Ashes to Phoenix: The Second Life Endowment for the Arts Is Announced

As has been widely reported (for example by Inara Pey, so I won't repeat the announcement), Linden Lab approved the foundation of the Second Life Endowment for the Arts (a successor to the Linden Endowment for the Arts) based on a proposal developed by Tansee and Hannington Xeltentat -- and congratulations! A year ago when LEA was collapsing and some people, with Tansee in the lead, began campaigning for some way to save it or modify it, I had some cautionary advice, and it seems one or two of my thoughts were absorbed into the proposal; hopefully my advice will prove foresightful.

Hannington and Tansee will helm SLEA, which is already a good sign. One of LEA's major sources of trouble was that its leadership was composed mostly of artists, which produced conflict out of competing views (not to mention competing personalities) and took a significant number of artists out of the running for LEA sims. Hannington and Tansee, however, have been curating the Hannington Endowment for the Arts. Tansee is also an artist, but any "vanilla" curatorial experience (i.e., without the mishegas of conflicts of interest and the like) counts. Plus the Hannington Endowment for the Arts has a good track record.

At seven sims, SLEA will also be considerably smaller than LEA, thank heavens. LEA frequently approved crap, especially toward the end, because it often received about as many proposals as it had sims. The SLEA residencies range from one to six months, with a few quarter sims, which is an interesting approach that allows (or requires) a lot of turnover; probably that will help lower the stakes for artists who've seldom (if ever) created a large work before.

Vanessa Blaylock, in her own blog post on the announcement, offers two suggestions: (1) have shorter residencies -- no longer than two months -- and thus provide more opportunities to artists; and (2) make the seven sims contiguous as a way to break down the isolation of the works and build artist community. I'm skeptical about both ideas.

Regarding suggestion (1), Vanessa makes a good point: nobody needs a six-month residency, and few need a whole sim. Well, actually Bryn Oh makes all that work, but she's got her own sim. Vanessa's specific suggestion increases the annual opportunities from 40 under SLEA's proposal to 60. However, she doesn't account for a fundamental problem, one which I discussed in my original advice: at least from what have seen in person or announced in notices to the arts groups, unlike ten years ago very few artists focus on 3D builds rather than 2D images. My concern is not that there will be too few opportunities for artists, but that there are too few 3D artists to take the 40 opportunities. Tansee and Hannington have their work cut out for them already. But the length of residencies and the apportionment of the sims is easily modified. I might recommend chopping the six-month residencies down to three months, but that's all for now.

On Vanessa's suggestion (2), community is important, and I've written a couple of posts about it myself. However, making the sims contiguous doesn't (as she assumes) necessarily build community among the artists -- it can also create visual competition. Compare with the SL Birthdays and Burning Life/Burn2 celebrations: complete visual clutter. If those events create community among artists, then great, that's already happening, but I doubt they do. (I wish LL would put all the artists on contiguous regions, actually, because they're the only reason I visit.)

Admittedly, when I was curating Split Screen, most of the time I split the space between two artists -- but I left the decision on coordinating or separating to them. Sometimes they shared the land, once or twice responding to each other's work, but usually they stayed separate and sometimes they split the space vertically as one artist would take the sky (a couple times I wished that they'd chosen that path...). In fact some artists prefer sky builds, such as Cherry Manga (for instance, Danse Macabre). So if someone looks at a neighboring sim and sees empty land, then what? I also had to deal with conflict between artists over windlights, and I wouldn't wish that sort of thing on Hannington and Tansee. To me, allowing the artists to choose seemed to build a little community in the sense of cooperation, and only once did someone demand the whole space (which led that person to get none -- I set the rules).

However, even though Vanessa presents her suggestion as a way to create community among artists, her argument is actually from the perspective of an art enthusiast: make it easier for visitors to see everyone's work. And on that, she's right, sometimes I myself felt frustrated by the isolation.

So overall, my own recommendations to Tansee and Hannington are (1) require a SLEA-provided TP system on every sim to get to the other sims, maybe incorporating a photo of each installation (too bad artists, you have to include it, those are the rules); (2) have open discussions and a flexible approach with the artists on splitting land horizontally or vertically, and even on allocation of prim equivalents (some artists do a lot with a little); (3) have a flexible approach to residency durations as things proceed; (4) keep a bottle of scotch, some weed, or a bottle of Xanax handy, at some point you'll need it; and (5) GET A PUBLICIST! I mean for fuck's sake, LEA was fucking horrible at publicity, which creates more community and happier artists than any other strategy.

