Virtual Worlds Art – The Avant Garden – Issue 28

Are You There?

admin — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 05:59:50 +0000

People sometimes ask me what I do. “I, ahhh….” “Virtual Interventionist” doesn’t fly in most circles around here. People don’t take too kindly to “New Media” artist, either. Recently I settled on “performance artist”. It’s just easier.

It all began innocently enough. I used to be in theatre. Standing on a stage, surrounded by set and lights, becoming a character and creating an illusion – this was really my first experience with the notion of virtuality. As I incorporated more and more media into my theatre creations I was compelled to surround audiences in the work so they too could understand this experience of existing in a virtual space constructed sometimes out of nothing but light and intentions. My performances began to take the shape of installations – audiences having to enter an environment and be in it with me as I projected images on the walls and ceiling and incorporated the audience into the story. It was after one of these installation/performances at the 2002 Networks New Media Festival in my hometown of St. John’s that I met visiting Vancouver artist Jeremy Owen Turner.

InWorld – a hybrid reality performance by Liz Solo. Image courtesy of artist.

Jeremy presented a talk about new online virtual spaces – places on the internet where one could simulate a presence in a three dimensional space and via that presence, interact with others. I was intrigued. He encouraged me to meet him in a virtual platform called OnLive Traveler for a demonstration. When I finally got the program to download on my horrible little PC machine (because Traveller couldn’t run on the mac) my big purple avatar head materialized on a flat plane. A box – Jeremy’s avatar – floated towards me. We came face to face and the box spoke. It said:

“Are you there?”

I was transported in that moment, and caught a glimpse of the yawning potential of this virtual space, where one could (re)incarnate one’s human self in a synthetic environment and commune with others. It was strangely immersive, in a way everything I was looking for, at least theoretically speaking. A door opened and I fell in. The next ten years would be devoted to exploring the possibilities of performance within these online spaces – fortuitous considering what was to happen to live theatre over the next decade (i.e. Death). Still, in answer to the age old question ‘How do you get the elephant out of the theatre?’ The answer remains – ‘you can’t – it’s in her blood’. Online virtual platforms became my stage.

OnLive Traveller’s greatest feature was its real time voice interface. It gave you a sense of intimacy, a real feeling of telepresence. Traveler had almost no other interactive features. Unless you could learn to create in 3D Max or some other building program there was no way to effect the world except by performance and interaction with others. Jeremy and I went about creating the Virtual Wedding Project, seeking an avatar bride for Jeremy’s avatar Count Onto von Distro. After much courting he was wed to the avatar Lady Lux Interior in a ceremony in Traveler that was simultaneously projected around an audience via RAVE technology at the Simon Fraser Institute in Surrey, B.C.. Possibly the first virtual wedding ever, the ceremony was overseen by my avatar (a high Priestess) and attended by a live audience and avatars from around North America.

InWorld screenshot. Image courtesy of the artist.

The very first virtual event Jeremy and I performed together was in a text only RPG called Achaea. Jeremy and I met in the Land of Minia at the Crossroads by the NPC Vellis the Butterfly Collector. Instead of getting our nets and heading off to collect butterflies, as per the game narrative, we invented a new religion on the spot and invited players to convert to the Cult of the Butterfly Collector. We began to worship the character with dance and ritual, using only text. As more players happened by our noob chars were soon surrounded and then, summarily executed. Kicked to death. We had become martyrs to the Cult of the Butterfly Collector. We returned to Vellis many times that day, being martyred again and again.

This theme was echoed a year or so later when the Second Front performed Martyr Sauce, one of our early pieces. Second Front, the first performance collective in the online world of Second Life, took the idea to a new level in this highly interactive new virtual environment. Our group of nine entered a user generated combat RPG sim. We arrived decked out in hippie gear with “free love” signs and peace particles, we handed out virtual spliffs. This time there were different responses to our presence, from bewilderment to appreciation to, once again, execution. We were martyred to the cause multiple times by bombs and machine guns.

Upside Down World – a hybrid reality performance by Liz Solo. Photos by Justin Hall.

With collaborators in Second Front and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (a virtual orchestra) I explored the notion of virtual embodiment and the avatar body itself. I investigated the curious cultural phenomenon in Second Life of virtual pregnancy clinics where avatars can have a birth experience coded for them and deliver a full term healthy bot baby in a virtual clinic – all for a price, of course. As part of this project my avatar stayed pregnant for about two years (without the aid of any clinics) until finally giving birth (at home) to multiples, including many of my avatar friends, in the performance piece – Live Alien Home Birth, first presented at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, BC..

