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.

As described by Wainbrave,

The SaLamander Project is an open Second Life education community with a mission to develop a searchable peer-reviewed database of educational builds and tools in Second Life. Using inworld tools - such as the Salamander HUD and on-location surveys - the project hopes to assist SL Education to develop the common language and set of “best practices” in the emerging profession of 3D Virtual Education. By making well crafted virtual educational learning materials accessible to more educators and providing useful and timely feedback to builders and scripters, the SaLamander Project hopes to provide an ongoing service to the Second Life Education Community.

Presently in the beta stage, The SaLamander Project is now planning to anchor it’s activities and practices toward developing a showcase of exemplary Second Life Learning Materials to be presented at the next Second Life Community Conference in September 2008.

Join us for the Buzz on Monday…

When: January 21, at 9:00 am PST (check local time)
Where: Teaching 2 (135,124,22)

Wainbrave Bernal - his avatar may look scary, but he is quite nice

To help seed your interest and to better understand the project, we recently met up in world with Wainbrave to have him talk through a demo of how SaLamander works:

Interview with Wainbrave Bernal (18.6 Mb MP3, 27:01)

People who wish to contribute to the project can get and wear the SaLamander HUD. When they come to an interesting resource or place in Second Life, they click the pushpin. This HUD is actually a modification of the SLOOG HUD, a rather interesting tool in itself- SLOOG is a tagging tool for Second Life, allowing any SL user to mark locations with descriptive tags, which are saved on the SLOOG web site under the avatar’s name. Call it SL.del.icio.us.

For the SaLamnder project, the venerable Eloise Pasteur reprogrammed the general SLOOG HUD with a series of questions that get at some more education descriptors, which in fact are the same organizing questions used to catalog web based learning materials on MERLOT (that will connect in a minute).

So after clicking the pushpin button, the HUD prompts with several questions via chat messages, and you respond by selecting from choices in one of those blue dialog boxes, or sending open ended questions via chat:

When the process is done (it takes but a few minutes at most), the information is posted at the SLOOG site, with the information entered appearing as tags, including a special Salamnderproject tag that helps them locate all items tagged with this special HUD.

So for our little demo example for the audio interview, we tagged the NMC Orientation, which now is registered in SLOOG under my avatar http://www.sloog.org/users/CDB_Barkley.

And you can see by aggregation all of the places in SL tagged with salamander.

But wait, there’s more.

For the SaLamander project, they have some automated routines that “scrape” the data from SLOOG and put them as wiki pages in the project site– these become a “stub” entry such as for Renaissance House.

The next phase of the process is that educators who have visited, used one of these resources can edit the wiki to add additional information, pictures, descriptions, how the sim might be used, etc– see for example the more complete example of Bailey’s cafe and Brewster Place.

And the ultimate plan is that the most highly rated resources in SaLamnder would then become part of the MERLOT site, expanding its reach from the 2D web scope to virtual worlds.

For a complete explanation see the video “How the SL-Sloog-SalamanderWiki-Merlot system works”

But all of this is based on educators participating in the tagging, cataloging and rating. So come to the Teachers Buzz Monday, learn more about SaLamnder, get a HUD, and start tagging!

Below we provide some of the highlights, mainly links to the archived video of the sessions. These videos were archived from our set up that provided live video streams to our overflow sims, but required some moderate post production editing. You can find a complete list of symposium resources on the main NMC web site, including additional papers, links, presentation files shared by the presenters.

First on the list is Howard Rheingold’s keynote presentation Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action “the big picture/long view of the way technologies, communication media, and collective action has co-evolved”.

Keynote video: (42.Mb Quicktime, 21:16)

In addition to the video of the presentation, we had Howard’s words transcribed, and we have combined both into the new publishing platform, CommentPress that allows you to attach comments at the paragraph level of the text (this was the same format we explored with the Symposium white paper). We encourage you to visit the site and contribute by posting comments to Howard’s ideas at http://web.nmc.org/coevolution.

In addition, we posted the questions that were collected from the Second Life audience (the audio for this segment was of too poor quality to include in the video).

In addition we have video or audio from all of the other presentation sessions…

(more…)

We had a capacity crowd of 73 for the 10:00 AM demo, and we got so many messages and IMs from people knocked out to the next sim, that Stephane agreed to provide another demo at 12:00pm where we saw an additional 41 eager avatars show up.

As a recap, we have some audio recorded from the first session (sorry, the sound quality is not the best, but hopefully you can appreciate Stephane’s detailed explanation of the technology, its potential, and what he is offering to the educational community.

Virtual Reality Room Demo [38.5 Mb mp3, 42:01]

And see the full set of photos we took today.

