spherical topography

dynamically changing cloud of cubes based on continuously changing homeomorphic transformations of a sphere. shown at magoo and the contribution of the museo del metaverso for the !D.A.! festival.
featured by soror nishi on her blog.

LPDT2

LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the Text”), created in 1983.

LPDT2 will be projected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea during the INDAF new media art festival held at Tomorrow City, Songdo, Incheon, throughout September 2010 (link to project). The project will also be open to visitors in Second Life during this month, starting from September 1st. See here for an in-depth description of the project (text by Alpha Auer).

Roy Ascott’s project has been co-authored in Second Life by Selavy Oh (programming and architecture), MosMax Hax, aka. Max Moswitzer (architecture and terrain) and Alpha Auer + Alpho Fullstop, aka. Elif Ayiter (avatars and soundscape). Further associates are Frigg Ragu, aka. Heidi Dahlsveen (avatar animations) and i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK (Real Life SMS input). Special thanks go to the University of Applied Fine Arts, Vienna, who have made the project come to life through the provision of their Second Life island for the duration of the show.

More information at the official LPDT2 website. Slideshow by Alpha here (this video is also shown at the Shanghai WorldExpo in the Madrid Pavillion in the program of OpenThisEnd).
See sentences sampled by the text generator and selected by visitors at the twitter stream!

Teleport directly to the installation here.
Download custom sky settings for the Second Life viewer here!

See Mab MacMoragh's machinima and her blog post, Frigg's machinima, Clarissa Ribeiro's blog, a German blog post by Stephanie Posselt, and Garrett Lynch's blog post! but that's not all, the installation has been used to shoot fashion pictures, make machinima or use it as backdrop for sl photography (see the flickr group).

scripted chair cam, video taken by mosmax hax

Ascott R, Ayiter E, Moswitzer M, Oh S. LPDT. Metaverse Creativity 1:81-100, 2010

a space to talk

letters provided by mosmax hax

performance on tuesday august 10, noon SLT, at the Odyssey Performance Art Festival 2010 (teleport).

selavy oh will be present during the whole performance. the duration of the performance is determined by the visitors.

during the performance, every letter chatted by the visitors is transformed to a prim-letter, which is created above the visitors. the artist will not participate in the chat. the letters are forming a structure, similar to a frozen fountain, above the visitors. since only a limited number of prims can be created on a given simulator, the performance ends as soon as there are no more prims available. at the end of the performance, the duration is announced and all letters fall down onto the visitors. after some time, the letters start floating away.

see my odyssey picture album, mab macmoragh's slide show, nicolex's machinima, and the official machinima by liz solo! read garrett lynch's blog about the event.

second performance, renamed to the limits of communicative space, saturday september 26, 1:30 SLT at ECNCS for the opening of the french Centre national du costume de scène et de la scénographie. the performance unexpectedly lasted 4523.758 seconds, that is almost 1.5 hours, and the letters used over 9000 prims. the organizer marc moana was generous enough to let the performance run until the very end.

don't be afraid

work for the group exhibition "It was a blur" curated by Radio Signals. to clarify: my contribution are just the moving letters.
opening july 16th, 6pm SLT, closes august 16th. teleport to mirror.

all participants had to obey several formal restrictions, such as objects being full bright, no glow, use either a given grey texture (HEX: #d1d0d6) or the blank white standard texture. only 2D objects laying on the ground were allowed to use colors or other textures. selling objects or wearable art was explicitly allowed.

see also arahan claveau's critique of the show, and bryn oh's machinima.

homology

ho·mol·o·gy
Pronunciation: \hō-ˈmä-lə-jē, hə-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural ho·mol·o·gies
Date: circa 1656
1 : a similarity often attributable to common origin
2 a : likeness in structure between parts of different organisms (as the wing of a bat and the human arm) due to evolutionary differentiation from a corresponding part in a common ancestor — compare analogy b : correspondence in structure between a series of parts (as vertebrae) in the same individual
3 : similarity of nucleotide or amino acid sequence (as in nucleic acids or proteins)
4 : a branch of the theory of topology concerned with partitioning space into geometric components (as points, lines, and triangles) and with the study of the number and interrelationships of these components especially by the use of group theory —called also homology theory — compare cohomology

Live performance with qiezli Hixantapo (Jeremy Owen Turner) at the Museo del Metaverso, Wednesday, June 9, noon SLT. Streamed live at the Viareggio Art Project!

