Virtual Life – 2 critiques
She Puppet by Peggy Ahwesh, 2001, 15:00
“SHE PUPPET is an homage to and a commentary on the female action adventure game Tomb Raider and it’s busty virtual superstar Lara Croft. I played the game on my computer and simutaneously recorded the gameplay onto videotape. Then i treated the material as «found footage» and recut it to my own artistic ends. The limited inventory of Lara’s gestures and the militaristic scenarios of the game are interesting from a feminist perpective and an analysis of the symbolic feminine and the popular culture that has sprung up around Lara Croft. Quotations are from three authors who philosophize the alien, the clone and the orphan: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, The Female Man by Joanna Russ and the jazz mystic Sun Ra.” –Peggy Ahweshfrom Electronic Arts Intermix:
Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Trading the rules of gaming for art making, she brings Tomb Raider’s cinematic aesthetics to the foreground, and shirks the pre-programmed “mission” of its heroine, Lara Croft. Ahwesh acknowledges the intimate relationship between this fictional character and her player. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft’s entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.
from Video Data Bank:
Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone in this work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider.
Tom Raider (1996):
Lara Croft is an English archeologist in search of ancient treasures.
The POV is third person – Lara Croft is always visible. Emphasis on solving puzzles, avoiding traps, and doing amazing jumps through the landscape. Gunplay is mostly about shooting threatening animals, although occasionally there’s a human opponent. The goal is to find artifacts that unlock the secrets of Atlantis. There’s more to it than that.
and
Prim Limit by eteam (2009), 32 min, video, Second Life/United States
The eteam: Franziska Lamprecht & Hajoe Moderegger
http://www.meineigenheim.org/videos/media/primlimit.html
“If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. Prim Limit traces this fascinating unexpected trajectory. A plot of land is purchased in the online 3D Second Life network and a simple question is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them?” – eteam
online updates on the game before the video was made from:
http://c-cyte.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-program-week-four.html
Update: The Program, Week Four, August 16, 2008
But here’s the scoop on one installation new this week. In Second Life, eteam has created a dumpster for the virtual things people there decide to delete. At right, see a bunch of “virtual-virtual” objects selected by me, Danette Dufilho, and AC Abbott per eteam’s guidelines to resemble such discarded items (which were of course originally designed to look real). These objects were then photographed by Ben Britt and me from multiple angles, and eteam used the photographs to construct virtual-virtual-virtual objects, which they placed in their dumpster in Second Life — see the following virtual photographs of the objects they made and put there (if you see the objects in “Real Life,” eteam’s work is even more impressive — nice work, eteam!). Next, eteam “filmed” the programmed decay of these objects, sent me the file, and it’s playing on the tv included in the installation.
The artists see Second Life Dumpster as “a continuation of their interest in the value of property, possibilities of land use, (web) site specificity, ownership, and investment.”
I also see this project as, among other things, part of a trend toward art as mad scientist-experiment.
and from Lafayette Art Galleries, Lafayette College, Easton PA
Eteam’s Prim Limit, is a poetic meditation created from the materials collected during eteam’s year-long project in Second Life—the online, three-dimensional virtual social network. There, the artist collective gained a piece of land and opened a public plein-air dumpster in which Second Life players could discard their trash. Eteam’s project focused on what is discarded in Second Life, what happens with these items when no longer wanted, and the players’ attitudes toward the debris. Throughout a year, the artists observed the dumpster, its continual changes, and the occasional visitors. The video is accompanied by narration from one of the avatars, music samples, as well as quotations from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,television and movies like Twin Peaks, Sin City and Lord of the Rings, creating the atmosphere of emptiness, entrapment and decay, while also capturing human aspects and intimate interactions in this curious world, which instead of an ideal utopian model, turns out to be just another reiteration of a life dictated by consume-and-discard.
btw, What is a prim? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tlcXwR-A2s
and btw, What is a prim limit?http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorial/Land/Region_%26_parcel_prim_limits
or same same here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF8XM3vyDmA
and
Larger essay: TK eteam, July 2013, with more detailed information
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/279001/tk-eteam
Augmented Reality
Uncovr App – New Yorker magazine augmented reality cover
Cover Story: Christoph Niemann’s “On the Go”
by Françoise Mouly and Mina Kaneko, May 2016
“The idea of an augmented or virtual reality is inherent in any drawing—it’s almost the definition of a drawing,” the artist Christoph Niemann says. “If you create a world on paper, you create a window. Usually, you just break the surface with your mind, but you always have the feeling of: What if you could step into that world or if something could come out of it?” Niemann’s work “On the Go” appears—in a first for the magazine—on both the front and the back covers of this week’s Innovators Issue. In another first, his images are the prompt for an animated three-dimensional city that is revealed when you look at either cover on your tablet or phone through an app. Niemann says of the concept, “In a drawing, the barrier between the real world and the made-up world is the surface, so at the very beginning I thought of an elevator with its doors closing. But then I realized that the subway is even better, because it really does take you to a different world. The closing doors are a flat surface that separates two worlds, and so are the covers of a magazine—separating before you read it and after you read it, what you know and don’t know, how your views change. So between the front and the back cover, and the experience created by the app, I like that we could show essentially two different angles on the same world. Like stepping through a mirror.”
Layar App – another augmented reality app – can’t get it to work!
Virtual reality video
The Fight for Falluja, NY Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ar0UkmID6s
The Displaced, NY Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecavbpCuvkI
Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart, NY Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIxQXGTl_mo
Ted Talk by Chris Milk: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine
https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine
Online, Interactive and Internet Art
The Question Bridge: Black Males
crowd-sourced online documentary
by Chris Johnson, Hank Willin Thomas, Bayette Ross Smith, Kamal Sinclair
from Sundance New Frontier
http://www.sundance.org/programs/new-frontier
So what is Question Bridge: Black Males?
The Question Bridge: Black Males project is a platform for Black men of all ages and backgrounds to ask and respond to questions about life in America. We created it to stimulate connections and understanding among Black men, but we also wanted to show the diversity of thought, character and identity in the Black male population so rarely seen in American media. In essence, we want to represent and redefine Black male identity in America.In 2012, the project launched as a documentary-styled video art installation, but since then, it has expanded to include an interactive website and mobile app, community engagement events and an education curriculum for high school students.
Why do you feel the need to redefine black male identity?
Because we want to break down the negative perceptions people have about Black males. American media rarely shows whole, complex and authentic images of black men, so by creating a space where these images can live, we hope that people will start to see things differently.So what exactly is a “Question Bridge?”
It’s a method used by those who want to create honest expression and healing dialogue among members of a particular group. It works like this: first, one person asks a question looking into camera, as if they are talking directly to another person. Later, another person responds by talking directly into a camera. This question-answer exchange, the Question Bridge, reduces the stress of normal face-to-face conversations and makes people feel more comfortable with expressing their deeply held feelings on topics that divide, unite and puzzle. This was the central approach used in the project.
and
Rome: Three Dreams of Black, an interactive film by Chris Milk
http://www.ro.me/
and
18 Days of Egypt
http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/
and
Indirect Flights by Joe Hamilton
Daniel Temkin
Cameron’s World by Cameron Askin
http://www.cameronsworld.net/
“Cameron’s World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009).”
Hyperallergic Art site review and links:
http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images-organized-neatly/
from Wikipedia: What is GeoCities?
Yahoo! GeoCities (also known as GeoCities) is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan. It was founded in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was called Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) for a very short time. On January 28, 1999, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!; at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. In its original form, site users selected a “city” in which to place their web pages. The “cities” were named after real cities or regions according to their content—for example, computer-related sites were placed in “SiliconValley” and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to “Hollywood”—hence the name of the site. Shortly after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.
In April 2009, approximately ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.
Shortly after the GeoCities closing announcement, the Internet Archive announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating “GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years.” Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The website InternetArchaeology.org also archived and is showcasing artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the Web site Reocities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it shut down in the intent to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.
Kyle McDonald, artist
https://vimeo.com/kylemcdonald
Body Anxiety
http://bodyanxiety.com/gallery/landing/
“Curators Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan pulled together 21 artists including Kate Durbin, Ann Hirsch, and Faith Holland to explore gender constructs in contemporary art in this online-only exhibition. Unlike most projects that make this list, though, Body Anxiety isn’t mainly concerned with how artists experiment with the internet as canvas but rather takes advantage of the visibility and accessibility of online platforms to celebrate the female voice.”
Code Art
working from the code
http://danieltemkin.com/Tutorials
*Glitch art, Nick Briz
data bending
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOemlx2sBIo&feature=relmfu
The Vernacular of File Formats, Rosa Menkman
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2010/08/vernacular-of-file-formats-2-workshop.html
Clouds in Cloudless Skies from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.
“Clouds in Cloudless Skies” is a boundless, four-and-a-half minute ode to the infinitude of all things procedurally-generated. Entirely created in Processing, this one is a swan-dive into a sprawling visual soundscape, materialized without the use of video camera technology.
In the 2003 short paper “Creating and Experiencing Ubimedia“, members of my research group sketched a new conceptual model for interconnected media experiences in a ubiquitous computing environment. At the time, we observed that media was evolving from single content objects in a single format (e.g., a movie or a book), to collections of related content objects across several formats. This was exemplified by media properties like Pokemon and Star Wars, which manifested as coherent fictional universes of character and story across TV, movies, books, games, physical action figures, clothing and toys, and American Idol which harnessed large-scale participatory engagement across TV, phones/text, live concerts and the web. Along the same lines, social scientist Mimi Ito wrote about her study of Japanese media mix culture in “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Otaku” in 2004, and Henry Jenkins published his notable Convergence Culture in 2006. We know this phenomenon today as cross-media, transmedia, or any of dozens of related terms.
Coming from a ubicomp perspective, our view was that the implicit semantic linkages between media objects would also become explicit connections, through digital and physical hyperlinking. Any single media object would become a connected facet of a larger interlinked media structure that spanned the physical and digital worlds. Further, the creation and experience of these ubimedia structures would take place in the context of a ubiquitous computing technology platform combining fixed, mobile, embedded and cloud computing with a wide range of physical sensing and actuating technologies. So this is the sense in which I use the term ubiquitous media; it is hypermedia that is made for and experienced on a ubicomp platform in the blended physical/digital world.
Of course the definitions of ubicomp and transmedia are already quite fuzzy, and the boundaries are constantly expanding as more research and creative development occur.
CMC 710 at the College of Staten Island, CUNY 