The Virtual Reality Room brings an impressive realistic presence into Second Life, and it is almost ironic that we are viewing real world scenes inside a virtual world. The “magic” works via the file format of a cubic panorama photo- generally one takes a series of high resolution photos with a wide angle lens on a tripod that accurately rotates the camera in even increments in a 360 degree circle. Stephane recommended a web site that shows you how to create a QuickTme VR Scene in 10 Minutes.

Special software “stitches them together into a format that actually places them onto surface that represents a cube that has been completely folded open and flat, or a cubic panoramic photo. Stephane uses professional software from RealViz but also recommended some of the open source tools you can find on Google such as Panotools

This is the format used by QuickTimeVR to make a full navigable scene; the computer graphics hardware takes this image plastered inot a cube and renders it to a smooth sphere.

What Stephane has done is to apply this same concept in Second Life by creating a giant cube that we stand inside of, and he has created the logic to project the panoramic photo as textures which create giant immersive scenes to explore.

In this image you can actually see the shadow (bottom right) of Stephane and his tripod!

Stephane also demonstrated other thing you can such as applying static images to the scene, setting walls as “phantom” so people can enter a room easily (there is a great example of a room scene built inside a VRR at Strategies located on Brimsen (196, 59, 302).

But we did say you could get this tool for free. Stephane pioneered this concept over the last 2 years, but felt like ti was not used as widely as he thought it could be. So he decided to put it in the hands of the educational community who might use the scenes and likely build their own, or add applications on top of the technology.

Therefore, in partnership with the New Media Consortium, the Info Island Archipelago, the Commonwealth Islands for not-for-profits, Stephane is providing the tool free for educators.

You can find the vendor machine now at the site of the demo — href=”http://slurl.com/secondlife/Learning/128/128/101/”>Learning (128, 128, 101) and very soon, it will be accessible at multiple locations on NMC Campus.

Because this is a valuable concept and technology, the Virtual Reality Room is scripted to verify it is placed on a sim that is part of an educational organization. At this time, it includes all of the NMC Sims (50+ sims) plus the Info Island Archipelago- meaning an educator could rez one of them anywhere at these places and it will work. If your organization wants to have its own, you should contact Stephane directly. He is eager to share.

The VRR is not limited to cities and nature scenes; there are plenty of opportunities for computer generated scenes, nano-scale scenes, or models. Another interesting example was a world map, and Stephane described how it as augmented with prims that were interactive for offering geographic specific information.

There are other related resources you can purchase from Stephane’s VRR Shop at Solariam (208, 171, 431) including many pre-built scenes and a HUD that allows just a single person to control the scene selection.

This was an utterly amazing day, and we appreciate the more than 114 people show showed up. We close with one of our favorite scenes– if you were in Chicago last August for the SLCC 2007 Conference, you may have ventured over to the park northeast of the hotel to gaze at the shiny Cloud Gate sculpture- this too is rendered as a VRR scene. Here is our audience, looking tiny next to it. And in the reflection we see Stephane taking the photograph:

On behalf of interested educators and the NMC, we extend to Stephane a big thanks for sharing this with us.

We had 54 attendees, including ones from the U.K., Belgium, Spain, and all over the US.

Today’s event was a pre-cursor to the Boston Digital Media Summit taking place January 12-13, 2007 which will include presentations, demos, and some big announcements, including that Second Life, Croquet, and Wonderland all have passed the requirements established by the Media Grid to be part of this common framework.

This weekend’s summit is expected to attract at least 150 attendees, and MediaGridAaron assured us there would be a lot of documenting of the event– The local PBS station WGBH is going to be providing video online soon after the summit.

For more information, see:

• The Education Grid slide set
• Four videos from the December 2007 Immersive Education Day at Harvard are viewable on the NMC Campus Conference Center
  • Video 1 is at the Babbage Amphitheater NMC Conference Center (210, 25, 51)
  • Video 2 is at Turing Hall NMC Conference Center (164, 219, 31)
  • Video 3 is at Rosedale Hall NMC Conference Center (31, 152, 29)
  • Video 4 is at Schroeder-Kroner Hall NMC Conference Center (41, 61, 31)

  But can also be viewed directly from our media server:

  • http://media.nmc.org/2008/01/harvard-immersive-ed-1.mov
  • http://media.nmc.org/2008/01/harvard-immersive-ed-2.mov
  • http://media.nmc.org/2008/01/harvard-immersive-ed-3.mov
  • http://media.nmc.org/2008/01/harvard-immersive-ed-4.mov
• Chat log from today’s session: digital-media-presummit.txt
• Audio from today’s session

We are eager to see the next steps in the Education Grid project.

