2nd Life Svarga Tour

I just returned from one of my most enjoyable 2nd life experiences. I got there from the link on Alx’s blog:

• Svaga ecosystem: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Svarga/7/124/2

When I arrived there were 3 other people standing around, which was itself a rarity. We tried to chat, but they were Italian so it didn’t go far. However, what I liked best was that there was a tour of the island. By clicking on the big chair outside the landing station, you can choose a language and get an aerial guided tour. Quite a pleasant experience, like flying but controlled by the program. It was a strange merging between feeling embodied and disembodied at the same time. In mouselook it was much more realistic.

Unfortunately, the tour isn’t interactive, which would have kicked it up to another level and a still more embodied experience as true participant instead of passive observer. I asked a question about the “artificial life experiments” they were doing, which the tour guide mentions, I got no reply. However, I did get some sense of what the place had to offer, what the major landmarks are, and the general topography. I got the landmark card and will return to explore another time.

In my mind this is a huge improvement over wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what’s going on, and what options are available. More “newbie” friendly places should provide something like this.

ps – if you take the tour, be sure to switch to mouselook – it’s a much better experience.

pps – If you go back to Art Metropole, be sure to touch the chained down floating simulation of Jean Beaudrillard right outside. He offers many interesting quotations of his ideas with each touch (right click, or option-click Mac)

 

Food for thought . . .

Today’s discussions and examples have left me thinking about the paradigm shift required to approach new media from the perspective of relationships and connections rather than the perspective of technology and aesthetics, which often appear so visually cumbersome. Steve’s comment about the enmeshed links between technology, concept and process was also a new way of getting past the “blockage” that I sometimes feel around new media art.

While the possibilities, options for control “on the fly” and innovative combinations and uses of media are really exciting, I have often felt that a lot of new media art seem like “much ado about nothing”: a whole lot of hardware, complex systems and programming for a “shiny new effect” that doesn’t feel all that new aesthetically, or very thought-provoking conceptually. Until today, I had never considered the development of the technologies themselves as a new art form, or that new media art needed to be viewed from quite different points of reference.

Discussion after class today recognized the enormous and complex systems, hardware, and mechanics of production, distribution and creation that the contemporary film industry requires. The amount of money, time, labour and materials in making, showing and distributing films is vast, and as Joanne pointed out, they are also largely invisible to us since we are so familiar with them. Other than seeing the final credits roll, these processes are generally not acknowledged or referred to in any way during a film screening. Janis commented that even the logistics of getting 100 or more people into a theatre at one time to see a film are vast. Since culturally we now know and understand the ideas, processes, rituals, and behaviours required in seeing a film in a theatre, we are immune to recognizing the underlying network and considerations that support it.

All of this reminds me a film Ed Slopek showed in Media Languages, “Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train”, in which an early film audience got out of their seats and ran from the theatre when a train on the screen came rushing towards them, larger than life.

For further discussion of this, please see:

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hI4ngceuXiwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA45&dq=early+cinema+train+and+panic&ots=q7axmAWIjq&sig=s5yXjVxitoKfx5IRM5ngjFsrag4#PPA46,M1

pg. 46 of

The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity

By C. Nadia Seremetakis

In another clip, a man enraged by what he saw in the film got up and tore the screen to shreds, fighting with the man shown on it. He even ran around behind the screen looking for the “perpetrator”.

Therefore the understanding of what film is, and what appropriate behaviours for viewing it are, including simple things like lining up to buy a ticket, are learned, and this learning we take for granted.

In this light, the complexities, processes and hardware of new media may also need to be socially learned to be more fully appreciated and seamlessly integrated into our experience of it. Like viewing painting, photography and film, the means to creating them either becomes invisible, or feels like part of a fully-resolved presentation.