New art works, and a new(ish) art sim in SL

I haven't been paying close attention to SL's art scene for a while. Chalk it up to feeling the SL art scene was in the doldrums, as I've written earlier, and being busy in RL. One interesting artist has appeared during the past year or so, FionaFei, known for importing Chinese inkbrush techniques into three dimensions. She has a work up at the Hannington Endowment for the Arts called "I Had a Dream, and You Were There," which I recommend. One reason to keep an eye on her is that she's done a full-sim work, Imposter, and not many artists have taken that challenge lately.

FionaFei, "I Had a Dream, and You Were There"

But the larger thing that slipped past me was the sim which hosted Imposter, called Sim Quarterly. Curated by Electric Monday, Sim Quarterly opened in July 2019 to provide a homestead "where SL creators and dreamers share their sim-wide, 3D installations" (to quote the notecard from the sim greeter). It is "quarterly" because Electric brings in a new artist every three months (a model similar to Split Screen's, except she has a whole homestead). I regret overlooking its entry into SL, because gaining a sim dedicated to large 3D installations is A Big Deal, in my view anyway. For the past several years the story has been the steady disappearance of such locations, culminating in the closure of LEA.

The current installation at the Sim Quarterly is JadeYu Fhang's Le Déraciné (The Uprooted). This work has three levels. At the landing point there's a small installation with a door through which you can TP to the second level, and from there walk or fly to the higher section on the side. That's all I'll say since I'm pretty busy these days, but go see it.

JadeYu Fhang's Le Déraciné

SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Sim%20Quarterly/6/10/1404.

LEA ends

It's official: the Linden Endowment for the Arts end is closing. The announcement reads, "Linden Endowment for the Arts in its current form comes to an end on August 31st and the remaining sims will be taken offline by Linden Labs on September 1st." What "in its current form" means is anyone's guess; probably nothing more than "Maybe we'll look at it again in 20 years, but don't hold us to that."

When LEA first opened I had strong reservations, as it seemed likely to undermine the independent curators like me. A whole sim for free -- what builder wouldn't jump at the chance? Not something I could offer. My worries seemed confirmed when someone slated for Split Screen pulled out at the last minute, taking a LEA sim instead and leaving me high and dry. But in the longer term the competition with LEA turned out to be less of an issue than I feared: the more serious problem appeared some years later, with the slow exit of the artists themselves. I closed Split Screen when it became clear that I was on the verge of repeatedly hosting the same half-dozen or so artists that fit my goals.

One major loss is the LEA Sandbox. Once in a while it hosted some amazing stuff. More importantly, with the closure of so many other sites for building and hosting large works, the future of SL art is probably limited to textures on a prim and occasionally smallish sculptures, plus a few stalwarts with their own sims, like Bryn Oh and Cica Ghost. Photos and the like are nice, but they don't explore one iota of SL's capabilities. And that's a great pity.

On Arts Blogging (my "blah, blah, blah")

Thirza Ember asked a few people to give her a list of what they like and dislike in arts blogging and then wrote a post about what they said as "The Art of Blogging ... Art." I was one of the people she asked, and since she necessarily only quoted some of what any of us said, I thought I'd post my entire note here (slightly revised), on the off-chance someone's curious:

DO:

1) Unless your blog's sole purpose is posting announcements, give some idea of what you liked about the work. But "Oh the pictures are so beautiful!" isn't good enough. What did you like: something about the technique? the theme? the emotional content? or what? And of course not all good art is beautiful. If you're ambitious, write a full-scale commentary. By the way, you aren't required to like everything: if something doesn't work for you, go ahead and say so -- but again, give some reasons.

2) If you interview an artist or curator, you should fix any mistakes in typing, grammar, and idioms. This is especially important when the artist is using a second language. (If you're both working in a second language, e.g. English, find a friend who can help). You're not going to somehow distort what the artist said -- on the contrary, you'll help them be understood clearly, without the impediment of fixable errors. Quotes from notecards are more complicated, but if you're writing before the official opening, work with the artist to make the corrections.

