Art Screamer tease and some random thoughts about social media

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On the subject of virtual art.....

The upcoming exhibit on Art Screamer is so fabulous I am gonna burst.

The artist, who may or may not be Claudia someone or other, may or may not be building incredible things that demonstrate the kinds of detailed art people can create with mesh.  Or not.  You will find out at the end of this month if all goes according to plan.  I can't wait!

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On the subject of social media....

I follow my daughter on social media which is my parental way of trying to protect her and make sure the inevitable teenage drama doesn't get out of hand.  She laughs and politely informs me that not only did she wait 3 months to make her relationship with her boyfriend "Facebook Official"  but some things are meant to be private and the really good stuff happens in IM anyway.  When I got done laughing and having a proud mama moment, I realized there is something instructional in her approach.

Social media makes our connections broad and our relationships immediate. It is amazing to be able to meet people from all over the world and form strong bonds over the expanse of timezones and continents.  At the same time, social media can create a false sense of connection that is betrayed by the reality of individuals alone in the night staring at glowing screens.  It is important not to mistake "friends" for people with whom you share a long term connection.  Online friendships are real and can be long lasting but not all online relationships are true friendship. The distinctions are important.

We all use social media for our own purposes and there is no right or wrong way to use the tools and platforms that seem to procreate like rabbits.  Having said that when people who read your posts, tweets, plurks or whatever begin to express frustration with what you are doing it is time to listen.

Way back when someone fussed at me because I was sending Plurks to Twitter and then not showing up on Twitter to interact with others.  At first I got defensive and basically said "it is my stream and if you don't like it don't read it."  Shortly after my outburst I began to reconsider what I was doing.  Guess what?  I stopped sending my Plurks to Twitter because social media is supposed to be social.  That is, a place to interact with others -- not a place to bombard the world with descriptions of every thought that flits through my peripheral vision or spam from other platforms.

A few years ago someone I know from Second Life plurked something like "I am going to smoke a blunt and then I am going to masturbate. bbiab."  I swear to you I am not making that up.

These days when I read what I have come to think of as "wall o text" social media streams I cannot help myself -- I think about that plurk.  Honestly, I don't want to know every mundane thing that happens in your life nor do I care to share my own minutia with you.

In the words of my wise 15 year old daughter, some things are meant to be private and the really good stuff happens in IM anyway.

LEA #4

I am back to exploring the LEA sims to see what our Tier is supporting.  Today I landed at LEA #4 and had a look around.  My first impression?  "I don't understand this and I don't know how to photograph the work here and I don't even want to blog it either."  Not exactly a good start but I said I was going to blog all 20 LEA sims and blog what I find I will do.

I think I reacted that way because while the theme of interactive work ties the various exhibits on the sim together, the works are all independent and do not visually work together.   So, it took me a while to understand what I was seeing.   When I landed I got the following notecard.

On LEA4: InterACT!, curated by L1Aura Loire/Lori Landay
Opening October 15, 2 pm PDT and exhibiting until January 15, 2012
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA4/21/9/21

Virtual art can invite, or even insist, that you interact with it. The artists in this exhibition cleverly and creatively make art out of interactions between data, objects, actions, and people within and beyond the virtual world in a stunning array of installations and experiences that stretch the possibilities of virtual art. Expect the unexpected, and click whenever you can. #interactLEA Installations by:

Eupalinos Ugajin, "Bateau à planter des îles" ("Islands planting boat") 

Glyph Graves, "Diversity--A Tapestry Spun"

Lorin Tone, "The Sound Garden"

Maya Paris, "soon, soon, quick, quick, soon"

Misprint Thursday, "Is It Real?"

PinkPink Sorbet, "The Beauty of LSL"

Selavy Oh, "The Rules" 

Performances at Senses Places ongoing, and environment always open for you to experience and experiment with wiimote and livestream.  Instructions at the environment.
 Environment open for interaction always.  Get HUD and instructions


WHAT TO DO HERE?
Talk to the InterActor Fishbot for a while here at the entry.  Get and wear a "KinoEye" that will show everyone where your camera is (where you are looking!)  Take an ArtTaxi ride around the exhibition to get an overview of what's here.  Go explore.

Interact in all the installations, and also by:  tweeting about the art show (#interactLEA) and seeing your tweet in the Twitter Cove ; uploading pictures you take of the show to Flickr with the tag interactLEA and seeing them on the Flickr viewer; or make machinima of InterACT! and send the vimeo or youtube url to have it shown on a machinima viewer at the Machinima Pavilion.