When I first entered Second Life I was instantly put off by the consumerist nature of the space. So many shopping malls and sports cars and porn star avatars. But its dazzling customizability won me over in short order and this platform has yet to be bested in terms of users’ ability to generate content. Further, any content created by a user belongs to that user. Over the years Second Life has evolved an artist’s playground, housing a diverse and sophisticated creative community. It is a natural fit – an artist can create any space or object and script it to perform almost any action; the work is immersive; an artist can comment on the space, its nature, push its boundaries, make it crash. Then, streaming technology was introduced, becoming more and more sophisticated so that now any object in Second Life can stream any website or media feed. The real world has entered the virtual space.

In Second Life I have met artists from all over North America, Europe, Australia. I have connected with artists in China, South America and the Middle East. Through my collaborations with these artists I have performed, via the Internet, in corners of the globe I may never have accessed in several lifetimes of producing work. Through virtual spaces I have made meaningful connections with like minded artists everywhere. The overwhelming urge, now, after ten years working in virtual space, is to bring this virtual space back out into the real world, back to meat space. To merge realities. Hybrid- reality performance – bringing the real world in to the virtual and vice versa, is the current trend in digital performance. The merging of the metaverse with real space is quite inevitable, especially considering how quickly the technologies are advancing – only a few years ago we were constructing worlds with nothing but text. From the inside it has become clear that it is only a matter of time before the real and the virtual become inextricably intertwined.

What began as an investigation of the virtual game space as a performance platform has become something much bigger. I am a member of a community of avatars, avatars operated by human beings who are located all over the world. Deep friendships and working relationships have formed. Many of my online friends are more of a daily presence than many of my real world friends. Over time the urge to meet has seen many of us travel great distances to collaborate face to face. The world’s problems have become more immediate, more personal. Places that were once far away are now next door. There are no borders between us in virtual space. Virtual space is a free space. In some ways it is the wild west, the unknown territory. Its boundaries are shifting, they can be pushed, breached, hacked. For some people in the world these virtual spaces are the only places anywhere for envisioning and experiencing a peaceful world.

Third Faction’s “Demand Player Sovereignty”. Image courtesy of artists.

My virtual horizons expanded into World of Warcraft in 2009. I joined the Third Faction, a cabal of artists working to interrogate and expose the narratives and structures of gaming environments. We developed the /hug project and formed an NGO in the game to further ideas of tolerance and peaceful gameplay. Our most recent project Demand Player Sovereignty focusses on exploring virtual spaces as a medium for political resistance and social awareness. Our interventions and marches in World of Warcraft encourage real-world social change through in-world political action. We have been exploring ways to bring in-world action out into meat space with dual-world quests, some as simple as making a new friend or starting a conversation about peace.

A few weeks ago a group of artists converged in the new online environment DC Universe Online and we became the Super Art League. On March 3rd, 2012, the Super Art League, as well as the Second Front, will participate in the Low Lives: Occupy! event – an international platform for artists and others who support the Occupy movement. Low Lives: Occupy! will transmit live performances and interventions as they happen around the world. These events will happen simultaneously in real and virtual spaces and be projected and broadcast into venues all around the globe.

Upside Down World – a hybrid reality performance by Liz Solo. Photos by Justin Hall.

Now is the time to be raising our voices within online virtual domains, these communities that we have built, (albeit upon corporately owned entertainment products), before our freedom to navigate within them is gone. Terms of Service, which must be agreed upon in order to enter any virtual environment, exist to protect corporate interests while controlling the social structures within which users must operate. Like the Third Faction’s quest to subvert the factional conflict inside the game of WoW, we all inherently desire to control our own destiny and to exercise freedom within our communities, wherever those communities happen to exist.

Liz Solo is a cross-platform interventionist specializing in performance.

Art in OpenSim…

admin — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 03:10:15 +0000

by Thirza Ember for SWITCH magazine

For the best part of a decade, Linden Labs have provided a wonderful platform where people can create, buy, sell, relax, interact, and express themselves virtually. While some Second Life Residents joined the grid with the express idea of using it as a workplace and marketplace, the vast majority signed up with the idea of simply playing and relaxing. Of that majority, some, encouraged by the supportive creative atmosphere of SL, have honed their talent in fields such as fashion, music and art, and carved out careers for themselves.