While we have a good pile of tagged media and stories on the main NMC web site, we goofed and completely forgot to share a fabulous summary video, created by our own resident artist and videographer, Stello Costello:

Remember again that we have a lot of conference material capture for you at:
http://www.nmc.org/keyword/slcreativity

The presentation will span from the time of speech and collective defense and collective food-gathering among primate ancestors on the African savannah; to the emergence of writing on clay tablets as empire-cities began to grow out of agricultural settlements; to the invention of the alphabet and the restriction of alphabetic knowledge to elites chosen by the emperors and popes; until the printing press enabled a rapid and broad expansion of literacy. At each of these stages, people began to do things together in the social, economic, cultural, and political realms that they were not able to do before a significant population of literates existed — empire, science, democracy. And now, we have questions about the role of literacies and education in the era of participatory media, from Second Life to the blogosphere to YouTube — and the kinds of collective action we see emerging today, from Wikipedia to smart mobs to open source production. What is the connection between participatory media literacy and the public sphere that is supposed to be fundamental to democracy? Join this special keynote presentation to discuss the answers!

View as Quicktime [46.2 Mb, 21:15]

We are working on getting a transcript of this presentation and the Q&A session that followed (the audio quality was not high enough to keep in the vldeo). And we will release it in a similar commentary online format we developed for the Evolution of Communication white paper published for this conference.

Participants in the session responded quickly with questions for Howard, of which he was able to respond to the first 6- this too will be included in the archive of the session, so anyone can join in with their ideas on how to answer these excellent thoughts.

• Bryan Zelmanov: did early communication make organized religion possible? Or vice-versa? or both, dialectically?
• Need Writer: question for howard: do you think that avatars are an extension of human capabilities, and if so, can we see virtual worlds as extending possibilities for social justice (Martha Nussbaum argues, for example, that social justice is the maximization of human capabilities)
• Desideria Stockton: Will the nature of communication ethics change with new media formats and virtual worlds?
• Pepto Majestic: Do you think our ability to adapt to change in how we communicate, initiated by our own actions, is keeping up with the rate of those rapid changes?
• CJ Carnot: How do we ascertain who or what ideas are socially important or beneficial now that the media available to us no longer defines or filters them as they did in the past ?
• ZacharyLark Zhangsun: How has English language use in online communication affected non-English lang speakers? is this another aspect of the so-called digital divide? I’m wondering what we English-only communicators are missing out on, and whether this is the new imperialism.
• Kah3na Falken: You stress the democratizing imperatives inherent in the development of print, but in fact, print was also quickly split into class forms, “high art” and “Low art.” Our postmodern time translates this into access: upper-class has access, while the poor and underclass often does not. How does this impact collective action in your sense?
• Meridelle Mauvaise: What size of a community is a “functional” commuity and how will intimacy and friendship change accordingly?
• Maor Quimby: the mobile- the lines between the digital and physical space are being ‘blurred’… can you speak to the public vs private identity issues of the user ?
• Bryan Zelmanov: Question about literacy and elites: is the proportion of the population with the power to use the tools recurrent?

War-paint. Camouflage. Concealment. Act of self-expression or of belonging to a group. Representation, reflection, or pretense? For protection sometimes; actually often. A curtain, a screen, a veil behind which to hide. A shield, disguise or figment. Often fanciful though - ones persona, like war-paint. Masks and avatars. Behind each, a person, with hopes and fears, with feelings often much deeper than the side they show; actually, always.

For extra bonus points, see how many avatars you can identify who are from the NMC community (it is considered cheating to look at the credits, but hey, I did anyhow). I think I saw 6.

Should there ever be some sort of Academy Awards for Machinima (”I got a Machinny”), I’d certainly toss all my votes for the brilliant videos by Robbie Dingo- to learn more about his work and see even more lovely videos, visit My Digital Double or see his channel on blip.tv.

Live video streamed in the overviews provided by the faculty, but in addition, we got to listen to a moving lunch time (well lunch time in Cleveland) keynote by Lev Book (aka RL Lev Gonick, Case CIO).

Look below for our audio recording of Lev’s remarks, very much worth listening to as he always has a keen eye to the future. He opened by showing the hard hitting A Vision of Students Today, the new video by Michael Wensch.

Lev Gonick’s Remarks

Thanks to the folks from Case for opening up this event.

During the show, like many of you, I was taking lots of snapshots (see 1000+ flickr photos from the symposium). With permission of DanCoyote, we set the images to some motion and the recorded music to create a video that is really just a small sampling of the experience:

Available here as QuickTime [18.1 Mb, 8:12] and can now be found as well on YouTube.

The ZeroG Skydancers are created, produced and directed by DanCoyote Antonelli (dc@spensely.com) and the music is original by ZeroOne Paz.

And wow, a last moment of SLCC 2007 was getting to meet a real Skydancer in person!