Thoughts: Misprint Thursday's "White Shirt" and oona Eiren's "Live!"

Due to a server issue, for about a week the video part of Misprint's "White Shirt" wasn't playing correctly. That's now fixed, so if you visited Split Screen recently, you should come again. The video stream is a crucial component of "White Shirt," not least because it incorporates a song that contributes much to the work's effect and meaning. (The Imprudence viewer seems to have difficulty with media, so I advise using another during your visit.)

The resumption of the video stream gave me an opportunity to sit with the work a little. Visually, "White Shirt" is highly layered. Although at first glance the installation is dominated by the huge "mountain" fronted by two enormous shirts (one blue, one white), that wall soon becomes the backdrop to the two rows of white shirts, socks and other clothes hanging from clotheslines. Their shadows play across the water below. Under its soft ripples, the video plays. It also appears on the surfaces of two boxes at clothesline height, with anims of hanging clothes, that track from side to side. The video is of a white shirt, dancing in the hands of someone unseen, often too blurred to be distinct but once in a while coming into focus. When you use the anim, your movements hanging clothes and the movements of the shirt dancing play against each other. From other perspectives the shirts hanging from the clotheslines and others hanging free in mid-air create other layers of shirt imagery.

Multiple visual layers do not of themselves make an artwork compelling, of course, although in this case they tell us something about "White Shirt." It has multiple layers of artistic significance as well. One is almost a layer of insignificance: clothes hanging on a line to dry; someone outside hanging them. The quintessence of the quotidian, an image seen perhaps as long as clothes have been washed -- thousands of years, thousands of cultures. Yet the clothes are hanging precariously over the water; if a shirt or sock slips loose, it will have to be washed and dried all over again (if it can be retrieved at all). More, the person hanging clothes is stereotypically a woman, as the keeper of domesticity. The song of course is sung by a woman (performed by Misprint herself -- a true "triple threat" as visual artist, singer/songwriter, and videographer), and its lyrics bring domesticity and sexual desire into close yet troubling contact. "I feel good I feel fine," the character sings, "I'm so strung out on your line / I feel clean I feel bright / Put me on tonight." Strung out, she seems addicted to the subject of her desire, yet abjectly desiring only to be his white shirt. "I know you don't need me / But I know you still want me / Amongst your other fine shirts." In an act of reification (as Misprint terms it), the character identifies herself and her passion with the white shirt. One wonders if she herself has been left hanging out to dry. She is the white shirt dancing in the video on the boxes from which one hangs clothes, in front of solitary blue shirt looming over the scene.

oona's retro-futuristic-grunge build "Live!" is visually multi-layered too, but in a very different manner. Like puns, the images play multiple roles. Contained in a gigantic high-fidelity ("hi fi") stereo from the 1950s or 60s are various turntables, televisions, vacuum tubes perhaps from some dismembered radio, speakers, and other early electronic items, all at wildly mismatched scales. It is also a city -- and yet, in another radical warp of scale, the buildings' walls are circuit boards. All of this is skewed further by the fact that, with just a few exceptions, everything dwarfs the visitor.
Along with the juxtapositions of scale are juxtapositions of time. Gracing a few of the walls are animated photos of Elsa Lancaster as the eponymous character of the 1935 film, The Bride of Frankenstein. (If you hunt around, you'll discover a wooden slab on which she might have been electrocuted into life.) But turn on the music stream, and you'll hear a piece by oona's group, The Gift Collection, which is very much of the late 20th or early 21st century -- 60s experimental music in a return to life. (Like the Bride of Frankenstein herself?) The city itself, corroded and dirty, is showing its age. The speakers-cum-water towers are somehow simultaneously celebratory, dystopian, quaint, and fun. (You can play with the sounds the make by using their menus.) As Yogi Berra once said, "The future ain't what it used to be."

"Live!" is scarcely somber: it's nearly impossible to visit and not smile. It's a kick to tumble into this mishmash of the past and jumble of proportion. Yet it's not just a romp into the early world of commercial electronics, but I think more specifically into the world of the media of art and entertainment. Now that "hi fi" has given way to "high def," it's worth remembering that someday, our own media will be soooooo early 21st century.

