soror Nishi at Split Screen during October

In a return to Second Life, soror Nishi has created "Boogaloo: A Visual Mash-up" at Split Screen. It will be on display until 31 Oct. It is a fantastical, swampy terrain inhabited by the colorful and almost iridescent trees, flowers and dragons for which she is well known.  Her work occupies both halves of Split Screen -- in a first for the installation space, she's the sole artist presenting this month.

I'm delighted to host soror at Split Screen for several reasons. In particular, lately she's been working primarily in InWorldz; in fact she's probably the SL art community's most vocal advocate for that virtual world, with its more extensive resources and options for prims, lower cost, reputedly more accessible support staff, and other advantages. Of course, she didn't completely stop working in SL -- last June she had a work which she recently re-rezzed -- but nevertheless it's an honor to bring her to a Second Life site.

soror doesn't suggest any particular daytime or windlight setting, but personally I prefer using midnight; the photos don't capture the feel of the immersion.

Incidentally, soror is an "artist of study" for the fall semester Art 110 course at California State University at Long Beach, along with Alizarin Goldflake, Betty Tureaud, and many other SL artists. Miso Susanowa was an artist of study there previously, and again this term.

I'm going to try something new soon. I had hoped to identify emerging artists who have the potential to "think big," but I haven't been very successful. In fact the only one so far is oona Eiren, and that happened because she was smart enough to ask me.  At the time she was just beginning to be recognized, and now, I'm happy to say, she's become well established.  (Asking me seems to be a good way to get into Split Screen, it's happened three times, including one upcoming artist. Then again, I've had to turn down a few people, but I'm keeping an eye on their work.)

In an effort to find more of these artists, I plan to send out requests for proposals to create an installation at Split Screen, most likely to be placed on a sky platform. This will involve a bit of guesswork, flexibility and negotiation, since I still intend to "commission" works from artists (in fact I've already lined up the next two pairs), and I will need to make decisions about when to present a work depending on prim availability. On the other hand sometimes requests for proposals will lead to an "interim" work that can be seen while other artists are building; I've previously had interim works by Misprint Thursday and Miso Susanowa (builds they submitted to the UWA contest), so this would extend the idea. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, go see "Boogaloo: A Visual Mash-up" at Split Screen. Burn2 will be too laggy anyway.

Holy %^#@!! Linden Labs finally added region environment controls!

For a while, many of us have wanted Linden Labs to make it feasible for landowners to establish a particular Windlight setting on their land. Not long ago the people who gave us Phoenix made this possible at least for Phoenix and I think Firestorm viewers. Well, in today's announcements from Linden Labs, after all the silly stuff is this:

You’ll also notice some changes relating to Region Environment Settings. These give region managers the ability to customize environment settings — like atmosphere, sun, time of day, and cloud coverage. Visiting Residents will automatically see those settings, unless they’ve already chosen to use a personal override. For example: a Gothic castle might have a gloomy, spooky environment — and a tropical island might be bright and sunny. This feature is sometimes referred to by its previous moniker, Windlight Environment Settings. Check out the Knowledge Base for more info.

This is great news! Yes, it took them long enough; and it's region-based rather than parcel-based, which creates limitations that Phoenix still surpasses (and Phoenix can have different Windlights depending on altitude, too). On the other hand, it doesn't require giving people a Windlight file. So on balance, definitely something for the SL art world to cheer about!

There's also an item about enabling parcels to have hidden avatars. Nice for people having sex, yeah. But somehow I suspect that people like Bryn Oh and Oberon Onmura (who's recently been trying things with bots) will find ways to make use of this feature....

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.

Selavy Oh and Kolor Fall at Split Screen

Starting today (31 July) and continuing until the end of August, Split Screen is hosting Random Walk by Selavy Oh, and Inverted Paths by Kolor Fall (Patrick Faith).

In her blog, Selavy describes Random Walk as "a continuously changing algorithmic installation belonging to a series of permutative spatiotemporal works." It is constantly transforming: occasionally I've gone to look at though it had disappeared because it had moved rather high up, and other times one practically lands inside it. You can affect the evolution of the installation by flying through it. "Sitting" on one of the elements takes your camera around the build.