3) Check your SLURLs. Test the actual link you create. Having incorrect SLURLs makes it difficult or even impossible to find the art. I remember one time someone's SLURL landed visitors in the ocean, but the exhibit was up 2000 meters. Sometimes SLURLs are so malformed they don't work at all.

DON'T:

1) Don't gush. Writing about something is enough to tell me that in your view, it's interesting enough to merit an announcement. But fawning makes me roll my eyes. I'd rather read a post that simply tells me the work exists.

2) Photos: forget the selfies. Once in a while you may need a photo with you in it so you can indicate scale (in which case you're probably small), or to show outfits/avs that the artist offers. Otherwise, stay out of it. To be honest, I also don't see much point in photos of the artist. The exceptions are interviews and, occasionally, artists with unusual avatars.

There you go. Exciting.

Poetry and Banality in Second Life Art

Following the tip in a blog post by Ziki Questi, I visited the Frantastica sim, where there is a new installation by DB Bailey (David Denton). To say that Bailey's installation is eye-popping is almost an understatement: the colors are so bright, so astonishing in color, they send an electric jolt through the brain. Parts of the build are positively on fire. Images are layered like echoes -- a cathedral, the Eiffel Town, pagodas, a woman in a kimono, deer drinking at a lake -- establishing a clear sense of place, space, and depth. The textures sometimes suggest wireframe. The impact of these color-intensified scenes is other-worldly, or maybe a hypersensual and almost hallucinogenic version of this reality. Strictly speaking the installation is most likely "possible in real life," but its sensibility is decidedly outside it.

(Click to enlarge)

Startling and impressive as the build is, one small section was particularly striking. Compared to the rest, it is quite simple: using a narrow color palette, it consists just of a space with curved walls, within which are tall boards and poles stuck at various but not extreme angles. On the boards, a poem slowly scrolls upwards.

(Click to enlarge)

Nothing particularly unusual in any of that -- after a point, I'd bet that there are dozens of works more or less along these lines. Two things made this piece exceptional. First, the poem was good. That's rare: most of the poetry appearing on Second Life art makes for painful, occasionally even cringe-worthy reading. Written by Albert Murrian (one of DB's neighbors), the poem presents tiny vignettes of daily life, often preceded by the word "somewhere" -- a jazz clarinetist plays in the market square, a magician performs tricks, a waitress counts her tips -- which are framed or punctuated, depending on your perspective, by a recognition of the impermanence of everything around us ("In the morning, all of this..."). The poem's style, subject, and use of typography place it in the American modernist tradition of William Carlos Williams (rather than, say, the ruralism of Robert Frost, or at the all-too-familiar kitschy end, Rod McKuen).

The second element that stood out was how the presentation of the poem works with the poem itself. Scrolling text per se is, again, nothing unusual in SL. In this case, however, it directly adds to the meaning of the poem. Its slow cycling exactly matches the poem's subject, the routine pace of the world repeating without end, without beginning. Ordinariness -- the ordinariness of everyday life, the ordinariness of the poem's presentation -- becomes newly seen and newly valuable. It is a good example of content and presentation working together, possibly toward the same end, possibly in opposite ones (as, for instance, in irony), but in either case conjoined. This small section of the Frantastica installation prompted larger thoughts.

Poems abound; poetry does not. Poetry is often lacking in Second Life art. In a sense this is to be expected: as Sturgeon's Law puts it, 90% of everything is crap. But it's useful to have some idea why. It's also difficult to discuss. There is extremely little criticism of art in Second Life; Quan Lavender is one of the few people who tries to inject a little. One reason criticism is rare here is that it often seems like wasted energy: we all have limited time, why spend it writing about stuff you don't like? Another reason is that there's a danger of "hurting someone's feelings," which in a tiny community like ours is a pain in the ass. There's enough drama already. The sort of art that certain artists produce make a viewer suspect that the artist won't take criticism well, and for critics as much as anyone else, life is a lot easier when people like you than when they're mad.