"White Shirt" and "Live!" close on 28 Feb, so if you haven't seen it yet, now is the time! Split Screen will be closed in March to the public while the next pair of artists create new installations, to be on view during April.

Artists interested in working at Split Screen are, as always, welcome to contact me.

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Although it's now long past, I'd like to thank everyone who came to the party at Split Screen on the 6th. Our DJ Isabelle Mavendorf took us on a global tour, eventually everyone was dancing, and only a couple people had too many jello shots. It actually was a party! We might have broken some law. We did close the sim -- we hit 20 avis (the max allowed on homesteads) and Misprint, who was delayed, couldn't get in at first. By the end of the day 47 people had been in Split Screen South, not all of them during the party of course, but certainly the majority.

Veparella! or, Aren't Capers a Garnish?

The second loopy build this month! Maya Paris has a new one called Veparella. As she tells us, a "scissor-wielding superheroine created in a freak sewing accident invites you to join her in a Fairytale Caper."

When you arrive, pick up the costume and instructions from the basket of bones.

(Click photos to enlarge.)

The Veparella costume	Full view of the build
What happens when you say "snip"	Dancing on an apple
Making angels on the bed	Ummm ... I have no idea

Turn on the media stream for musical accompaniment reminiscent of old cartoon shows.  Really, the whole thing seems to be channeling Chuck Jones and Jay Ward.

There's probably a serious meaning to all this (maybe something about the philosophical significance of seamstressing, red high heels, and sew on and sew forth), but I'm not that smart so I'm going to take it as a fun treat.

To those of you who feel uncomfortable about wearing women's clothes, just a reminder: this is SL, you're looking at a bunch of pixels, so please -- get over it.  That goes for the males among you, too.

Heartseed Wonderland

The following is an article I just published in Scruplz. The photos in that version were taken by a professional, and they look it. But I'm publishing it here anyway. Plus, I'm able to make some updates, corrections and web-only adjustments that I couldn't get into the Scruplz version because of the publishing deadline.

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Jedda Zenovka

To visit Jedda Zenovka’s Heartseed is to be splashed head to toe with the colors of wild plants; bathed by mysterious lights in deep waters; immersed in the soft glow of some ancient shrine that echoes with dancers’ footsteps.

Jedda’s profile says that her work is inspired by the Australian rainforest. One can well believe it.  Although she grew up in London, after many travels she made her home in the rainforest of northern New South Wales, Australia. (An area which fortunately is accustomed to floods.) “When I discovered this place,” she told me, “I sat in the valley and looked up at the twin waterfalls, and said to the people I was with, ‘I think I will be here for a long time.’  Still here years later!” Her house in her adopted homeland is “in a forest by a creek, surrounded by green and water—landscape where you’d almost not be surprised to see a dinosaur wander through.”

There are no dinosaurs in Heartseed, nor even large lizards (like the goanna she photographed in her RL garden). But the land is lush with beautiful, variegated plants—some brightly colored, some more subtly shaded, some with glowing bulbs, some with large faces, some apparently with flickering flames, some curving overhead like enormous tree trunks. The oversized mushrooms are easily large enough for a hookah-smoking caterpillar. An archway bears the huge head of a horned gorilla with a nose ring.  In one area there seem to be loudspeakers, and what appears to be a spaceship partly overgrown with plants and containing a video player screening videos she likes, including some of her own.

Overhead there is a large sparkling starburst, along with various other creations.  Under the swirling water there are several sea creatures, among them a large translucent shark (by Igor Ballyhoo), as well as a further range of spectacular plant life. Three sky levels complete Heartseed: one with a huge plant issuing seeds; another setting coral in the rain where at the top of another gigantic plant one can float with visions, fantasies, and imagination; and very recently Jedda added the TerraBioStarCraft, a sort of living spaceship.

“I think you’ve created some new spaces here in the past several months,” I remarked. “A couple,” Jedda answered. “Deleted a few too—ran out of prims. I’m always trying to expand on things.  Also as my skills improve, I try to do things again but better, and they evolve.”

