Peregrinations

Oh dear, so much for my good intentions of trying to write here reasonably regularly. My Second Life activity has been rather sporadic of late. Not that I’ve lost interest - quite the contrary really: I find myself bookmarking tons of stuff I see mentioned in weblogs, but somehow I rarely manage to find the time to follow it up. (And incidentally, talking of weblogs, I recently discovered Not Possible IRL by Bettina Tizzy, and that is fast becoming one of my favourite sources of information about cool content in SL - heartily recommended (if you aren’t reading it already!))

I’m prompted to write today because yesterday (via Twitter) I discovered an announcement of a music event in my home town of Bristol which is attempting a live linkup with SL, streaming audio and video from the physical venue into an SL space and projecting video of the SL space into the physical venue. It’s a club night called D.R.O.I.D., at the Trinity Centre on 23 February, with Luke Vibert, Various Productions, Bass Clef & Vexkiddy. I don’t know the people who are putting it on (though, one of the partners, Qu Junktions, has been responsible for some great gigs in Bristol over the last few years), but Bristol does strike me as having the sort of arts scene that would be quite open to experimenting with this sort of thing, and I’m kinda surprised I haven’t noticed anything similar before now.

The SL venue seems to be an island called Prados Azules, which I think is owned by a Barcelona media company called Mosi-Mosi (who provide the Sloog SL bookmarking system).

Via a post on the SL-Ed mailing list a couple of weeks back, I came across Second Life Messenger, a (Windows only, at the moment) desktop IM client for Second Life, developed by Rizwan Virk.

The tool is based on the libsecondlife client library. It looks and behaves like a typical basic IM client, but you login with your Second Life avatar name and password, and it talks to the Second Life server, and the list of contacts available is the list of your SL friends who are online at that time. (Edit: Actually, this list didn’t always update for me, so there may be a bug there, but you can enter the full name of an avatar to send a message to anyway.)

It’s probably worth emphasising that when you log in to Second Life Messenger, you are actually logging in to SL. And although the IM client doesn’t render your avatar’s SL surroundings to you, to other online SL users, your avatar appears in world at the location where you last logged out. So if you last logged out on a busy dancefloor, or on stage in a conference hall, that’s where you’ll appear to other users in the vicinity, even though the SL Messenger client provides no indication of their proximity, and whether they are attempting to chat to your avatar in world (or indeed perform any other actions on your avatar, like push you off stage or into a swimming pool….)

Also my avatar seemed to appear “Ruth-ed” whenever I logged in using the client, but that may have just been an intermittent SL glitch!

One of the questions that occurred to me after trying this was whether the idea could be adapted/extended to include the ability to detect and chat to avatars in the vicinity. And before I’d even mentioned it, Art was on the case….

The Man, Burning Life

Originally uploaded by Pete Johnston

This is a post from my Flickr account to test whether I’ve configured Flickr correctly to post to Peregrinations.

The image is a snapshot of the Man from the Burning Life festival a couple of weeks ago.

From New World Notes, I came across a list of their recommendations for the “Top 10 Art Installations of Second Life” and I’ve been trying to find time to work my way through their list.

But to be honest, I could probably spend days just exploring their first choice, a quite spectacular exhibit called “Full Immersion Hyperformalism” by DanCoyote Antonelli (in RL, DC Spensley), which is hosted on the New Media Consortium’s Arts & Letters sim.

It’s difficult to convey a good impression of what this exhibit is like, to be honest - it really takes advantage of Second Life as a “medium” and requires that you see/experience it in SL. You arrive (if you use the SLURL above) in a “reception” area which includes some instructions for changing settings in the SL client, and these changes make quite a significant difference to the way you perceive the components of the exhibit. So you are reminded that not only is the perception of space and movement different in SL from in the physical world, but even in SL your perceptions vary according to all these different parameters.

The centre points of the exhibit are a number of huge, crystalline sculptures which shift in form and colour as you approach them, and these are surrounded by a number of smaller pieces, sculptures and “paintings”, almost all of which have some dynamic aspect to them and respond to the viewers movements or actions.

What for want of a better expression I’ll call the “viewing infrastructure” of the exhibition is also fascinating in its own right. The smaller pieces are viewed from a number of transparent platforms, which are linked by walkways (also transparent). But both the platforms and the walkways are only visible from certain angles and distances; as you move away (or move your camera away) they disappear from view. Similarly the noticeboards providing information on the exhibits “open” and “close” as you approach or move away from them. There’s a “tour” (via the red cube “cars”) which takes in about a dozen major viewpoints of the exhibit, but I’m sure there’s a lot more to explore.

Finally, I’d just add that on two evenings I was at the exhibit with friends, DanCoyote himself appeared and flew over and stopped by for a chat with us. Typically, I was rather too star-struck/tongue-tied (if one can be tongue-tied in SL chat) to manage much more than, “Oh. Hi. Yes. Oh. Err. It’s great. Cool.”. But it struck me afterwards that this represents another example - similar to the dialogues about music that I described taking place between DJs and dancers in SL club spaces (or at least in those club spaces where the attendees are music fans) - of the way that SL can provide opportunities for dialogue between the artist/performer and the viewer/listener: it really brings a new dimension to the nature of the “digital gallery” experience.