But the fact is that no matter what sort of work someone does -- build installations, create scripts, paint, photograph, write -- they can benefit from critique, even when they disagree with it. I say this from lots of first-hand experience: I've written and continue to write scholarly articles and books, and scholarship usually can't get published unless two (sometimes three) other scholars have read and commented on it. Scholars must be able to endure criticism, or they won't survive as scholars. Sometimes the readers say the book/article is fine, sometimes they say it needs significant revisions, and sometimes they say the problems are so severe that the book/article shouldn't be published. After that, it's up to the author to decide what to do with the criticism. Like most scholars, I've also had to review other people's work and comment on it, and a couple of times I've had to say the book or article should be rejected, which is not a pleasure at all. I've had an article rejected only once, and actually the criticism was absurd, small-minded, a bit vicious, and showed a complete misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. But even though criticisms were wrong, it would have been dishonest of me to assume I had simply been the victim of bad readers. Identifying and solving the article's actual problems resulted in a stronger article, which did get published.

But when it comes to art, people are often afraid to criticize, partly because of the ideology that art is about self-expression. This is a terrible belief. Yes, art is frequently expressive -- but I'd say that generally speaking, it shouldn't be an act of expressing oneself. Instead, usually it should express the world we live in, necessarily based on the artist's perception of it, but without it being about the artist. As William Carlos Williams put it, "No ideas but in things." Otherwise, why should I care, what does the art actually tell me? The ideology of "self-expression" can easily lead to self-absorption. It also makes the work unassailable: by criticizing your art, I must be criticizing you as a person! In contrast, Albert Murrian's poem is an excellent example of how art can be an artist's expression yet not be about the artist. It clearly expresses a perception of the world, the perceiver is Murrian, and yet nowhere does he appear in the poem. Not once does he say "I" or "me" or in any other way point to himself. He simply and directly gives us perceptions, without stepping in the middle. DB Bailey does exactly the same thing. He confronts us with an experience of the world, without saying "This is how I experience the world." Whether he does or doesn't experience the world that way is not the point (it seems doubtful) -- but his installation is an amazing vision of the world.

Another detrimental ideology of art is that it's supposed to be about Important Matters. I probably won't explain this well, because good art does explore issues and ideas. However, the ideological version of that fact leads artists to distrust their art, and so they announce those issues, always (literally or figuratively) capitalized. Love. Family. The Cycle of Life. Loneliness. Devotion. Peace. Inequality. Et Cetera. Et Cetera. Et Cetera. Most of what's said through these Deep Statements is simplistic and trite. The art becomes merely an illustration. Let me demonstrate how the ideology of Important Issues can ruin art, by mangling Picasso's Guernica:

/Me is stunned and moved by the violence, confusion, pain and horror encapsulated by a brilliant painting,
which uses just the right techniques (such as distortion and monochrome) to build its meaning. [Source info]

/Me is dismayed by the artist's inability to trust his/her art, a distrust which wrecks a potentially
excellent painting, making it merely an illustration of war's destructiveness.

Compared to the presentations of Important Issues that often appear in SL art, SaveMe Oh's "(F)art," sophomoric as it is, is almost a relief. (Almost: it's still sophomoric, and it still tries to make a Big Statement.) Of course, anything can be done well. Consider, for instance, the bluntness (and ironies) of Jenny Holzer's "Truisms."  But such forcefulness is rare. And when an artist is obviously earnest in their desire to produce art that Says Something, what can one say when the art is awful? "I'm so glad you have these major ideas, now here's a bottle of scotch, let's see what you do when you're pissed and pissed off." The ideology that art is about Important Matters makes art unassailable in its own way: since I'm criticizing your art, I must be criticizing your ideas, but since you're the artist you know better, therefore I know nothing about art!

I'm particularly wary of works displaying people: the human figure so often invites platitudes. Only a few artists in Second Life get away with it. Bryn Oh and Romy Nayar spring to mind, and they succeed in part because they don't take the body literally. Their distortions or reconstructions of the body are necessary to their narratives. Eliza Weirwight does present realistic bodies, but for her the body is a surface -- sometimes simultaneously stripped and masked, sometimes radically naked when it's fully clothed, sometimes hidden and obscured by its nudity.

A third damaging ideology is that art consists of Pretty Pictures. There's not much one can say about this sort of art. It's basically candy. Which is fine, if you want candy. I myself want candy now and then. But good art is not always (or even usually) pretty. Guernica is not pretty. That doesn't mean art should be ugly -- it means that art can be beautiful without being pretty. Of course, art can also be both pretty and beautiful. Some of Ziki Questi's photos are of lovely places, some aren't, but the photos themselves are almost always beautiful: the composition is impeccable and the photos make one see via her perception. (Although I'll have to admit, she was over-using depth of field; she appears to be easing off.) Beauty isn't an essential criterion either. Some brilliant works of art are outright ugly, like Francis Bacon's. DB's installation and Albert Murrian's poem are neither pretty nor ugly -- but they're powerful works of art. The point is that prettiness, generally speaking, has no particular connection to art. Artists should ignore the concept entirely.

