NMC Campus Observer Podcast

A bit of time has gone by since the 2008 NMC Summer Conference at Princeton, but we wanted to make sure we jotted a few notes on the closing plenary by Henry Jenkins- an inspirational presentation on What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media.

This was not only taking place in a gorgeuos real world facility, Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, but was also live streamed to a remote audience gathered in the Second Life version of the same room.

We have the presentation available as video, audio, and on the NMC media archive site you will find a MediaSite version synced to slides.

Quicktime video
(129 Mb Quicktime, 1:04:11)

MP3 audio (58.8 Mb MP3, 1:04:11)

Jenkkins opened with the story of rapper Soulja Boy who not only used web media to reach his dream of stardom but instigated the whole following of fans from all walks of life who created and published their own versions of his dance moves — right up to the MIT Nerd version featuring legendary Richard Stallman.

This was one of many examples Jenkins weaves in as Participatory Culture, which in interestingly, ought to have parallels or relevance in Second Life:

• low barrier for engagement (not the barrier of entry for learning SL, but that it does not take much for one to be active, if they choose)
• strong support for sharing creations with others very much evidenced by the freebies one fiinds, the giving nature of the education community, the numerous web sites, photo sharing sites sharing SL creations.
• informal mentorship which happens all the time be it Orientation Island, accidental, there are countless stories of experience Sl-ers helping newbies
• members believe that contribution matters which is the underpinnings of a user generated world
• care about others opinions of self and work - pretty much describes the grooming of avatars, the importance of building reputations

From his MacArthur Foundation white paper on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education, Jenkins shared the 11 competencies young people need to pas new media literacies:

• performance
• play
• networking
• collective intelligence
• multitasking
• distributed cognition
• appropriation
• negotiation
• judgment
• simulation
• transmedia navigation

And he expanded more on appropriation as the competency for creating remix content:

the ability to meaningfully sample and mix media content within a context

and then went on to argue that we have a fallacy of looking historically at creativity as coming form nothing, or all as original (which as taught in school tends to intimidate learners creativity):

• The Sistene Chapel is a mashup of prior imagery
• Shakespeare practiced fan facition, re-writing characters and plays from existing works into new contexts, new meanings
• Homer was remixing Greek mythology every time he spoke

Culture operates in dialogue with other existing cultural materials

Jenkins went on to demonstrate the newer versions of this concept via fan videos, and offering remix as a form of pedagogy as demonstrated in Scratch the mix, mash, and generate software tool that allows people to create games, art, interactive stories via a simple tool set– so much that there is one new item created there every two minutes.

And he went on to show the Moby Dick was a classic example of absorbing everything from a culture and recasting it into a new, mixed form- that Melville was a “protofan” of whaling culture. He then moved into to modern remixes of Moby Dick, ranging far from political cartoons to Moby Dick House of Kabobs, and a video of how a modern version of Moby Dick was retold by kids in a contemporary setting.

Jenkins closed with some strong words on copyright, parents using media of their kids in less than appropriate ways, and took some questions from the Second Life audience (see the SL chat log for more).

All in all this was an incredible session, both in RL and SL.

For January through March 2008, NMC Campus was proud to have hosted regular performances of DanCoyote Antonelli’s ZeroG SkyDancer show for 2008, entitled Second Spring.

If you never had the opportunity to experience this performance, virtuoso SL film maker Gary Hazlitt (aka Gary Hayes) has published am immersive full recording of this as machinima which you can find on YouTube (because of the 10 minute limit of YouTube, he has it in 2 parts- perhaps he may post it to Google or blip.tv??).

Enjoy!

A stunning new Second Life art show will be opening this Saturday on NMC Campus. “Kiss the Sky” is the definitive exhibition of Hyperformalism in the world of Second Life®, and is a brand new collection of Second Life art curated by DC Spensley (aka DanCoyote Antonelli).

Virtual worlds are a place for discovering new territories and exploring meaning outside the context of the material world. Even in virtual worlds there is an avant garde, a native artform spawned from unique conditions. “Kiss the Sky” is an exhibition of artists that have been wowing viewers since 2006 with art installations indigenous to the virtual world that artist/curator DC Spensley calls Hyperformalism.

We caught up today with DC and recorded a brief interview where he talked about the new show, what Hyperformalism is, and why he thinks this is a historical moment for these Second Life artists. Be sure to check out his new Hyperformalism Ning social networking site.

Interview with DanCoyote (13.3 Mb MP3, 19:22)

On May 17, 2008, 12PM PST, DC will unveil “Kiss the Sky” the definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism as expressed by over a dozen artists working the discipline in Second Life.

Artists included are the most notable creators in the virtual world of Second Life, chosen specifically for their Hyperformal direction. On display are Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The reception and exhibit are at the NMC Arts Lab (43, 135, 706)

Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.

With a figure in the picture, nobody notices the landscape. Hyperformalism proposes that that by removing the comfortable cliché of anthropocentricism a viewer will be more open to a whole other class of experiences that resonate on a more basic level of awareness and reflect back to the viewer their own humanity. The perception of immersion and variable point of view implicates the viewer into unique relationships with the work destroying all of the usual boundaries between the viewer and the work.

While space in virtual worlds is a simulation, place can be real. In fact art experiences are the only thing that can be real in both the virtual and material worlds at the same time. Abstractions that exist as discoverable objects are somewhere between object and concept. It is the state of half existence between object and concept that differentiates formal abstraction in virtual worlds from preceeding expressions of formalism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. Hyperformalism is not Modernism, it is not Post-modernism because it is native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.