As a footnote (and an incentive to me to finish this post and publish it today!), I notice that DanCoyote is the guest at the New Media Consortium’s Teachers Buzz group today, Monday 1 October 2007, at 11.00am SLT (Check local time). I think those meetings are aimed primarily at teachers, but my understanding is that they are open to others too. If I get home from work in time, I’ll be there.

As something of a music obsessive in RL, I’m always curious to explore what Second Life has to offer on that front. I have to confess my early experiences were disappointing, as many of the venues I came across seemed to regard the music as an incidental (mainstream rock/commercial hiphop) soundtrack to the performances of the exotic dancers. Each to their own, but really, there’s only so many times I want to hear “Back in Black” or “Milkshake” while a nice young lady shakes her tassles at me.

It was probably at the SecondFest Dance Tent a few weeks ago that I picked up a few useful pointers, either by looking at attendees’ profiles or chatting to people (or eavesdropping their chat with others - look, I’m still quite shy about talking to strangers, you know!). And since then I’ve discovered quite an enthusiastic SL community interested in electronic music of various forms, centred mainly around a few club venues (e.g. The FAC, Trash Palace, Club Vega, Club SH-3103, the Vibration Institute, and the tiny but great Alpha Box, and probably more that I’m forgetting to mention) - and also visible on the Web, through MySpace and through dedicated Web sites (e.g. The FAC, Trash Palace, Club Vega @ MySpace, Club SH-3013 @ MySpace, the Vibration Institute).

In contrast to Art’s experience at the SL Hacienda, my visits to the venues above have been overwhelmingly welcoming and positive (though as I commented in reply to Art’s post, scheduling a “event” to test voice chat in another community’s space that is primarily designed for music does seem a little bit cheeky to me!).

Some venues have one or two avatars on duty as “greeters”, so you’ll probably get a “Hi avatar” shout when you arrive (or indeed more often than not, other people will greet you anyway), but after that it’s really up to you how much you choose to interact with other participants by chat or IM. On occasions, I have just opted to click the dance ball and “camp” there quietly at the back of the room and treat it much like any Web radio stream, leaving SL in the background while I spar on ILX or read Stylus or whittle down my fortnightly Boomkat shopping basket in another window (checking back occasionally to see if anyone has been trying to talk to me!).

But a recent post by John von Seggern (SL: Johnvon Watanabe, co-owner of the aforementioned Vibration Institute (which also operates as a NetLabel outside SL)) and J LeRoy titled “The Significance of Music in Second Life” articulates quite nicely what it seems to me really makes these experiences quite compelling:

While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene, they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one’s own recent music purchases or of a live concert.

But in SL:

As an artist is performing, so is the audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his (sic) performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.

In our opinion, the creation of virtual social spaces like Second Life where music can be shared and experienced together is a development of potentially huge import for the future of music, adding a major new dimension to what we’ve seen so far with music on the Internet.

These SL events offer the opportunity for a real-time conversation - and one in which not only the audience, but also the artist or DJ, can participate. And indeed I’ve come to realise that often in the venues above one of the avatars in the audience turns out to be a performer or DJ in another venue, or at the same venue on another night. This is a very different sort of event from something like SecondFest where many of the “performances” - not all of them, but many of them, at least by the “major artists” - were pre-recorded streams piped into SL. In contrast, these club spaces are, AFAICT, very much “grassroots” initiatives.

They are highly cosmopolitan spaces too, and although it’s probably true that English tends to be the dominant lingua franca, you’re quite likely to find yourself in the middle of conversations in German, Italian, Dutch or French.

Now, sure, some of that chat is limited to exclamations of “Tune!” or jokey banter between attendees who are acquainted with each other. But - in the best sessions, at least - there is also a sense of a genuine excitement and enthusiasm for music in these places, and there is a real social, communal dimension to listening. In the past I’ve joined in “synchronised listens” on Web-based music message boards, where members arrange to play the same records at home at the same time and post messages along the way, or I’ve joined in threads during live TV broadcasts of events like Glastonbury (I drew the line at Live Earth, and did my bit to combat climate change by leaving the TV switched off for the day), and a DJ friend of mine runs a Web chat room during his show.

But the “presence” factor provided by virtual worlds like SL seems to offer more than any of those, albeit in ways I can’t always put my finger on.

One of the SL sessions I particularly enjoyed recently, though I only caught a small part of it, was a DJ set by Transient Zeluco in Alpha Box where he played a very varied set of tracks entirely from NetLabels (and so mostly available as free downloads, under open licenses) and also posted a hyperlinked set list on the Web, so that you could follow up on anything you enjoyed and obtain mp3s of tracks there and then, see what else the labels were releasing, read about the artists, and so on. Some SL clubs even have in-world mp3 vending machines.

