WoW Science Conference

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.