[-empyre-] Missive 1: Reply to Annabeth.



First of all, I'm very glad to see Annabeth here, and to finally connect
all her works.  She is probably one of the best SL formalists I know,
and her works at Ars Virtua have been a real inspiration to my own work,
although highly different.

The Port is an important collective that I feel does not get as much
recognition in SL circles as I feel they deserve; they've done great
work in formal means and in community building.  Their Flack Attack
anthology (featured at the Whitney ArtPort) was my first introduction to
collective possibilities in SL, and probably needs inclusion in the
Guide 1.2.  Their approach to in-world art creation in regards to the
way they use space to represent work in that it is highly
non-architectural in the traditional sense has been of great interest,
and need s more examination.

Annabeth, and other artists like Gazira Babeli(sic) and Douglas
Story(sic), are people who I have been consistently impressed with in
that they have been some of the best formalists in sl, engaging with the
structural concerns of the environment as aspects of their work, as well
as the aesthetics of the engine and issues of space and interaction.
Annabeth's UUID Polyphony and Avatar Harp are some of the few pieces
that actually deal explicity with the idea of avatar as
"instrumentation", and I sometimes wonder how her work compares with
physical soundspaces like the 1990's work of groups like Greyworld.  As
an educator in a program that has a Game Design component, sound is
often drastically underestimated, and that 3D engines rely on the visual
so much makes the use of sound that much more dramatic.

Annabeth, what has been your experience in using spatialized sound in
the SL environment, and what issues have you come upon in regards to
visitor experience, and do you feel that sound works differently in SL
as a medium at all?

The thing I find most interesting is those works that do not equate the
avatar as doppelganger/body as merely a "cameraperson" or identity
placeholder, but more like a "pointer" to unique sets of data that can
be picked up/manipulated as material or as agent of interactive
instrumentation.






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