More on the avatar body. My avatar has been pregnant. Several times. She has given birth to many creatures but in these images she is nursing her tiny avatar baby on Odyssey Island in Second Life. This theme of birth is both a part of the Machine I Am Project as well as being explored in depth in my upcoming piece "Live Home Alien Birth" - with Second Front. Live Home Alien Birth is a Second Life based performance and Gallery Installation. It is programmed at Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art - in Kelowna, B.C. - a joint show with Networker Mez (a.k.a.) Mary Ann Breeze of Ars Virtua for April of 2009. I am working on a new virtual instrument and composition for the Birth Piece with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse.
I have been playing in Photoshop again, quite fascinated now with manipulating images from Second Life. Am looking into making prints in the coming months. Here are some experimental images taken while hanging out last night with Fau Ferdinand. I find the inner structures of the avatar body very interesting.
The following images are from the upcoming "Machine I Am" release. This little blue fairy - my main avvie in SL - plays an important role. Here she is dancing at the Last Art Center in a scene from the piece.
Here are some images I created for a group show curated last summer by the amazing Jo Cook. The show took place at Lucky's Gallery in Vancouver. These images document the many divination techniques I used in virtual space in efforts to make contact with the dead. The video piece below, "neila ni" was also a part of this show.
The work from the show has been published in an artist's book - here is the description from the publisher's page at Perro Verlag - Books by Artists
"Documents of Psychic Amateurs is the first volume in a quarterly publication dedicated to the dissemination of research by both faculty and students at the Institute for the Science of Identity. Volume 1 no.1, 2008, is 58 pages, 8.5” x 11”, perfect bound with 24 full colour pages and 34 black and white pages printed on various coloured papers. The first issue represents the work of 20 artists: Aby W. Blake, Mark Connery, Jo Cook, Mily Goodden, Claudine Hubert, Sally Ireland, Doug Jarvis, Malena Kirlianova, Chris Lloyd, Ross Angus Macaulay, Billy Mavreas, Michael McCormack, Tammy McGrath, Wesley Mulvin, Florentine Perro, Sally Rees, Liz Solo, Julie Voyce, Matt Warren and Frances Zorn. Published on the ocassion of the exhibition, International Psychic Amateurs Work/Study (iPAWS) at Lucky’s Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. Printed in a limited edition of 50 numbered copies. Perro Verlag, Vancouver."
Video by Liz Solo and Teri Snelgrove. Song from my "alien" CD release.
I have been working in Photoshop with images captured in Second Life and am in the process of creating a full series themed around the Avatar Body. Here are a few early experiments.
I have been having a great time working with the super cool online orchestra - Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. Members participate from all over North America, Europe and beyond. We perform frequently - compositions created by members of the collective. We play the compositions on virtual instruments also designed by artists of the collective. I have been working on my first instrument - The Birth HUD - part of my general exploration of the virtual body. I hope to play the Birth HUD in a new piece with AOM this month - will post details.
Instruments in SL are generally HUDs (Heads Up Device) that can be programmed to play sounds, generate particles or and/or animate your avatar. Many of our performances also involve merging Real Life players with virtual players - what we sometimes like to call "hybrid-reality" performance. Here is an early machinima I made of AOM giving a concert at U21 Global in Second Life.
My good friend aurel Miles is always introducing me to the work of artists in Second Life. aurel is a writer who contributes to Second Life publications including the Second Life Herald. When she was writing an article on a new installation/environment in SL by the artists of ChouChou she asked if I would create a machinima to accompany the article. The video is below.
It was an interesting experience to work with the material because it really gave me a sense of the artist's intentions, something I wanted to be sensitive to, and the story of the space sort of evolved as I edited. In general I have been approaching the editing process intuitively, allowing one clip to suggest the next one.
I'm back at blogging. I have been so immersed in this project all year that I had to drop the blog for awhile. But now it is time to document and start preparing for the release of "Machine I Am" - a standalone video piece that merges real and virtual spaces by pushing machinima, online performance and video together. In the piece I draw from my own real experiences of exploring virtual space. But....More coming on that later.
For now..
I am going to play catch up and document some of the stuff I have been doing this year. When I last left you I was pretty heavy into the Warcraft. While I am still working in WoW the focus of my work this year has really shifted to the online environments of Second Life. (I do have a have a neat new WoW based project coming up soon with Ars Virtua - stay tuned for the lowdown on that. Still in early planning stages but going to be very exciting!)
My friends at Ars Virtua told me about the first WoW Science Conference which took place over three days in May 2008. WoW Science Conference was a meeting of scientists, researchers, artists and interested people gathering in-world to discuss research in World of Warcraft. It was, in a word, awesome. The discussion were very interesting and gave me a great deal to think about. If you play WoW you also can understand how cool it was to attend such a huge gathering of characters. Each day after the Conference we went on an adventure, visiting shrines, undertaking raids. On Day Three there was a wedding.
I documented all three days on machinima. The material was extensive and it was quite intense going through it, so in an effort encapsulate the experience but not spend a year on editing - I took the text from the chatlog, edited it and ran it through a text to speech generator to form the voice for the soundtrack and then I edited clips together chronologically. The effect is a sort of hypnotic. The one voice speaking is actually made from words spoken by many people so don't mind the contradictions:)) The videos from Day One and Day Two are posted below. I will edit Day Three soon and post it as well.