I should mention, it's best to see Selavy's piece using SL's own Viewer 2.7 (and above). V2.7 has a new feature for lighting and shadows that really brings out the color in Random Walk; Phoenix, Firestorm and other TVPs don't have it yet. (This is probably the only time I've ever recommended anything V2.) Unfortunately, the lighting and shadows feature also kills antialiasing, so be prepared for jagged edges.  The colors do show in the other viewers, just not as well. I recommend playing with different windlights and day settings. (Click photos to enlarge.)

Random Walk (dawn)

Random Walk (night, using Viewer 2.7)

Inverted Paths, Kolor told me in conversation, "is about space/time differentials and path theory." His recent work "uses one geometry for positive time ... flips that geometry for negative time ... and the 'movement/life' is the tension between paths [...] between the two space/time spaces." This work too continuously changes and interacts with the visitor's very presence. As you walk through it, paths form behind you. You can "sit" on one of the cubes rolling in the air, and as you dance, curling paths form beneath you. The construction also interacts with itself, as pyramids sometimes flip in relation to the paths. As Kolor's comments hint, mathematics underlie Inverted Paths  -- it's fun, but more than that too.

Inverted Paths (noon)

Inverted Paths (sunset)

In a striking case of artistic serendipity, there are several commonalities between Random Walk and Inverted Paths -- as should be obvious from their related titles. But that similarity arose through the artists' similar ideas, not through conversation (as best as I know): Kolor built most of his installation on his own sim, placed it at Split Screen just a few days before opening, and only gave me a title a couple days later, having no idea what Selavy called her work. More than that, as you can see from my quotations from each artist, both works have a mathematical basis focused on the space-time relationship.

The serendipity doesn't stop there: Miso's Time as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones continues on display at the sky platform. Although focused on her experiences of time and space while on a meditative stroll rather than math, at play in her piece are similar issues of time, space, and the path one creates by following it.

Get to all three installations from the starting point here.

A Thousand Cuts

A Thousand Cuts, by Ligorano/Reese

Need I say more?

In which I cave in and create a Facebook page ... and learn that I can't be your friend

Some people hassled me about not having a Facebook page. They told me it'll help promote Split Screen. Well, OK, that's pretty persuasive. Then I discovered some evil creature snagged the name "Dividni" on YouTube before me, so I decided I better get my name in FB before someone else does. So if you use FB, be nice and pretend you're a friend of mine or I'll feel very very foolish. And beware of pseudo-Dividnis!

I think this link works. Apparently, if I get enough fans there's a prize: I get to have a page without a whole bunch of squirrelly numbers. Unless I want squirrelly numbers I guess.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dividni-Shostakovich/243285845684004

Now, most people sign up with FB with regular personal accounts, but as probably everyone has heard, FB occasionally trawls through and wipes out SL accounts. Poof. No warning, nothing. But they don't do that with a "page" account, which is what non-people like politicians and corporations use (shut up, Supreme Court!), and one option is to be a fictional character. After all, if you've declared to the public that you're a fiction, they can't exactly ban you for lying. So that's what I chose. (As did Botgirl Questi and various others More Famous Than Me). Hopefully this will make me a less tempting target for Viagra ads, poking, and all the other Facebook-y treats that my RL page gets (which, by the way, I check about once every two months).

The down side turns out to be that I can't "friend" with anyone and they can't "friend" me.  All they can do is "like" me. Which is OK, except for the fact that it sucks. In fact, FB removes the search bar from my page! It's lonely being a fiction.

I could've made a page for Split Screen instead, but that seemed like a poor idea since that's not the only thing I do or think about in SL (well, friends of mine may beg to differ!).

I do get notifications about who Likes me. I got a friend to like me, and then discovered that checking who likes me opens up a list of other people who might like me. The weird and worrying thing is that among the couple dozen people in SL I'd never heard of were a couple of my actual SL friends. FB figured that one out instantly. Chills up my spine.

It's starting to look like Google+ may actually be worse for SL, since apparently Google wants to limit profiles to "real people." So far it doesn't sound like they'll even offer an option for being explicitly fictional. Which raises a serious problem: if Google wipes out avatar identity profiles, and those identities maintain blogs, the blogs will be wiped out too. Including this one.

