From Internet, to Interact: Glyph Grave's "Composition in Realities"

Twenty years ago, on 6 Aug 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first website, using a modified version of SGML (which was used for all sorts of texts) called HTML. The Internet, which had formerly been used to mainly transmit data and simple email, began its transformation into what we understand it be today.

Fittingly, today Glyph Graves opened a new exhibition of pieces called Composition in Realities that combine the physical world and the virtual world. In his words, "It does something other than cross the RL/SL boundaries. It ignores them."  Many of the works take real-time data from various RL sources and transform them into responsive shapes.  For example, one piece draws on data about wind in locations around Antarctica. Another uses the solar wind's interaction with the earth's magnitude field. There are a few more, but the showstopper is "Faceted Existence," in which Glyph uses a Kinect to control a panel of spheres which move out to show his face -- changing as he moves, live. It is a kind of performance piece. ColeMarie Soleil made a video (better than my pile of stills) that shows it in action:

You can't see it at the small scale of the video, but the spheres aren't simply changing color: actually, a video is playing on them. I have a couple of photos that give the idea (click to enlarge):

In a sense, a data source is a data source is a data source; from that perspective, it doesn't make much difference whether one uses wind sensors or a Kinect to control prims. But this particular bridge has been much awaited: the human body's entrance into virtual worlds, to create (again in Glyph's words) a secondary avatar. "Faceted Existence" is part of the effort to take the third step in this direction, after the manual creation of fixed files for standing, walking, dancing, and so forth, and then the use of motion capture (mocap) technology to do the same. The move from static files to streaming data is a significant one. Already this year, the Kinect has been used to trigger preexisting avatar actions (like gestures and flying) within Second Life. Glyph's piece goes an important step farther by connecting SL to arbitrary human actions not already within the program. This is crucial for the final stage, in which people's avatars can move within SL in accordance with their RL bodies.

But let me return to my comment above: data is data. What difference does it make whether it's prims that move, or an avatar? The issue presents itself as psychological: on some level or other, to one degree or another, most of us identify with our avatars -- not in the sense necessarily of feeling that the avatar is an expression of selfhood, but rather, that we experience our avatar's "experience" as our own. When a friend's avatar gives my avatar a hug, I feel hugged. When I go to a sim with large-scale builds like Kolor's Studio, I'm overwhelmed by their enormousness, even though in physical reality they're only images on a computer screen not even a foot high.

This sense of experiential identity is, however, not just psychological: it's neurological. Evidence suggests that human brains have "mirror neurons" which generate approximately the same pattern whether a person is actually doing something, or watching someone else do it. If a movie character steps on a nail, part of our experience is the brain triggering the same set of neural activity as it would if we had stepped on the nail ourselves; when we watch someone dance, our brains are also dancing. At some point, we may physically make the gesture of hugging as another another person does the same, our avatars will hug, and we will feel it with even less distance than we do now.

And so we stood there, some dozen and a half of us at the opening, transfixed for an hour watching Glyph's face doing almost nothing (he was not making exaggerated movements for show). We were, so to speak, facing the future of virtual worlds: when the internet provides new ways to interact.

Through the Virtual Looking Glass/Shanghai World Expo: Island Two, Glyph Graves's "no energy/Entropy"

I've been running into more and more of Glyph Graves's work lately. (By now, you'd think I'd already seen acres of it. Like I said, I haven't been getting out much ... sigh ....) His "life forms" of various sorts -- bulbous plants, translucent flying animals, jellyfish and the like -- are a central hallmark of his work (in real life he's a biologist). Many of these creatures look like they emerged from the deep ocean.  One of his avatars is such a being.  The largest of his creations that I'd seen before was his "Strangers Also Dance," an immersive realm telling the story of an alien jellyfish species that traveled too far from home. (There's a good description by Bettiny Tizzy here.)

His installation for the Through the Virtual Looking Glass exhibition, called "no energy/Entropy," is also part of the Shanghai World Expo, which has a five-sim SL component. I could've sworn there was something specific I wanted to say about Glyph's piece here, but after dealing with some issues at work and a head cold that made me want to do nothing more mentally strenuous than catch up on episodes of "Glee," I haven't a clue what it was. Anyway I'll describe this installation a bit. By clicking/sitting on a tree near the center of the sim, "whispering" to it, you start a transformation: four more or less human-shaped statues on mountains in the distance slide into pieces that turn into glowing creatures. They travel down four rivers that merge into one basin, which the creatures intermingle and slowly swirl about. Whisper to the tree again, the creatures separate into groups which travel up the rivers to the mountains, where they coalesce once more into the statues. (Sorry that the photos are so dark, I set to midnight to highlight the creatures' glow.)

The effect is magical, and I've hauled a few friends over to watch. It's undoubtedly even more beautiful on a better computer than mine. The piece is thoroughly characteristic of Graves's work in its focus on transformation. The scripting involved involved is quite cool; as a rough guess I'd say it's probably akin to the scripts used to make trains and rollercoasters in SL follow a path -- which is not a criticism, just an observation on how scripts can be adapted for artistic purposes. Nevertheless, I'm a little disappointed that there isn't more interactivity, as there was in "Strangers Also Dance," a work which had the additional benefit of a narrative in the background.