I suspect sometimes that those artists who actually believe the ideologies of "self-expression" and "important issues" think personal expression and significant topics can substitute for technical skill (which is pretty damn important) and thoroughgoing perception. As I've noted, by placing the artist's feelings and earnestness foremost, they make critical commentary unmistakably unwelcome. For its part, the ideology of "pretty pictures" misconstrues what art is altogether. All three ideologies lead to banality.

I haven't said much about technical skill. That's partly because this post is focused on a different issue, and partly because skills are learnable -- and if someone just can't get the knack of GIMP or Blender or whatever, they can figure out how to use whatever skills they do have to their best advantage.

True, I'm not an art teacher. Strictly speaking I'm not even an art scholar. All I can do is say is what, from my layperson's viewpoint, seems to work and what doesn't work. Sometimes I can even figure out why. Probably half of SL's artists disagree with me; such is life.

On the other hand, I do have limited time, so for the most part I focus on work I like. Plus pissing people off isn't really my favorite activity. Go see Frantastica.

A conversation with FreeWee Ling about the nature and impermanence of Second Life art

A few nights ago I contacted FreeWee Ling (art curator for the University of Western Australia's Second Life sims) about a couple of minor topics. Our conversation drifted onto the subject of ArtGyro (FreeWee's group for open discussion of various issues in SL art aimed at arts stabilization and collaboration), UWA, and then the preservation, sustainability, and nature of SL art itself. Like all conversations it wanders from topic to topic, sometimes modulating ideas or not completing them, but it occurred to me that other people might find it thought-provoking. So with Free's permission I've copied part of our conversation below (with edits for typos, clarifications, etc).

---

FreeWee Ling's profile photo,
much in need of updating

FreeWee Ling: [UWA is] starting another big money competition like the Centenary show last year. That'll be the first few months. Starting Feb.

Dividni Shostakovich: Open submission again?

FreeWee: Yes. I'd like to have some [ArtGyro] sessions to talk about what it all means. Is what we're doing here important? Is it good? Does it have lasting value? Art with a capital A? That kind of thing. The ephemeral nature of art here defines its legacy in some ways.

Dividni: Yes -- there are complicated feelings about that issue, not surprisingly.

FreeWee: Of course. People who value the work, whether their own or not, feel like it should be preserved. I think so, too, but maybe for other reasons.

Dividni: I think it should at least be documented, but even doing that can be a challenge.

FreeWee: Right. That's why I document every show we do here. But the difficulty is preserving the idea of the work, not the work itself.

Dividni: Yes. But defining what "preservation" means is actually not so simple.

FreeWee: I feel pretty strongly that the strength of art in virtual worlds is the ability to do a rapid prototype of an idea. The actual technical quality [of the SL platform] is pretty much crap. Even the best of it. But it's so easy to express compelling ideas despite the limitations.

Dividni: Hm, but how does the experience of immersion and interaction fit into that view?

FreeWee: That's what makes it easy. I think of it like Picasso sitting in the Lapin Agile, talking about art and sketching ideas on a napkin.

Dividni: But a sketch of an interaction isn't an interaction: that's a real experience (so to speak, given we're in a virtual world). Regardless of technical quality, psychologically we project ourselves into the virtual space.

FreeWee: The sketch is the idea. An illustration of an idea. But not a fully fledged artwork.

FreeWee: SL is a napkin ... heehee.

FreeWee: No... SL is the Lapin Agile... ideally.

Dividni: Yes, I understand your analogy, but I'm questioning it.

FreeWee: The interaction is the interaction. The others at the table. My point is SL is a place to gather and exchange ideas. The technology is crude, but highly effective because it's easy. It's accessible.

Dividni: So in RL it would be an interaction through the medium of the napkin?

FreeWee: So we can't necessarily critique work here the same as we would in a formal gallery with finished works that are complete unto themselves. We have to see beyond the form to the idea. We make allowances for technical weaknesses if the idea is compelling enough. A lot of the winning entries at UWA are far from the strongest technically. I think there's a consensus that the idea is implicitly transcendent over form.
          This is a different observation than a gallery curator would get. I'm observing a larger population making specific judgments. And I see trends in that. The Artists Choice series reflects the temperaments of artists. The UWA challenges reflects the temperaments of a different type of judging population. But in all cases, they tend to support the rendition of a compelling idea over technical quality.