“Spirituality seems to be an important part of your work,” I observed. Jedda replied, “I build with intent.  A lot of futuristic builds are based on Armageddon, the end of it all, etc. I am not a nihilist—I prefer to think of something more positive, and try to convey that. A world filled with beauty, magic. I don’t want to concentrate on doom and gloom. Ask and ye shall receive, you get what you give, etc.”

“You connect it also with the world of the original Australians.”

“There is a certain magical earthiness about them. I have used the didge [didgeridoo] in my installation, where the heart is. It connects earth and breath. I like to use sound in my builds. I linked the didge with a heart beat, breath and heart and earth. Water is also important in my builds.  Love is like water—such a powerful yet gentle force, gets in everywhere, and can shape worlds.”

“Are there particular ideas from the original Australians that you work with?” I asked her.

“I think it’s a basic tribal element,” she said, “from dancing in the forests.” And in fact Heartseed has many figures of dancers.

The heart that Jedda referred to is a large, glowing, pulsing heart crowning a tree, or perhaps it’s a giant flower, in the middle of a sort of temple.  It incorporates a poseball which places one at the center of the heart, curled into the fetal position.  Jedda places various anims in Heartseed, such as the floating anims in one of the sky levels, and a couple anim in which one person snatches something from another, and teases her by pulling it out of reach as she tries to grab it back.  I asked her about the inclusion of anims in her builds.

“I’d love to do it more, but its hard to find the right anims. I have been trying to make some. So many couples anims are romantic. That’s why I like this one [in which the girl tries to recapture whatever it was that was swiped from her]: it’s just fun. I’d love to have more anims a round, they make people want to stay and play.  So if anyone reads this who makes anims: more fun please!”

I noted that Jedda works mainly with sculpties. “Yes,” she said, “but I’m going to have to rethink that soon though, with mesh on the way. Dammit—I’m just getting my head around sculpties and something new comes round!”

Because the advent of mesh (an upcoming feature that enables creators to model objects using external software such as Blender and import them into Second Life) has stirred controversy among content creators, including artists, I asked, “Do you think mesh will be useful for you?”

“It’s going to be amazing,” Jedda said. “I had a look in the test mesh grid, and it will really up the ante here.  I am apprehensive,” she admitted, “but mainly for selfish reasons, because it means I have to relearn a load of stuff and be a noob again.” Despite her apprehensions, I’m sure we have much to look forward to.

Jedda has a small store in Heartseed as well, for her brand Wild Designs. There you can buy several of her plants, as well as a cheekily large penis sculpture to carry under your arm (a collaboration with Del May, modeled on a photo of Louise Bourgeois taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982).

If you use Phoenix, note that Heartseed has a local Windlight setting you can use; if you use another viewer, you can change your Windlight setting to [TOR] SCIFI - Evocrads'lime (Torley's Windlight settings are available here). Some of my photos use the Windlight presets.

Jedda has photos and machinima on Flickr and YouTube.

Click on photos to enlarge.

Cow loon

Occasionally, while I'm at Split Screen, I'll get into conversation with a visitor. One who came by a couple days ago to see the new show was Eupalinos Ugajin, appearing as a large dragonfly. I don't think I'd ever heard of him (I think it's a him), but then, I get a bit disconnected. He gave me a link to his Flickr site with some interesting photos of his sim, he said he didn't build elsewhere, I got an LM and he went off to take photos. But something told me I should look at his work in person. And so yesterday I landed at "One Day My Cow Will Come." It's a wild, wonderful, lunatic build, I laughed pretty much the entire time, and everybody ought to make a pilgrimage there tout suite.

There's plenty to do and see here -- in fact I know I missed some bits, which is good because now I have an excuse to return -- but the pièce de résistance is surely the huge catapult. There's a menu from which you can select from a range of objects (by various makers, including Dekka Raymaker, Rose Borchovski, and Maya Paris) to drop in its bowl. When you launch it, a gigantic strawberry descends from the heavens, hits its paddle, and the projectiles go hurtling across space, into and through the huge net. I spent maybe half an hour loading and launching, pretty much giggling the whole time.

(Click on photos to enlarge.)

