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.
Boom Pearls presented Gillion Grantsaan & Sabbabas in Second Life september 10. He has done a project together with a group of musicians from Ghana. He learned how difficult it was to use Second Life as a place to meet and work together across geographical borders. For his project, it was easier to bring all the musicians to Europe, though they all spend a lot of time in front of their computers. Organizing an art project was also about building up a story about the participants. He did that with a series of collages, texts, songs and a music video, seen below here.
This is a video from the installation, which was available until May 30, 2009, at Boom Pearls in Second Life. More information about the project boompearls.com/?page_id=493.
Call for EULA’s is a blog, where everyone can register and contribute with a suggestion for an End User License Agreement, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or what these juridical regulations are called. The project is about the framework for more or less public accessible media and electronic spaces, simulations and games.
There’s no rules for the call yet. Participants are asked to respect other people, and then to help play with rules. To participate in the project, you simply register and post a suggestion. There are no limits for what you want to set the terms for.
To particapate in somekind of action you want to be sure the framework is working. Bungiejump, chess, a MMORPG. But still you don’t want the rules to be too narrow. So here’s a suggestion to make them part of the creation process.
Everybody will be invited, economists, sailors, artists, gamedevelopers, information architects, architects, poets, gamers, children, grandparents, politicians, students.
Antonia Low makes these fantastic scaffoldings. As stated in the press release, i also think they have this quality of of ambiguity, because they are more than one thing at a time, interieur, architecture, art and now circling in 3D. In that sense there’some play about the project in Boom Pearls, as something with more than one meaning.
It was a really nice opening. Matti Blinker played music from his and Slinky Kiergartens livingroom. The avatars started dancing and luckily one from NewBerlin had brought a dancefloor, which had better dances than our own.
Saturday March 14 Pernille With Madsens project for Boom Pearls, Endless Structure opened in Second Life. The project was created in collaboration with NewBerlin, Jan Northoff helped to connect to a scripter, who worked with some of the latest technology in scripting in SL.
The video below is from the opening. First theres a simple drawing at the ground, then it turns into a hole which draws avatars around inside, and then it the hole goes back to drawing state, before it goes upwards and turns into a building and with a hole turning up in one of the walls. Since its 3D it doesn’t go on, that’s not possible. So it loops endlessly.
Pernilles projects is about vertigo. Here it worked through the avatar, and the avatars pulled into the hole lost control in an unexpected way, though they might have read the press release. The french sociologist who wrote on play, Roger Caillois defined one way of playing as searching for vertigo, or ilinx. Since its also about using an avatar, the practice of the audience is also about playing a role, so theres a bit more to it than vertigo, eg mimicry, in relatation to audience patterns as suggested by Chris Bateman. Read more about Pernille With Madsen at her homepage, and at BoomPearls.com.
Yesterday i was shortly interviewed in the danish radioprogram kulturnyt. In relation to the support my project Boom Pearls has been granted by the danish art council, to discuss art in Second Life, Tore Leifer asked me how i think SL is suitable to make art in today.
SL was thought dead by many after it had a big burst in the media starting two years ago. Its difficult for institutions like museums to be flexible and do projects initiated on their own. A lot of people still make art in there. Some are integrated as inhabitants while others more use it as a tool and tend to think more about how the project may work out in Real Life. Projects like New Berlin create a model of Berlin in 1:1. The last project in Boom Pearls by Tommy Støckel was an installation consisting of a large number of objects made by the inhabitants. This way he states that he does not make art in SL based on RL. While Boom Pearls invites artists new in SL it would be interesting to discus this starting point with others.