As I have said before, I don't usually enjoy places and exhibits that feel like work.  So when I get a notecard that is a wall of text I am often turned off.  I suppose this makes me a lazy art consumer and many artists do not enjoy people like me who want our art to be easy to experience.  I understand that.   So, this post comes with the disclaimer "Chestnut is a lazy lazy art blogger who does not want to read long notecards to figure out the discordant collection of work on this sim"

Now that is out of the way, I will say I enjoyed my visit. The works on LEA #4 are interactive so I found myself flying and hearing music and twirling about.  I do very much enjoy art that insists that I be part of the work and in fact interactive art may be my favorite kind of virtual art.  I was trained well by the NPIRL artists that I encountered way back when I first came to SL.  I click everything just to see what it does.  You do this too, right?

 It is often hard to photograph interactive works well but I gave it a go.

The work that currently lives on LEA #4 was supposed to end on January 15th.  I have no idea how long these works will be available so scoot!  Go see!

"All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie" Bob Dylan

All in all today was a strange day.

I was contacted by someone I know only in the vaguest of social media ways, which is to say not at all.  You know how it is -- someone travels similar circles so you become "friends" but if you were to drop a stone in still water and you were the stone, this person would be 5 or 6 or 10 rings away from you.   You add each other on twitter and maybe you respond to each other once in a while or maybe you don't but you know their name and they know yours and that is about the extent of it  Perhaps you have an impression of them and if you are, say...me....they think they know you because you happen to blog and that gives people the impression they know you.  I mean me.

Are you still there?

Anyway this person messaged me and wanted me to help him understand a conflict between other people, one of whom is a very good friend of mine.  Ummm, I politely declined to comment because he wanted to know if what he was being told was "the truth."  I suggested he talk to the people involved as I could not possibly know "the truth."  He understood and that was that.

Except it wasn't because it is something like 8 hours later and I am still thinking about "truth" and what that really means when it comes to human beings who engage in relationships online.

It is so easy to misrepresent things on the internet and we all have examples of events where things were not as they seemed.  Over time I have gotten a little jaded I suppose and now when someone tells me a story about their life I nod, smile and take it at face value.  Maybe what they say is real and maybe it isn't but honestly I will probably never be able to confirm the facts. Funny enough, the more time I spend online the more comfortable I am with not knowing "the truth."

Exodus Viewer - Check it out!!

I have been hearing some buzz about the Exodus Viewer for a while.  Then this week the fabulously informative and funny crew over at the MetaReality Podcast talked with the Exodus team, and it seemed like the right time for me to check it out.  I am still making my way through the bazillion options for photography in the viewer. There is SO much Exodus can do and honestly much of it seems a bit over my head right now but you don't need to make full use of all the features available.   Just like many other viewers you can use what you like and ignore the rest.

I took Exodus out for a little photographic spin and while maxing out the settings for depth of field and shadows and gamma slowed my fps to a grind, I was without much effort able to get some nice photos.

Exodus has the customizability of Firestorm but runs a bit faster on my rig, at FPS rates close to the Second Life viewer -- when I am not cranking graphics up for photos.  For general tooling around Exodus was running quite fast and smooth for me.  I slowed down only when I enabled all the bells and whistles but I do think that is to be expected on any viewer.  I am not gonna lie, I did start to dream about a new computer with more more more and bigger bigger bigger when I was playing with Exodus for photos.  I am greedy like that I guess.  My laptop is about two years old so its not time to replace it yet but I can dream, can't I?

Based on advice from Crap Mariner I was able to quickly copy Firestorm's windlight presets over to Exodus, which is really nice as I am quite fond of clicking through presets.  For now, I am running Exodus and working to understand its capabilities better.  So far after one day of use? I like it. A lot.

A Real Life Photographic Interlude

I got a fantastic Canon digital SLR camera for Christmas. Since then I have been taking pictures of places I go in my day to day life in favor of more SL photos.  The images below were taken as we took a walk by the Hudson River a few days after Christmas.  No windlight!  No shadows making my computer crash!  Just a cold nose and a patient husband were required.  These image are straight out of my camera with no post processing whatsoever. How much do I love my camera?  Tons.

Of course I have taken every opportunity to annoy my family and friends by pointing my camera in their faces as much as possible.  In the image below both of my children are smiling and even seem to be enjoying each other's company. I am so glad I caught the moment as believe me it was fleeting.  The image was taken in Boston.

I will get back to exploring the LEA sims this week.  Look out for those posts in the coming days.  

Happy Sunday poppets!

