in september Andrew Paterson presented some thoughts on creative actions in online spaces. We began to meet over skype and visit a few places later on, to see the posibilities for critical self organizing. One of them is habbo hotel. Andrew suggested our talks could develop into a club about public and private spaces.
And now i’m working on a spreadsheet for inviting people to come and join. Here’s a rss feed for the planning site. Join the club by using the spreadsheet, post ideas for spaces to explore. You can be a member by listening and talking.
Some of our other projects also deals with these matters. Andrews work with public and private online spaces, and gave a course, on among other things how these places and platforms can work as boundary objects for activism. My agenda comes from recent and ongoing projects, Wikipedia as meeting place for the institution of art, wikipedians and public space, flash 7 games also playable for the Wii browser, available in public and private spaces, and also Call for EULA’s, where everybody can make their own end user license. The meeting between different types of users and inhabitants as platform for art at Wikipedia is a group project being developed with Nis Rømer and Gillion Grantsaan at the moment. We arrange walks, workshops and research for new articles. The focus so far has been on public art, we also need to take care of the meeting between wikipedians, readers, appropriation artists and one timers. The projects uses geo information, gmaps, gdocs and wave to organize and link to videos and photos, here from a tour in southern Ørestad. In relation to the club, one of my colleagues may be interested in talking about transition towns at skype, while we write an article about it, for a different language, and see if it’s notable for a public encyclopedia. Metaplace.com closes in january (Metaplace Inc. goes on). It was really good to see how a MMO could work as flash 10 browser gameworlds created by the players(sign the petition). Unfortunately this kind of creativity didn’t work out. Inworld value drives the economics, and the small world i made was not much of a game, just navigating. Game mechanics is perhaps more interesting in places like Kongregate, or the iphone App store. From our point of view as newbies, creativity in casual games or Free-to-play/ Play for free is maybe played in a browser, in a sort of more public place? People who are not into participation in games or other social online places, could maybe be interested in these temporary groups. The mobile server could be fun to play with. Almost ten year old software for an old windows ce can work as a temporary server and playground. Similarly I hope we can open for suggestions for spaces to learn about.
I participate at New Berlin Art Festival with a black box, when clicked it links to Call for EULA’s.
It’s an open show in Second Life, set up by Jan Northoff. Art in virtual worlds’s is a bit like art in Denmark, where art in the last decade have been politicized as nationalist norm. In the series of talks under Boom Pearls Northoff talked about his work as building. He sort of stopped making art after leaving the american desert and began working in 3D simulations. Now he understands art as context. I think it’s a point that you can see practice in a vw as something particular but it is still part of reality.
The Boom Pearls talks about art online didn’t create a real dialogue with other digital artists who thinks presence online as participation in these places leave less space for critical work. The different points of view are nuanced and related to different art projects. Maybe it’s not the time to make a dialogue between these types of work, it’s different categories sometimes.
My initiative with Boom Pearls was intended to point to how virtual worlds can be a platform for art, also for artists new to social real time simulations in 3D. It seems to be crucial that geographic limits can be even harder to deal with in virtual worlds. It’s is simply too hard for someone to make it into a virtual place. Their computer or the network infrastructure might not live up to the standards. Still, artists who do not stay in a vw can use it as a temporary play ground, and play with the new possibilities, based on their artworld experience. My work is then sort of supporting link’s between different contexts and the inworld driven economy of these server park playgrounds.
This casual simulation game offers you the possibility to experiment with the idea of visualizing yourself as a mountain, and through that gain calm awareness of yourself in the world. It’s partly inspired by mindfullness, described shortly at Wikipedia. Try to close your eyes. Then visualize yourself as a mountain. The weather changes. The sun shines, a bit rain, wind, snow, storm, maybe some lightning, then calm weather, a few skies. A few sheeps go up, then dissappear. A tourist bus comes up the road. The tourists get out. Go up the mountain. Disappear. Seasons change but the mountain stays the same.
The game helps to think of how a mountain is placed in the world. It is a procedural rhetoric in the sense that by playing you momentarily accept to experiment with the interface of the simulated model which you wouldn’t do otherwise. This way you accept to learn the offered rhetorics. iMountain lets you play with the reason of immersion, and hereby think of which context it is within. The challenge is to translate a casual game as more than a geeky experience within the context of an online singleplayer game.
I made a new world in a google spreadsheet. Users can decide the content and using the google functions and gadgets you can link between data in the spreadsheet and also outside. That means you can also risk that other users dont like the things in the main sheet, but with a link to something you create on your own you decide which rights visitors should have at your spot. I consider it kind of a game world. However you can say its just a creative chat room, where you dont even have a real avatar, since you can edit the spreadsheet without having an account.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pLLRYWcIP5owj84JcHz3ZJQ
Recently Supertanker held a workshop in Hedehusene, to create ideas for a game or a series of events with the intention to improve social competences in the area. They arranged a walk to inform about the neighbourhood. There’s some good ideas there, I hope they can be realized.