But Second Life is also the ‘Old Europe’ of virtual platforms: it is crowded, pricey, and rather decadent. Creating virtual art with prims, textures, and scripts, known as ‘building’, may not create a messy studio it would in the real world, but certain requirements are the same – space, privacy, peace and quiet, and the opportunity to experiment. For many artists, the answer has been to look beyond the borders of SL, and head out for new worlds. What awaits them there?

Taken by Vint Falken in the New Rezzable Private Sim for Open Sim.

A new world means a new avatar. It is a time-consuming and frustrating business, trying to get comfortable with your new ‘self’. Objects you made in Second Life can be exported as .xtml files – provided you’re both creator and owner of all the prims and textures – but that leaves most of your ‘belongings’ stuck in Second Life. If Second Life is the Old Europe of the virtual world, OpenSim is most definitely Frontier territory, where pioneers have to make do, or make for themselves items that in Second Life they take for granted: hair, shoes, animations, and so on. It’s a steep learning curve, and a different mindset, more neighborly, less money-minded. The pride of making your own objects weighs against an acute awareness that your efforts aren’t a patch on the nice store-bought item you own in SL. That said, like any new frontier, things are in a state of constant change, and new resources, as well as SL-quality stores, are popping up all the time.

Technical problems in OpenSim can slow down, even cripple art projects. Second Life blogs may contain horror stories about Linden Labs’ unhelpful tech support, but Second Life is a well-oiled machine. OpenSim has a series of well-known yet maddening bugs, such as weird stuff happening when you edit parts in a linked object, or try to walk upstairs, or are looking for an error in a script. Constantly having to mend or rebuild your art can sap the enthusiasm of the most inspired builder. Grids are as good as the technical knowledge of their owner; you can’t rule out total grid failure, loss of inventory, sims going offline unexpectedly, and more. They’re also only as good as the physics engine the owner can afford: none can compare with the mighty Havok used by Linden Labs. Some grids have no physics at all, which can crimp your style if your art depends on scripts.

On the plus side, Open Sim offers space and privacy. No need to hide from prying eyes on a platform thousands of meters above the ground. There is no uploading charge for pictures, sounds and animations, so experimentation is a joy. At as little as $15 a month for a whole sim with 15,000 prims and no set-up fees, space is certainly not an issue. Avia Bella, for example, has 20 sims of mostly Steampunk environments on OsGrid. In Inworldz, artists like Alizarin Goldflake, Nyx Breen, soror Nishi, and Wizard Gynoid have been able to exploit the huge prim count to revisit and expand on Second Life art. No need for megaprims in OpenSim!

Once, SL was teaming with Universities and private individuals alike, who were willing to host artists studios and installations. With LL’s more austere pricing policy, many of these patrons are gone, but in Open Sim it’s another story. Craft Grid’s Licu Rau hosts a number of educational and artistic sims. Jeri Rajha of InWorldz, donates sims to a galaxy of 3D artists. Miguel Rotunno organizes art openings with live tango music at his OsGrid gallery. There’s the portability of a sim-on-a-stick, or a mini-grid which can be attached at minimal cost to a bigger ‘world’, like Zonia Capalini’s Condensationland, available via OsGrid. The mini-grid provides a layer of protection from content theft and censure. Ruben Haan’s sim Kleideraar is the classic example. Art shows in Second Life usually last a few weeks; for sim- or half-sim sized installations, a month is about the limit. In Open Sim, time is rarely a factor.

What is a big factor is exposure. Those residents in Second Life who come in-world to relax and play are the audience at virtual art shows. They vote in competitions, buy art, compliment the artists. Convincing them to make a new avatar so that they can visit your non-SL build is not easy. Log-in problems, and ‘new world lag syndrome’ often drive away even enthusiastic visitors. Like any Frontier community, those who venture into OpenSim are producers, not consumers. They support one another’s art, but the level of community infrastructure is low. Interactive groups and significant community events are rare; less rare the sense of lonely wonder one feels on a small grid, where there’s literally no-one else online. Where groups have formed, there’s a warm spirit of collaboration and sharing; no sign (as yet) of the petty jealousies and bitter rivalries that exist in the SL art scene.

Social networking can help herd the diaspora, but ex-Second Lifers often dislike Skype, Facebook and Twitter too, making it hard to stay in touch when one has a foot in multiple virtual worlds. Hypergridding, no longer the scary beta experience it once was, is helping, but time differences among the small pool of users make it hard to plan gatherings, and of course places like InWorldz, Avination and Spoton are closed worlds, like Second Life, so one hyper-gridding avatar for all grids will remain the art tourist’s Shangri La.