Dividni: I agree that technically SL doesn't present what many artists have in mind, but I don't think that "draft" quality applies to interaction and immersion. I think that stands more clearly, even if still not precisely what an artist might dream of. But that issue applies in RL too.

FreeWee: Well the question might be, then, what is the quality of the interaction? Is it comparable to RL? Better even? Or is it the facility? The opportunity? Again, it's a matter of simplicity over technical quality that allows interaction to take place on a global stage with few barriers.

Dividni: Why can't the quality of SL art -- including technical -- be exactly what the artist wants? Cartoons can be art after all.

FreeWee: If the artist is satisfied with it, that's fine. What makes a cartoon effective is not its artistic merit but the ability to convey an idea in a simple way. Certainly it's art. And it can be a complete expression. But there's a difference between a cartoon and a Rembrandt. There is depth that can't be achieved simply. A novel instead of a limerick. A symphony instead of a folk song. All have their merits. It's good to be able to use this platform to express ideas, but some people have the illusion that it will last.

Dividni: Yes -- but perhaps the problem there is that they expect RL art to be more permanent than it necessarily is. Some arts are always evanescent, like theater, dance, and music. Oil paintings crack, corrode, etc.

FreeWee: I'm not talking about erosion. I'm talking about this work that we see every day no longer existing. The world itself is evolving away from this technology and there will be no retrieval.

Dividni: There's no retrieval of a theater performance either -- just documentation.

FreeWee: Imagine if oil paint suddenly started to evaporate off all the paintings in the world.

Dividni: See, that's the analogy that people shouldn't be using. Performance is more accurate.

FreeWee: But doesn't performance have temporal and social elements that are lacking in visual art? [ADDENDUM: What I wanted to say here about performance is that when the music is over, there are scores and recordings. When a play is done, the script remains. It doesn't vanish forever. The essential element of an art performance can be recorded or the instructions retained so it can be reproduced. The art in SL is often site- and platform-specific. Very often when a show is over, the work is removed and cannot ever be retrieved. And there is so little "legitimate" criticism by journalists, its memory will also be lost to the future.]

Dividni: Yes -- as does immersive & interactive art in SL.

FreeWee: Of course you're right in certain cases. It's hard to generalize.

Dividni: Yes, which perhaps where this conversation is stumbling! lol

FreeWee: Heehee. Yes. We can always cite exceptions. There are no absolutes. But I do see trends.

Dividni: OK, flesh out what trends you're seeing.

FreeWee: I think we're in for a massive change in technology over the next year or two that will make SL untenable. The core issue being mobility. The real estate model for SL can't survive.

Dividni: Yes, that's a big issue.

FreeWee: I see this where I work. A university. They're pushing hard to get more and more classes online. But what they aren't talking about is what happens to the campus when students don't have to be there? And if a student can get a history class from Oxford and an engineering class from MIT, why should he be in a degree program at the University of Kentucky? And he'll be competing with a class that is global in scope. It's a sea change.

Dividni: Yes, true. What implications does that have for SL art?

FreeWee: Everything is being delivered to portable devices. People are less willing to sit at a computer desk.

Dividni: People are watching whole movies on their iPhone.

FreeWee: SL won't work on a tablet, even if the technology is supported. The bandwidth used by SL is relentless. Significantly greater than downloading a movie. And ultimately, the immersion doesn't happen on a small screen.

Dividni: I haven't tried Cloud Party, but there've been some experiments with browser-based SL, I think.

FreeWee: I've been to Cloud Party. It's basically the same as SL, except that everything is mesh. Harder to create content, but much easier to socialize.

Dividni: I'm not sure I agree with you about the size of the screen impeding immersion -- one can compare it to watching a play from a back row: you still get immersed and can usually read faces even though they're small.

FreeWee: I'm sitting at a desk in my home with 3 monitors in front of me. About 4.5 feet wide altogether and I can spread SL across all three to get phenomenal peripheral immersion.

Dividni: Spoiled brat :-D

FreeWee: I spend enough time doing this there seemed to be justification ... heehee. I still get lagged and pissed about how slow it is. Spent a bunch of money on the graphics card.