Left: qiezli as abstract avatar consisting of colored geometric shapes and Selavy. Right: "undressing" the avatars reveals the underlying human shape of both avatars. After being completely undressed, both avatars swapped shape and appearance and slowly dressed using "clothes" and attachments of the other, thus becoming the other.

watch machinima by mab macmoragh and screenshots by selavy oh.

Re-performed November 20, 2010, together with qiezli for the mixed-reality event Zeitgeist, a project by Nora Furlough, which was seen at the MuroGallery in Geneve and on Odyssey.

big bang

work in collaboration with mosmax hax (Max Moswitzer) for the Scien&Art contest. big bang comes in two flavors: one for collectors, and one for exhibitions.

the collector version consists of a single object, the seed, that is given to the collector. once unpacked, i.e., rezzed from the user's inventory, the object triggers the big bang, which lasts about two minutes and results in complete self-destruction. due to the properties (permissions) of the seed object, which cannot be copied, a repetition is impossible, because the seed object is destroyed together with the big bang. thus, the work can only be experienced once and is part of the collection only as long as it is not experienced.

the exhibition version consists of a seed object, which triggers the big bang upon touching it. after teh first touch, the visitor gets the following message: "do not touch the forbidden object again unless you want to trigger the BIG BANG. triggering may violate the rules of this land and may lead to expulsion. triggering the BIG BANG will be at your own risk." after touching a second time, the message is: "probably you accidently touched the forbidden fruit again. you are warned for the last time. triggering the BIG BANG really is at your own risk!!!". the visitor can then trigger the big bang.
notes about the exhibition version, distributed in a notecard:

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Forbidden Fruit: A Theoretical Model for the Big Bang

Selavy Oh

The Big Bang is the prototypical creatio ex nihilo that either seems to require the touch of a cryptic god external to itself or constitutes a mysterious everlasting cycle of creation and destruction. Here we propose the Big Bang contained in the Forbidden Fruit as a theory that unifies the expanding and contracting versions of current cosmology. We suggest that the universe created by the Big Bang is vanishing into the void, but that the creative act performed by the avatar, who assumes a god-like attitude, will start the cycle again. The touch of the creator may, however, be violating the underlying laws, the laws of physics dictated by the terms of service, and instead of being able to admire the successful creation, the creator may be punished by expulsion. Several further side effects of the Big Bang are explained by the proposed scheme: the time dilation accompanying the Big Bang can be observed in the statistics panel, the repetitive nature and limited number of the generated elements is clearly visible, the variability in size has a fractal character, and the cumulative energy consumption equals that of an average laptop computer. Finally it is concluded that the similarity in overall appearance of the generated universes clearly proves that the creative mind was not the one triggering the Big Bang, but the one inventing this concept.

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"The Competition aims to expose and reward the best artworks created in Second Life to communicate scientific concepts."

Scien&Art Competition (2010)

art does not illustrate. art never communicates any concepts outside of art. if an artwork is concerned with scientific concepts, it does so in a critical discourse. art can talk about concepts and topics that are inaccessible to science. art and science are the two faces of the Janus called culture.

Selavy Oh (2010)

another way of putting it might be that art deals analogously with the state of things “beyond physics” where philosophy had to make assertions.

Joseph Kosuth: Art After Philosophy (1969)

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note: surprisingly, this work was not among the winners of the contest.
but see the blog post by zorro hirvi for another opinion, and listen to the podcast by amy freelunch!

the inner workings of perspective

new work for the museo del metaverso (see also here) investigating once more virtual physics, but also the context of museum space. the structure uses a distance-dependent spatial scaling, which contradicts the normal perspective: its size is proportional to the distance of the nearest avatar (see my pseudo-giants). due to technical limitations of the medium, the rescaling of the structure is not smooth, but rather jerky and happens in quantized steps, as if the visitor would be able to observe the actions of the laws of optics. the consequence of the inverse scaling is that the structure plays with the rules of the museum by ignoring the boundaries of the confined space that is allocated to each artist. when seen from far away, the structure breaks out of the walls of the museum and invades the adjacent booths. but as soon as the visitor is close enough to see what is in those booths, the structure is small enough to fit in its assigned space.