Super Art League!

The Super Art League is a group of performance artist superheroes in DC Universe Online. The league is comprised of established and emerging virtual worlds/video-game performance artists from around the world – including members of the performance art group in Second Life known as Second Front.

Active members include: Idea Cyclone (Jeremy Owen Turner, Canada), Slizello (Liz Solo, Canada), NamJunePaik Man (Joseph Delappe, USA), Argon Flux (Patrick Lichty, USA), The Underliner (Ben Unterman, Canada), Pyegirl (Pyewacket Kazyanenko, Australia), and Kai Steamer (Colombia).

There are many other members worldwide (visit our Facebook group for more details - http://www.facebook.com/groups/344213862275316).

Hybrid Performance with AOM

Performing Pauline Oliveros/Free Noyse’s “Hello Vancouver” with the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse and Real Life players. This performance was part of a series of demonstrations at the New Music Network in Montreal.

See:
http://www.newmusicnetwork.ca/forum2012.e/seances.php#paradigms

http://www.newmusicnetwork.ca/forum2012.e/seances.php#stretched

From InWorld

Here are a couple of screen shots from InWorld - my recent on woman theatre performance piece about a recluse gamer searching the metaverse for her avatar lover, missing in real life wartime. Here Lucy Darling enters the Vortex Pinnacle temple in World of Warcraft.Lucy achieves Level 85!
Here is a piece of media adapted from InWorld for the web project Exile Writing - an ongoing project between an amazing collective of women from around the world that started as a workshop at ISEA. This video sets up the love story.

This is a shot from Lucy's final speech where she says: "To know someone virtually is to know them in a perfect way. You see what they want you to see, and so you see them. You get to know who they are inside, even if you never meet in real life. The only problem is - if someone doesn't sign in again - or if they can't sign in - you may never see them again. There is nothing you can do. You will never know what happened to them."

Lucy enters her virtual garden to build another tree.

This show was made possible thanks to support form the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Section, The Black Bag Media Collective and the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. Produced by Roles 4 Women Theatre Company and Liz Solo.

InWorld

InWorld

Roles 4 Women Theatre Company is proud to present the first show of its inaugural season - Liz Solo‘s multi-reality performance piece “InWorld”, live at the LSPU Hall Second Space,Thursday November 24 to Sunday November 27 at 8:30 PM.

A stand up comedienne has given up “the life” and taken to gaming full time. She now lives alone with her puppets and spends her days reliving old comedy routines and leveling her Frost Mage. Merging large-scale projection with live action, video and sound, InWorld is a multi-dimensional exploration of online media culture.

Created by and Starring Liz Solo. Directed by Charlie Tomlinson. Featuring online appearances by members of The Third Faction, Odyssey and The Second Front and puppet appearances by Newf the Baby Harp Seal and Pinky the Bra. Sunday night’s performance will be followed by an Artist’s Talk.

One-act comedy/drama. Mature themes and language. 45 minutes.
Tickets $10 (except: Thursday’s Preview show is PWYC)

Tickets available only at the door.

poster by Jimmy Rose

IO Graphica

Been having some fun today with IO Graphica – a cool little program I found on the Internet that follows your daily mouse movements and turns them into modern art. It was created by Moscow designer Anatoly Zenkof. You can download the program free Here.

I thought it would be interesting to compare the images generated based on what tasks I was doing. The program is making the images across my two computer screens.

Here is the IOGraphica image of me doing administrative tasks and web updating:

Here is the image generated by playing World of Warcraft:
Finally, here is an image created while working on Odyssey in Second Life while Skyping at the same time.

Third Faction at ISEA

The Third Faction were in Istanbul, Turkey in September where we presented a series of workshops as part of the ISEA Istanbul conference. Our project “Demand Player Sovereignty” is a civil disobedience workshop focussing on creating interventions in the online MMORPG World of Warcraft and extending these virtual actions into the geophysical “real world”. During our workshops we held Slut Walks in WoW and had attendees take part.
Below is a propaganda video I created for the ISEA workshops. Visit The Third Faction Website to find out more about the DPS and our other projects.

Occupy Wall Street Bus

Recently, in solidarity with OWS, I met up with associates in Blue Mars Lite to find and occupy Wall Street virtually. The event was organized by my friends Jeremy O. Turner and Jacquelene Drinkall.

Blue Mars Lite uses Google Street View as its interface. So your avatar can walk around the streets of the world. The group met up at a NYC landmark and then started trying to find our way to Wall Street. There was so much traffic, though, that things got confusing and we were lost for a little while.

Luckily we found the Wall Street bus! We occupied that for awhile on the way.
Blue Mars Lite works for both Mac and PC and according to the Blue Mars webpage it is possible to take a URL from Google Street View, plug it into the program and it places your avatar right there. I haven’t been able to get that to work yet but will keep trying to sort it out. Good to know for next time.

Newfoundland Joy Award!

While at ISEA in Istanbul this year I got some great news - I am the proud recipient of the 2011 Newfoundland Joy Award for my upcoming hybrid video project "the machine" -

merging video, 16 mm film and machinima. Woohoo! The award comes with in-kind support from NIFCO, The Atlantic Studio Cooperative, John Doyle, some film from KODAK (we'll see how that goes:) and some cash support from the CBC. I have been working on this script for awhile, in 2010 it won the Newfoundland Arts and Letters Dramatic Script prize. I go into production in April 2012. Stay tuned for announcements.

photo by Fau Ferdinand from the virtual set of “the machine” in Second Life.