Today is double bonus Wednesday! LEA#2 and LEA#3

LEA#2 is home to The Path which I have written about before and which I hope you have seen already. If not, what are you waiting for I ask?  Here is the SLurl and you must go.

So what in the world is happening on LEA#3 you ask? Well I am here to tell you.  LEA#3 is home to the LEA Theater where there has been a series of monthly machinima screenings.

January is the last in this series and apparently there will be changes to the way the process works.  More information will be available soon.  You can read more about the machinima screenings on the LEA blog here.    For the next few days you can still go to the Theater and view films entered for the month of January.  There are huge screens and its a great way to enjoy the films.  Take a moment to check it out if you have some time over the next week.

Over the years I have wondered why we import our thinking about structures from the atomic world right into our virtual lives.  I remember the first time this struck me as odd too.  I was living on Jokung and the people across the water worked for weeks building a house.  They were a cute couple learning how to build and I smiled at their flickering overlapping textures and unaligned prims.   I was still pretty new and I was amazed at what they could do because moving prims around was still a challenge for me at that time. It was when they added a two car garage to the house I got cranky.  There wasn't even a road on the sim and they didn't even have a car for that matter.  Why the HELL did they need a garage?

It is what we do though. We recreate offices and clubs and a myriad of other true to our daily life structures in Second Life.  We can sit upside down or swing on a branch attached to nothing or sip tea in a butter cup made of spiderwebs so why in the world would we arrange seats in neat little rows to watch a film?  But we do.  I suppose it has to do with packing a lot of people into a sim or keeping people out of each other's way at public events but still I wonder why we humans like things to be so predictable.

Yes, this little tangent was brought to you by the rings of seats at the LEA Theater.

Let's begin at the beginning - LEA 1

I promised you a bit of a tour through the LEA art sims and the best place to start seems to be at the beginning.  So that is why I started at LEA 17 the other day.  Ooops.

Rewind.

So today I visited LEA #1.  I had no idea what I would find when I opened my map and teleported to LEA#1.  I don't actually recommend this as a way to start your visit as the landing point for the sim appears to be underneath a museum.  Perhaps the LEA folks might want to rethink the landing point or maybe I some how managed to show my dorkiness early on in this post.  Either way -- TP off to one of the sides or better yet follow this SLurl to get to the Survey of Hyperformalism 2011.

More about LEA#1 after the break

Some thoughts about the Linden Endowment for the Arts

I support art in all of its 3D glory in Second Life. Since my earliest days I have spent my time and money supporting musicians, performance artists and people engaged in visual arts.  I don't know much about art in that I am not educated and I actually (shame on me) enjoyed the Damian Hirst exhibit I saw in Kiev. I don't pretend to be an art critic or someone who understands the theory and history behind great art.  I am just a person who enjoys sharing what I love with others.  Art makes me happy.  Simple.

So I should be really happy about the 20 sims the LEA provides to artists, right?  Well, honestly I have very mixed feelings about the LEA sims.  On the one hand I think its great Linden Lab is providing the land and letting a group of people who are not Lab employees manage the content.  On the other hand as someone who pays tier and hosts art exhibits I have to admit I feel like an idiot paying a lot of money for something LL is giving away for free.  I probably should have my head examined as the saying goes.

And yes, this issue contributed to my need for a break from SL.  The LEA kind of took the wind out of my sails, you know?  My art partners and I talked about it a lot.  We considered giving up our sim but decided to keep going with something we love. Still, every few days I still think to myself "why am I paying tier again?"  Zachh Cale is a more patient and hard working person than I am and when the November deadline for proposals to the LEA rolled around he put in a proposal to curate one of the sims. And the LEA board, in their wisdom, gave Zachh a sim.

I think I am going to use the LEA sims as blog fodder and spend some time looking at what your tier is buying you because let's not kid ourselves.  Nothing is free in this world and your tier and my tier and every one's tier is used to fund these 20 sims.  So, stop number one on our trip?  LEA 17 - curated by my dear friend Zachh.  He invited Yooma Mayo to build the fantastically detailed over sized prim bugs for which he is known.  I took the images in this post at the Grand Opening of Yooma's "Under the Sky" exhibit on Friday night.

I love this exhibit!  Its beautiful and playful and well worth your time, as long as you are not scared of bugs several times the size of your own body.  To go see Yooma's work search for LEA on your map then scroll down to LEA17 and teleport.  You will land right in the middle of this lovely build.  Or follow this SLurl to Yooma Mayo at LEA.  Enjoy!