Dividni: Yeah, SL is a systems hog.

Dividni: Gaah I need to go to sleep!

FreeWee: Good talking as always.

Dividni: You too, have a good night, and enjoy the holidays & break.

FreeWee: Gnite!

---

Since this is my blog, I'm going to add some thoughts, just to elaborate some points I raised briefly in my conversation with Free, primarily on SL art as a prototype (sketch, draft) and on its impermanence. I just want to flesh out some thoughts to which she and other readers may want to respond.

I don't actually know any SL artists who view their work as a prototype of something they'd like to do in the physical world, or wish that it could be, but perhaps I just haven't had those conversations. Plenty have complained about the limitations of SL's tools, but that doesn't seem to be what Free has in mind. Some artists (in SL or RL) do attempt to represent particular ideas through their works. For example, when sunflower Aichi talked about her contribution to the recent festival at the Odyssey sim, she said, "this sculpture represents the rebirth of man." So perhaps that artwork was a draft or illustration of the artist's ideas. I suppose Artistide Despres's Let These Facts Be Known (at Split Screen in December 2011 and then incorporated into other works) could similarly be described as representing her feeling about the power and importance of the Occupy movement.

But that latter example seems to stretch the idea. In my view, the artwork often is the thought. In these cases the relationship of draft and artwork is the reverse of Free's analysis. The artist's initial, conscious ideas are the draft; the final work constitutes the ideas' eventual form, the result of wherever the building process took her -- much in the way that a novelist can start off with a plot-line in mind and then discover that the characters somehow obtain a life of their own, pushing the story in unexpected directions. An artist certainly can be frustrated with the limitations of Second Life's tools, but that doesn't make the artwork a draft of something yet-to-be-achieved: it is still a completed expression, even if the articulation isn't what the artist would accomplish with better tools. In many other cases, however, SL provides the artist with excellent resources that the molecular world cannot offer. Because the artwork is the thought itself, it's often useless to ask an artist what her work "means" or what she "intends": at the end of the day, what she intends is the artwork. At that point the artwork just is, in all its (virtual) materiality, for its audience to receive and understand in whatever way it does.

The point is especially true for art with a strong narrative element. Bryn Oh's Rabbicorn story is about an orphaned robot-girl and the robot-rabbicorn who eventually saves her from attack; Rose Borchovski tells stories about Susa Bubble, "who went to bed single and woke up double"; and Artée's Let These Facts Be Known has an implicit narrative about the Occupy movement. (The stories, of course, are also about themes like loneliness, fear, and liberty.) But the story is the story. The fact that it was developed and expressed in a virtual world doesn't makes it a prototype of some idea: it is the idea.

I'd like to tie the issue to the problem of preserving Second Life art. At some point, nearly all artworks in Second Life have to be removed, but often we wish they could continue to be available. However, preservation confronts all sorts of pragmatic problems such as who would pay for the sims, and technical problems such as the eventual extinction of operating systems and hardware.

In my view, people should think about SL art not on the model of paintings and sculptures in the molecular world, but on the model of performance. Let's face it: art in Second Life is evanescent. In a sense, all art in Second Life is narrative: not a narrative about something, but instead, a narrative in itself. It came, we saw (or we didn't), it went away ... end of story. That's how arts like music, dance, and theater exist. I wish I could have seen David Tennant as Hamlet (a very good production, I've heard), but I'm out of luck. One can have scripts and scores and recordings of performances -- documents of various types -- but the performances themselves vanish.

Stop wishing that SL art could exist permanently. It doesn't, it can't, and maybe it shouldn't:  maybe trying to make it permanent would simply freeze it to death. The fact that it disappears is part of what makes experiencing it valuable, fascinating, and in every sense immediate. On the other hand, everybody should document!

FreeWee may see the issues differently; or maybe I'm misconstruing her argument; or maybe she'll find she agrees with me on some points. Who knows, maybe I can be persuaded to see things differently.

I'm not going to get into the issues of immersive and interactive art, where immediacy is even more crucial; or the related matter of our psychological projection into such environments, which is being increasingly illuminated by cognitive science. These topics are actually more important to me than the issue of impermanence; however, my impression is that currently impermanence is on more people's minds. So possibly I'll discuss immersiveness and interactivity some other day.