In this sort of context, it seems to me, music in Second Life becomes an integral part of that continuum that includes the blogosphere, MySpace, Flickr, Last.FM, file-sharing networks, Web radio streams, and more, and yet it also brings something new and different and, as Johnvon stresses, above all social and shared, to that mix.

P.S. I should probably mention that if you visit the venues above at random, then there’s a good chance that you’ll find them empty and streaming a radio station and you’ll wonder what on earth I’m getting excited about. They tend to fill up only when a live DJ or artist is performing. Sometimes those performances are programmed on some sort of regular schedule or advertised in advance (e.g. via MySpace pages), but quite often they seem to be organised or at least advertised at relatively short notice, so joining the in-world groups is the best way to keep up.

P.P.S. Oh, and if you don’t like house and techno, then, TBH, the venues above probably aren’t for you, but I’m sure there’s an SL venue for the genre of your preference somewhere out there.

Via New World Notes, I came across the announcement from Penguin that they are planning a range of William Gibson activities in Second Life, including a reading and interview session by the man himself.

I suspect it will be a rather popular event.

(If you can’t make it to the interview (or even if you can), I can recommend a visit to Nexus Prime, a very evocative tribute to the world of Neuromancer et al.)

In addition to my visits to SecondFest last weekend, I also dropped in on the SL version of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings exhibit, which had been developed by AngryBeth Shortbread.

I missed the “opening” event(s) as they were scheduled to coincide with the opening of the real life exhibition at at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which meant that they took place between 4am and 6am BST, and not even my curiosity extended to getting up that early on a Saturday morning. But four different SL venues showed slightly variant forms of the exhibit over the weekend.

Each exhibit consisted of a number of very slowly shifting images, accompanied by an ambient soundtrack. Each painting appears to melt into the next. At first the process seems incredibly slow, but within a very short period, it seems you become attuned to the “pace” and you begin to observe the tiny shifts in colour and shape (and in sound). Very Eno, but oddly affecting too.

A note on the 77 Million Paintings web site explains the creation/generation process:

The painting is generated from hand-made slides that are randomly combined by the computer using specially developed software. The software processes the music that accompanies the paintings in a similar way so the selection of elements and their duration in the piece are arbitrarily chosen, forming a virtually infinite number of variations. The result is that having created the seed of the work it becomes unpredictable even to the artist himself – and every viewer also has a unique experience of the painting.

The settings for the SL installations were quite effective: each was approached through a single doorway leading into a darkened corridor which in turn opened into a square room in which the images were projected on the far wall from the entrance (or in one case on the faces of three rectangular “pillars” set around the room). I’ve sometimes felt a slight frustration at the tendency of SL constructors to “just” replicate the forms of RL constructs in SL, but I have to say that in this case, the settings worked very well. I suppose they provided the sort of “context” I expect for an exhibit of this sort, and maybe there’s a lot to be said for retaining those familiar “cues”.

I was particularly impressed by the effect in one room, where the projected image was reflected in a polished wooden floor. (Art Fossett later explained to me the (simple but clever!) technique for achieving this in SL, but at the time it seemed quite extraordinary.

(I put a small set of snapshots of the exhibits up on Flickr.)

I’m currently visting the end of year shows for three undergraduate courses at the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design.

The SL building is (I assume) a replica of the RL building. I have to admit a maze of concrete corridors and stairways is even harder to navigate in SL than in RL!

A fuller post to follow later….
posted by Peregrine Juneau on LeedsMet FAS using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Over the course of the weekend I made a few visits to SecondFest, a music festival in Second Life organised by The Guardian and Intel.

As others have commented already, the technical limitations of SL made it a somewhat frustrating experience at times as the audio dropped fairly frequently (especially when delivered as a movie/video feed, it seemed), and it took a lot of fiddling around with settings and/or leaving parcels of land and coming back to restore it, if indeed it came back at all. And the parcels were so full for the Pet Shop Boys last night that it was hopeless.

I was also slightly disappointed to learn that little of the music was actually played and transmitted live. With the exception of the SL bands on the Chill Island stage, I understand that most were live sets recorded earlier and transmitted into SL (but I may be wrong).

But having said all that, when it did work, I must admit that I did find it more “engaging” than I had imagined I would, and I enjoyed it a great deal. The Qemists set on Saturday night in the Dance Tent and Gabriel Ananda’s yesterday afternoon were both excellent musically, but perhaps more to the point, the “social” aspect seemed to kick in pretty well too, with people commenting on tracks, offering pointers on other events, engaging in trainspotter debates on genre classification, and generally sharing their enthusiasm, in a way which I don’t think I’ve experienced on music message boards or chat rooms.

So, sure, it wasn’t perfect, far from it, and I was left with the feeling that it could have been “something more”… but overall I did enjoy SecondFest, and the high points, I enjoyed very much indeed.

Apologies for the silence here: RL seems to have intervened over the last three weeks. But I did find this rather amusing: