[-empyre-] fwd: post from AnnaBeth

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@anat.org.au>]

Hi,

thanks for having me as a guest...

I'll keep it short...

I'm a relative newcomer to Second Life, having been part of it for 2 years.
Seeing SL as an alternative virtual learning environment for my college was a
primary motivator for getting me to join, as well as seeing how machinima could
support moving image practice within the course I teach on at LCAD. ( I can talk
about this at another time if anyone is interested - though some info is at this
blog - http://ddmcollective.blogspot.com)

Very quickly I was aware, that Second Life was as much its own medium, than
using it simply to simulate or prototype ideas for the classroom.
Within a few weeks, I had joined a community of SL artists called The Port
collective - http://theport.tv ( set up by artists - Goldin & Senneby )
and joined in with a few of their collaborative projects. The first was their
opening event on August 26th 2005 - http://www.theport.tv/wp/wordpress/?p=22
, this gave me my first SL experience of a Live/SL mashup, with us as performers
across the globe, watched in Stockholm and back into SL.
I think this really opened my eyes to the collabrotive potential of Second Life,
as well as pushing it in terms of live inworld generated music and visuals.

It was on the Port's sim I also set up my working space - called The Pencil
Factory ...  I don't think of it as a gallery, but more a virtual sketchbook of
my experiments with Second Life and particularly its Scripting language..

SLURL for the Pencil Factory - http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Port/23/65/

I found an area of particular interest was creating sound based installations -
favorites being the Avatar Harp and UUID Polyphony.
Ultimately I tend to poke around a lot of the functions/events of LSL ( SL's
scripting language ) to do a bit of R&D in the types of interactivity you can
have with the system and how far you can push it.
Some of the stuff is documented on my website here -
http://www.annamorphic.co.uk/projects.html
I find generally, the majority of my art require Avatars to participate with the
work. From interacting via touch, collision or chat, to more passive interaction
where the work scans for avatars and pulls data from them to generate an event.


---

Most recently, I was commissioned by the Long Now Foundation to recreate Brian
Eno's 77 Million Paintings installation to run concurrently in Second Life,with
the opening at San Francisco. Sadly this only ran in Second Life for 3 days,
struck from the world, as the show in San Francisco came to an end.
Some of it was documented here -
http://leedsart.facebook.com/album.php?aid=7534&l=1ddf2&id=612575632


If anyone is interested in an inworld tour of the Pencil Factory I'm happy to
arrange it during this month.


Annabeth Robinson