At the landing point	The big net
The big picture	I'm not sure why I'm running in a tub....
Our hero: Frank Zappa	Looking down into the "city"
Tyrannosaurus watches ELF	My conversation with Mrs Bones
Sleeping on the net	Also on the net
Cows rain on me in the "city"	The strawberry falls
Flinging eyes from the catapult	Flinging cows from the catapult

Mrs Bones made a machinima which will give you a flavor:

As you can see from my photos, the place has gotten a bit more, um, occupied since Mrs Bones made the video.

So stop reading this and go see "One Day My Cow Will Come."

Split Screen hosts Misprint Thursday and oona Eiren

Misprint Thursday and oona Eiren have created intriguing, wonderful new works at the Split Screen Installation Space, showing from 29 Jan through 28 Feb. Both of the installations use some form of streaming media and have interactive elements, so don't come simply to look: watch, listen and touch!

Misprint's White Shirt, in her own words, "is a site specific installation dealing with the personification of a white shirt." The piece integrates video into an outdoor environment -- in a sense, reversing the setting of her recent Paranormal Frottage. It also has clothes-hanging animations.  Be sure to turn on your media (video stream) when visiting this installation, to see the video play under the water and hear Misprint's song, which is a crucial part of White Shirt (lyrics included in her notecard). The photo below was taken in daylight to highlight some of the build's elements, but the work has its subtlest effect when viewed in midnight.

Misprint Thursday's "White Shirt"

NOTE: Sometimes Imprudence has difficulty getting video to play, so you may need to use another viewer. It usually takes 10-15 seconds for the video to start.

oona Eiren built what I'd call a "retro-futuristic-grunge" city/stereo, in an enormous partly open case that occupies almost the entire quarter-parcel. Called Live!, it too involves the use of media: in this case, turn on the music stream for an instrumental piece oona created with her experimental indie music group, The Gift Collective. Touch the loudspeakers to change the sounds they play, and make your own soundscape. The Bride of Frankenstein has a special appearance. Again, although the photo below is taken in daylight, the artist recommends setting to midnight.

oona Eiren's "Live!"

I'm especially pleased to host an (increasingly well recognized) "emerging" artist in the realm of immersive art, who I hadn't known about until she contacted me asking about Split Screen.

Misprint's build is at Split Screen North; oona's is at Split Screen South. Be sure to see both works!

Mark your calendar: we will have the opening party on Saturday, 5 Feb, at 2:00 SLT.  Both artists will be there and the DJ will be the excellent Isabelle Mavendorf.

By the way: if you like what Split Screen is doing, please vote at the Art Galleries of SL kiosk. There's one at the landing point of each installation.

And if you really like what Split Screen is doing, become a sustainer!  You too can be a patron of the arts!  (And kudos to Kara Trapdoor, a big-time sustainer, for scooping this announcement!)

It's snow small matter

Walked out of my house this morning, and the snow was over my knees.  That's on top of the similar amount we got a couple weeks ago, and a couple of lesser snowfalls in between.  More is predicted for tomorrow.  Thought I'd share. Click to enlarge.

See how deep the snow is?

Search for the Sy: SL as platform? game? or? and?

The Search for the Sy opened recently at IBM Exhibition C. It's an interesting build, both for its own sake and for its connection to recent discussions on the nature and future of Second Life.

The creators of Search for the Sy -- Annabelle Fanshaw, Layton Destiny, and Vicki Brandenburg -- say in their introductory notecard that:

This is a sim devoted to encouraging play, and game development in a virtual world.  We seek to explore how an environment filled with interesting things, and a compelling back story can create a multi leveled game within itself. How can the players make a game within the game? How can the game grow beyond its original scope?

[ . . . ]

Concepts such as cultural absorption, indigenous species survival, shadow biospheres and mimetic mythology peek from around the prims in this build, but the purpose is to have fun, to take the ride, and come out on the other side slightly windblown, but smiling.

The backstory is that three scientists were exploring an abandoned sim and found various peculiarities that suggested the existence of a silicon-based biosphere. To investigate it further, they built a detector which seems to have led to their own disappearance, possibly to the silicon world. The game for sim visitors is to locate pieces of the detector, fit them together, solve a couple of puzzles, and find the silicon life forms -- the Sy. You get a trophy if you win, and your name is listed on a wall in the sim's landing area.

