Tuesday, December 30, 2008

SL 2.0: Outline of topics

(Linked from secondlife-sfai.blogspot.com) For those topics that are only outlined and not elaborated on yet, here are some descriptions and examples so that you can fill in the rest. If you want more details just email me.

New exhibition sites
Siting cross-cultural art:
. Problem of audience for cross-cultural artists, e.g. Shirin Neshat's Fervor,
  Xu Bing's Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?
. Site art in SL in the place of the desired audience.
. Site in more than one place, e.g. for Western audience, and compare reactions
. Bourriaud in "Relational Aesthetics": site of art as space for discussion

Art prototype and archive:
. Art modeling and walk through, visualization for proposals and publicity, such
  as Scott Snibbe's Blow Up for YBCA website and brochure before installation is
  created in the gallery
. If funding doesn't come through or no funding for ambitious project, can still
  construct piece in SL
. Afterwards piece can continue to exist in SL as archive e.g. Lynn Hershman
. Conceptual art exercise in New Genres class: Think of a piece assuming you have
  no constraints of any kind

Critical landscapes:
. Visualize the effects on the local by the global (referencing the global
  communication aspect of SL)
. Visualize social networks, e.g. Mark Lombardi, Warren Sack's works and examples
  in 'Aesthetics of Information Visualization'
. Digitally-constructed landscapes to be traversed that are too ambitious to be made
  into physical space
. Digital landscapes that are generated in real time (Pierre Huyghe's landscape
  traversed by Ann-Lee generated from sound, others: seismic waves, oil prices etc.),
  or information mapped onto higher-dimensional objects that can be viewed one
  time-slice at a time
(www.geom.uiuc.edu/graphics/pix/General_Interest/Higher_Dimensional_Objects/)

Narrative
. Use existing forms and incorporate SL content and medium-specific elements e.g.
  Daniel Small's documentary and agitation (in a way that's similar to the Electronic
  Disturbance Theater) uses requests to the server to bombard the space with a
  mountain of surreal smileys and colorful explosion (depicts SL as a lawless
  place, like Sonnenfield's WWW, MiB)
. Insert and perform actions to engage, e.g. Patty Chang's Shangri-La
. Insert other participants to enage, e.g. Tino Sehgal's
  This is so contemporary and other works
. Combine multi-room installations with avatar performers (some can be
  automated).
  E.g. a scenario like Russian Ark, in the form of installations with material
  from archives, or historical scenes/time travel. Possible themes: history (to reflect
  on present, to interrogate the past, personal histories, histories that have fallen
  off canons). Another theme is culture (own - related to history, against 'othering',
  e.g. Coco Fusco's Two Undiscovered Americans Visit the West)
. A walk e.g. Janet Cardiff with voice-over (preferably binaural!), or script of places
  to go, or choices at each point. Or one that takes people on a tour on intersex
  fashion
. Exquisite corpse games to engage with people as one walks through SL, e.g.
  Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon

Language
. Seamless translation of languages in chat.
. A good example is Yael Kanarek's online space for Palestinians and Israelis. This
  time Hebrewis not privileged over Arabic and all 3 languages are available at once.
. The cultural spaces described in the above two sections provide a location for
  people interested in other cultures to interact, analogous to pen-pals/host-family/
  exchange student.
. Benefits: people don't travel much as U.S. is a large country, and being a
  superpower, it has a large influence on people in/from other countries.
. Philip Rosedale mentioned the possibility of metaphorical language?

Collaboration
. Between people who don't normally talk to each other, e.g. technoscience theorists/
  artists and scientists/engineers, Left/Right in the U.S..