberg
(aka Doctor Rodenberger)

Scott Kildall wrote:

Hi Stephanie,

Thanks for sharing the details of the project. This certainly articulates many of the odd aspects of the Second Life economy.

One thing that is particularly compelling about your virtual sweatshop is the co-operative element. Most of the other jobs in SL are solo operations: camping, dancing platforms or else services with a client: building objects, escorts, etc.

I was just on a panel called “Real World Implications of Virtual Economies” at the Floating Points symposium through Emerson College and Turbulence. This was following the Mixed Realities exhibition.

At the symposium, we discussed many facets of the economies of both Second Life and World of Warcraft. Some key differences arise.

In the practice of Goldfarming, the workers are often in countries in parts of Asia. Usually young men around 18 or 19 years old who are living onsite in dorm rooms with bunk beds and by day working 14+ hours to generate profits for their company and generating goods in the form of virtual characters for westerners. It mirrors the sweatshop labor practices in many ways — though diverges from them in a few.

For the Mixed Realities exhibition, Victoria Scott and myself showed a new work called No Matter which transforms imaginary objects (e.g. the Holy Grail, Time Machine, Schrodinger’s Cat) through Second Life and into the real world as paper replicas (thanks to OGLE by Eyebeam).

The critical component of this project is a study of the economy of Second Life: we paid builders and artists to make these objects for them and tracked the wages we paid them. What resulted are things such as a unique object of the Trojan Horse that cost us $12.00 to have built (over 25 hours of labor). In the process of working with people in SL, we gained a deep understanding of the economy.

One divergent factor is that virtual labor in SL (we also talked to campers, dancers, etc.) operates from developed countries. The sweatshop practices can mimic RL practices but without the real economic need, they are gesture rather than impact.

In reality, the wages garnered in SL are less than minimum wage for the people using it. In many cases, users probably spend more on their power bill than the wages earned.

The question then is why?

A certain psychology of desire is often at operation. Many users don’t want to transfer money in from their credit card — even though this would be the sensible decision. So they try to earn Lindens. Probably all of us in Second Life are irrational consumers but it still baffles me to see irrational producers.

The other thing that we discovered when working with the builders is while some of them were building objects for us to earn Linden dollars to buy goods for their avatars, many felt a connection with the No Matter project. They wanted to contribute to the final artwork. The amount they made served as a token of their time.

I also recall a conversation I had with someone in SL about a year ago. She wanted to do escorting in SL because of the novelty of it: the fact that you could try something like this without any consequences since there is no physical act and no social stigma (since most people on SL keep their identity private). From your description, it seems as if the desire to work in a virtual sweatshop as a project is part of it — and the fact that at the end of it, you can just quit Second Life and the virtual factory disappears.

Best,

Scott Kildall

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Remote
by Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa, Georg Tremmel

Remote connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the Internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa — remotely controlling each other. Communication between the two halves of this extended environment is a complex choreography coupling the environmental phenomena of humidity, temperature, light, speech, mist, wind, sound and proximity across the two. The object in Boston appears to be a seat; but, experientially, the Second Life space appears to be inside the seat. A similar alteration of scale occurs in the other direction. Visitors to the Boston space and the Second Life space must negotiate to achieve goals: e.g. by sitting down, breathing, touching, knocking, colliding. The environmental data of both spaces is publicly available in realtime via the EnvironmentXML repository enabling others to build devices and spaces that connect directly to both Boston and Second Life. The intention is to explore an architecture that is resolutely “human” (in the sense of being inhabited, configured and determined by its occupants) yet context-free (because it does not privilege geographical location).

Imaging Beijing
by John (Craig) Freeman

Imaging Beijing is the latest installment of Imaging Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. When a denizen of Second Life first arrives at Imaging Beijing, he, she or it can walk over a satellite image of central Beijing where they will find a networks of nodes constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoramic photographs texture mapped to the interior. The avatar can walk to the center of one of these nodes and use a first person perspective to view the image, giving the user the sensation of being immersed in the location. A web-cam captures live video of the user and transmits it to the head of an exhibition avatar. Dated links in the virtual space launch a browser, which opens a web journal of the Imaging Beijing field research.

NO MATTER
by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott

NO MATTER is an interactive installation that activates the transformation of imaginary objects through the Second Life virtual economy into physical space. Second Life builders construct replicas of famous buildings, luxury goods and custom-designed objects, first reproducing, then inverting the notion of value itself. With zero cost for gathering resources, production of goods and transport of finished product, these items proliferate widely and quickly. In the real world, consumer items and imaginary objects serve as forms of emotional attachment — projection screens for desire, fear and love. A 3D-simulated space, combined with a virtual currency and social interaction, Second Life is a fully functioning economy of the immaterial.

The Vitruvian World
by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele

In the 1st century BC, Roman writer, architect and engineer Vitruvius authored specific building formulae based on the guiding principles of strength, utility and beauty. For him, architecture was intrinsically linked to nature and is an imitation of cosmic order. The most well-known interpretation of this postulate is the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci in which the human form is depicted in unity with the square and circle - representing material and spiritual existence respectively. The Vitruvian World is a real-time immersive installation that embodies the principles of Vitruvius within a contemporary context. Existing in three distinct yet interconnected spaces, the artwork simultaneously embraces the virtual, the physical, and the network that connects them.

CATERWAUL
by Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and Brigit Lichtenegger

When someone screams in real life, do they hear us in virtual reality? Do they want to? CATERWAUL is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the internet. A physical wall in Boston operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds than they do communicating in real life. The cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, transmitted across the Internet and piped out of an “identical” wall in the virtual world Second Life. A website displaying a simulation of the wall allows other people, on the threshold of “real” and “second” life, to vicariously eavesdrop the wailing.

Mixed Realities is an exhibition 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 (10 Boylston Place, 6th Floor, Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life: SLURL).

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 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.

Mixed Realities on Turbulence.org was funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. We are deeply grateful for their support.

There is Still Time.. Brother is a commission for an installation that consists of an interactive projection for a 360° screen. The commission is rooted in the recording of a Wooster Group performance developed specifically to be viewed as a projection on a 360° screen. The video is revealed by way of a window that scans around the screen, never showing the whole of the projection at once. The window is controlled by an audience member or performer who selects which part of the 360° video to reveal at any given time. However, it is clear that the sections of the video that are revealed are all unfolding in one, continuous 360° space and that there is some kind of linear timeline to the sections of the performance that we are watching unfold.

This piece challenges the notions of linear narrative in theater or film by creating a time-based theatrical experience that can be experienced in a new way each time it is “performed” by the individual controlling the interface which dictates that which we see and hear in the immersive space of spacialized sound and projection. The viewer is involved in an immersive process of discovery where their chosen point of view creates the dramaturgy of the piece and literally activates the story.

It will have its European premiere at the ZKM in Karlsrhue Germany (December 2007). Commissioned by EMPAC, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [USA]. Produced by EMPAC together with the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research [AUS], and the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media [D] and in collaboration with The Wooster Group. With support from the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts.

Workspace Unlimited’s They Watch is also a commission for the 360° screen or other immersive projection space. Using a modified computer game engine, artificial intelligence, and an immersive projection environment, They Watch creates an ambiguous hybrid space where the virtual blends with the real, and where encounters with simulated characters challenge our ideas of presence, place, perception and identity.

Workspace Unlimited is an internationally renowned collective that creates virtual worlds and interactive installations at the point where art, architecture and digital technologies converge.