The space has three levels: the terrestrial world (the photo below is of an underwater portion), a transitional sphere where one takes on a Sy avatar, and the Sy realm itself.  (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Terrestrial

Transitional

Sy

I'm not a gamer (tried a little roleplay once, it didn't take), so I have no idea how the Search for the Sy compares to other online quests in difficulty or complexity. In any case, I enjoyed the challenge. Admittedly, I was lucky enough to fall upon a missing page from a scientist's log, which helped me find pieces of the detector -- a big help, though some may feel that such "cheat sheets" would ruin the search-and-discover experience. (I wouldn't give away any hints, would I??)

The spaces of Search for the Sy are visually appealing, and it is a thoroughly immersive environment. As a game, it is also necessarily interactive, which is a crucial part of exploiting the possibilities of Second Life. But one aspect of the search particularly interests me: it requires the explorer to have basic building skills. One has to know how to manipulate relatively small prims and link them, know what a root prim, and know how to make a particular prim the root. However, many people in SL don't have those skills, rudimentary as they may seem. (A friend guessed 95%; that seems overly pessimistic to me, but she has a much broader and more representative range of friends than I have, so she may well be right.)

Several issues come to mind. First, what should we make of the fact that many people will never be capable of success in this game? Are the creators of Search for the Sy being exclusionary in some sense? I don't think that would be a valid conclusion: most games require some skills, a potential player must work to develop those skills if she hopes to play, and no matter how dedicated they are, some players simply won't become competitive. (I might have a shot at a career as a football, but never as a football player.) And yet I also want to see works of art and builds such as this one be accessible to a reasonably large audience, not just the minority who've learned how to do basic building in SL: those basics simply aren't that hard to learn, and more people should learn them. So from another perspective, Search for the Sy raises the bar for what is expected of participants in Second Life: that one should be more than (say) a consumer or romance/sex seeker. So even if Search for the Sy is "exclusionary," is that a bad thing?

Search for the Sy also pushes Second Life artists and builders. As I said, I'm not a gamer, so I don't know how often building is a part of virtual world games, whether in SL, World of Warcraft or elsewhere. But despite some artists' advocacy for art that makes the most of SL's capabilities and/or for art that involves interactivity, I can't think of a single artwork that requires its audience to interact with it so deeply, by becoming builders too. Perhaps a few such works exist; I know one artist who has been thinking along these lines, and probably there are others. But actual examples? By being a game, Search for the Sy challenges artists in Second Life to raise the stakes in their own game.

The issues that Search for the Sy raises are timely, since Linden Labs just named Ron Humble its new CEO. Humble was with Electronic Arts, maker of the highly popular Sims game, and before that he worked at Sony developing EverQuest, another MMO. His appointment has stirred discussion about the future of SL and whether it is or should be a game (see for example the posts by Botgirl Questi and Bryn Oh). Of course nobody has any idea where Humble will lead SL, but he's put the game issue front and center.

One question not well explored is what it means to be a game. Some people suggest that games necessarily involve winners and losers, but that reflects a narrow conceptualization of play. Roleplay, for example, does not need to have winners and losers (although a particular RP game might): the challenge can be more qualitative, the object of the game simply joy or exploration. Similarly with the adoption of cross-gender and non-human avatars. In fact, the adoption of any avatar involves elements of games and play. Some objections to the idea that SL is a game invoke the point that SL is real -- real people produce real things, have real interactions, really fall in love, all through a digital medium and in digital form. But then, we also speak of love as a game (need there be losers?), war as a game (need there be winners?), and so forth -- games with real-world consequences.

So, while it's inaccurate to say that Second Life simply is a game, I also demur from the idea that SL is a neutral platform within which people can create games. Game qualities are inherent to Second Life. Those qualities can be developed to various extents, in various ways, and toward various ends. But they cannot be eliminated. The creators of Search for the Sy seem to recognize that fact when they write of players making a game within a game. There are potential implications for how artworks might engage their audiences, as games elements may generate new approaches to virtual art and build new types of public interest in it.