OpenSim is pure frontier, in constant flux. Every week and month it grows a little more stable, less buggy, more united, and sees the arrival of new goods, people and ideas. It’s not for the faint hearted or the attention whore, and hopefully never will be. But anyone who contemplated it more than six months ago and decided against moving should go back, and revise their view. Second Life, like Europe, will always be there, but Open Sim offers an unsophisticated, fresh alternative, a brave new world, where art is just getting started.

Painting Data: When Art Goes Virtual

admin — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 02:54:57 +0000

Oberon Onmura

If we consider an artist as fundamentally an agent of creation, the question then arises “creation of what?” And when the artist is creating within a virtual environment, that “what” begs additional discussion. In my view, an artist takes what is available from the surrounding environment, manipulates it physically or conceptually, and presents the result to an audience. Creation, in this sense, is a sort of “feedback loop” where the artist responds to the environment by adding to it, thus altering it, and then responds to that altered environment, changing it further. The creation process, then, is dynamic, and fully dependent on artists’ ability to “tune in” to the environment they inhabit.

In the physical world, artists have available a wide range of materials to work with – paper, rocks, paint, metal, chalk, clay, etc.. But each material has a limited range of available options for shaping, coloring, or otherwise manipulating that material. The process of creation, then, in the physical world, is largely one of transformation of materials. Paint remains paint before and after it is applied to canvas; the transformation of “paint” to “painting” realigns the material in conformity with the artist’s vision. The result of the artist’s work is (usually) a unique physical object that can be transported, displayed, and purchased. The art product that is ultimately purchased is not the paint, canvas, and wood, but the artist’s transformation of those materials into her notion of art.

By contrast, in a three-dimensional virtual environment, there is no material for the artist to transform. The artist is, in fact, manipulating data into patterns to create new information. Only when that information is instantiated within a virtual environment (requiring an appropriate set of hardware and software) can it take on properties and behaviors that can be manipulated – transformed – by the artist, and ultimately viewed by others. There is no “object” to transport, display, or purchase; there is only data stored in disk drives on servers. Digital information is, by definition, infinitely replicable, and so cannot be thought of as unique in the sense that only one exists in the world. What is unique, instead, is the artist’s ability to organize patterns of data in such a way that they are recognizable as the work of – and only of – that artist. What the artist can sell, then, is access to those unique information patterns, and, by extension, to the hardware/software systems required to instantiate the information.

Oberon Onmura. Kinesis. Second Life.

While this mode of artmaking (and hopefully art marketing) may seem conceptual almost to the point of being unfeasible, the fact is we are accustomed to using – even purchasing – unique patterns of data that are unattached to and not representing any physical object. A perfect example is downloading an ebook into an ebook reader. The “book” we are purchasing is, in fact, a set of unique patterns of data designed to be instantiated into alphanumeric characters by the reader. There is no need to purchase a physical “book object” in order to gain access to its information (and there is no reason to create one in the first place). We only need to purchase the data patterns themselves as long as we have a way to translate that data into characters we can parse in order to gain meaning from them. The owner of the data is selling access to the data; the result for the buyer is the ability to read the patterns of information in the ebook reader.

In pointing out this fundamental distinction between physical and virtual art, it is not to make a case that privileges one above the other, but to introduce the concept of virtuality as defined by N. Katherine Hayles in her book “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,Literature, and Informatics.” (University of Chicago Press, 1999) Hayles defines virtuality as “a cultural mindset … perceiving information as more mobile, more important, more essential than material forms [emphasis the author’s]. Artists working in threedimensional virtual environments represent the essence of virtuality, since they create and manipulate information rather than materials in a purely conceptual art practice.

Once the connection to material objects is removed from the creation of artworks and replaced with manipulation of patterns of information, what then is a reasonable basis for assessing the monetary value of the resulting products? Viewers of the work cannot directly see the data that creates the work, and would not see meaning in that data even if it were possible. And since digital data is infinitely perfectly reproducible, the previously ironclad law of supply and demand fails, as well. So what can we use as a reliable metric for asserting that some work is good and some is better?

One answer to these questions – and unfortunately not a good one – is that it is too soon to tell because there is, at present, no market for three-dimensional virtual art outside the virtual spaces themselves. And not much of a market within those spaces, either, I’m afraid. When a market does arise, the market itself will begin to find ways to assign value to virtual artworks. This will require a new kind of critical dialog, a new way of discussing art, and a new set of cultural touchstones that help us understand an art form that is “more mobile, more important, more essential than material forms.”