Miso Susanowa has written an excellent blog post on Google's position and its irrationality. She raises a number of points, including marketing ones, but at the very end she mentions another that deeply concerns me. She writes:

This is the Information Revolution: we move outside the established channels because they no longer serve us; we seek our own communities and establish our presence and our reputations by our words and actions; we speak amongst ourselves and we use the tools of a free press to do it, uncontrollable by gatekeepers and sluice-gate operators who seek to stem the flow of community under the guise of commerce. This is the true meaning of "information just wants to be free"; not free as in 'free beer' but free as in 'free to move between people.'

So here's the question: is there a right to use pseudonym? If so, would Google violate that right by wiping out accounts? Is being an avatar a freedom of speech issue? I think so. I think everyone in SL ought to think so too.

Rod Humble interviewed by "The Mark" -- with intriguing results

"The Mark" published an interview with Rod Humble, Linden Lab's CEO. (Thanks to Kara Trapdoor for blogging this.)  It's an interesting read, especially as it raises questions about some of Linden Lab's strategies, which seem at odds with Humble's remarks. In fact he sounds like he shares more views with SL's creative community than with Linden Labs, or at least the Linden Labs of today.

Humble: Second Life is a completely user-created virtual world. It's really, at its bare bones, a creativity tool.

LL's slogan of "Your World. Your Imagination" was killed off some time ago, but Humble seems to be raising its ghost. One can only hope that he succeeds!

Humble: At Second Life, we’re really just following our customers – our creators – and seeing where they take us next.

Umm ... we wish. Get this on LL's mission statement, please!

Humble (responding to a question about "true selves"): I don’t have a clear answer on that, but I do have an opinion. There have been a series of high-profile people, from the head of Facebook to the Pope, talking about how social media should be about centering the individual – that it is all about your real life and ensuring that you don’t become a fractured person. I respectfully disagree with that.

I think that one of the healthiest things that technology can do is actually help us develop the different dimensions of ourselves that we portray in different situations. For example, the "me" at church is very different from the "me" who plays an online shooter game. The "me" talking to you now is very different from the one who will be at my parent-teacher-association meeting later tonight. We’ve always had that. I actually like the idea of enabling people to say, "In this community, I’m a completely different person, and I can hold views that aren't going to seep into this other part of my life." It’s a slightly heretical position, but that's the one I take.

Has Ron been reading Botgirl Questi, Miso Susanowa, soror Nishi, et al? Sure looks like it. Then can we please cease the absurd pressure to connect our SL identities with RL identities in Facebook (and evidently also Google+)? Yes, some people might want to do that, but the great majority of people in SL highly value the separation between SL and RL, so just sideline the idea.

Humble: I think that something big is going to happen when it comes to online associations, which are going to run headlong into conflict – probably with some totalitarian country somewhere. It's a broader thing than just Second Life.

What's going to happen when people identify with each other more in some online community than they do with their government or nation? It's hard to see how that's going to be anything other than messy.
In the past, we've seen – even with slower modes of communication – certain ideas, like Marxist ideas, spreading around the world and uniting people around ideas, rather than around their current rulers. At some point, a new idea is going to take shape, and it's going to spread far more easily through this online system that we have. Then what's going to happen?

It's an open question; I don't have an answer for you. I think it will happen, and it's probably going to be one of the major thematic stories that will govern the mid part of the century. We're due for some kind of new global idea, particularly in the field of politics – there haven't been many new ideas when it comes to politics in recent years. It's been pretty stable for a while, and you have to wonder when that stability will run out.

It's startling to read a CEO suggest that there are (or may be) political consequences to virtual worlds ... still more, that it might be a good thing. He's certainly right that our current political realm is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Although I don't remember any explicit discussions of it, I think plenty of people within SL's creative community (and hopefully elsewhere) have similar views of how virtual worlds could impact society politically. We've already seen examples of how online communication can be used for political ends, the uprising in Egypt being the most recent. But the impact derived from instrumental use of the internet. Rod is talking about more a fundamental philosophical and ideational effect. It's a visionary view (again, he seems to be following the lead of SL's creative community), and remarkably, he doesn't get all dreamy-eyed and utopian about it either.

Still, I'm starting to get impatient. When will we see these views start steering Linden Labs? Will they really steer it? LL made a lot of changes in the past couple of years that have alienated (and sometimes priced out) many of the very people most deeply involved with creating the "user-created world," and those most interested in exploring the possibilities of identity that virtual worlds offer. Will Humble turn Linden Labs around? If so ... please hurry.