the rules

the rules, part I & II
installation for the LEA art shows
InterACT! curated by Lori Landay
and
Hyperformalists curated by DC Spensley

opening october 15, 2011, 1pm and 2pm SLT

the installation consists of two parts. in each part, 6^3 cubes are distributed over a space of 7^3 cubes. the spatial configuration of the cubes is slowly changing over time. the visitor can walk or fly through the space or just watch it. it is possible to navigate through the space - some cubes will act like an elevator moving the visitor one level up, others will move away to open a new corridor.
in part I, each cube reacts to interaction - touching, sitting on it, or colliding with it. part II of the installation reacts to interactions performed by the visitors of part I. the specific reaction of each of the cubes is not due to random chance but is determined by an inner logic - the rules.

see saveme oh's blog for some fun critique and a machinima by laurel leavitt.

random walk

"random walk", conceived for Split Screen curated by Dividni Shostakovich, is a continuously changing algorithmic installation belonging to a series of permutative spatiotemporal works. visitors can actively influence the evolution of the installation by flying through it or can incorporate the avatar into the work by 'sitting' on one of the elements.

viewer recommendations: use the newest Linden Lab viewer (version 2.7 and better), switch on shadows. try different daylight settings (noon or midnight work well).

opening: Split Screen, July 31, 2011, 2pm SLT.
see Dividni's blog for more info, and read Flora's blog for a review!

LPDT2

the new version of LPDT2 on opensim will be shown at ISEA 2011. for the inworld experience, register at http://ngrid.org/blog/?q=node%2F3, or go from elsewhere on the hypergrid to hg.ngrid.org:8002.

construct @ humlab

code for 75 days

Yoshikaze "Up-In-The-Air" Second Life Residency presents 

CONSTRUCT by Selavy Oh

11 - 18 May 2011 @ Humlab, Umeå University, Sweden

Opening Hours: 8am - 4pm Weekdays

Opening: 11 May between 1:30pm - 4pm 

Artist-Talk at the Opening via Second Life at 2pm

SL Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ HUMlab/95/215/351 

Curated by Sachiko Hayashi in collaboration with James Barrett at HUMlab

"CONSTRUCT is a 75-day project performed during Selavy Oh's residency at Yoshikaze/HUMLAB. Selavy Oh was present every day adding one cube representing one day to the installation. The resulting installation built of 75 cubes, most of them reacting in various ways to the presence of visitors, can be conceived as collection of dynamic time capsules, a spatial blog or diary, that transforms time to space and thus breaks up the inevitable causality of its development by folding it to a multidimensional ensemble allowing for novel relations between its constituents. Moreover, the single days continuously exchange their positions, resulting in an everchanging labyrinth of cubes - some days even becoming inaccessible - which allows the visitor to discover new connections and associations that go beyond formal or semantic similarity." (Selavy Oh)

For the HUMlab RL exhibition, Selavy Oh adds another dimension to her inworld installation by exposing codes she has employed for the construction of her work. By letting a code represent each day of her residency in the same manner as her inworld cubes, Selavy Oh's CONSTRUCT conceives a highly conceptual artwork, in which multiple representations can be cross-referenced and examined via a thread of a day, revealing creative process of interconnections, transformations and even contrasts between virtual construction, subjectivity and the behind-the-scene hardcore coding. (Sachiko Hayashi)

Mab Macmoragh from Soup/Lovers Lane Studio has kindly contributed with a 23-minutes-long beautifully edited machinima of CONSTRUCT to the RL HUMlab exhibition. Mab Macmoragh's thirty-seven "mini" machinimas, each depicting various scenes from Selavy Oh's inworld installation, are online and can be viewed at SL: Selavy Oh's construct

Yoshikaze "Up-in-the-Air" Residency is a Second Life residency programme run by Sachiko Hayashi together with SL HUMlab sim manager James Barrett from HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden. As part of HUMlab, its 3264 sqm land in Second Life supports SL artists in their pursuit of virtual art practices and researches. For inquiries, please contact: goodwind.seiling@gmail.com

Yoshikaze is funded and hosted by HUMlab, Umeå University. Original exhibition poster design by Carl-Erik Engqvist.

See summary by Jim Barrett.

at humlab

CONSTRUCT

remembering the future
imagining the past

for the upcoming residency, i chose to construct a dynamic structure - one component for each day of the residency - that can be accessed by my visitors. each component will be a place-holder for the day it has been built. the components may contain artefacts, sounds, interactive elements, or may be empty. once the space is filled, the residency will be over.

the residency will be filled with time. the space will be over. the structure may be empty. the component will be dynamic. the visitor is chosen. the artefact may be accessed, sound be interactive, elements be place-holders. each day will be a space. each time will be filled. the residency is upcoming. the residency is over. the day has been built. the components may be filled. the space may contain time. i chose to construct.

more info at yoshikaze.
teleport to HUMlab.
see also the blog posts at soup by Mab Macmoragh.
watch chair cam sequence at day 29.
time lapse video until day 60.
camera sequence shown at HUMLab.
Oberon Onmura's blog post at New World Notes.
blog post by Dividni Shostakovich.
interview with Jim Barrett. 
machinima by Lori Landay.

thanks to Jeremy Owen Turner for suggesting selavy for this residency.

chatroom

Installation for the Second Life part of the Cyberfest in St. Petersburg, curated by Pinkpink Sorbet. See Pinkpink Sorbet's blog or the Cyberfest page for info.
The installation is a simple white box, which makes extensive use of Second Life's shared media feature for presenting sound (a computer-generated voice reading a book from the project gutenberg), video, and text display on the walls. The text chat of the visitors is answered by two instances of a pandora bot, which is listening and responding to itself in a positive feedback loop.
A discussion at a forum dedicated to chatbots mentions the pandorabot Identity Absent several times.
The behaviour of the chatbot was slightly changed following a mail from Richard Wallace:

Hello, your bot Identity Absent is taking up a lot of resources on our community server at www.pandorabots.com . Please contact us at info@pandorabots.com or call me to talk about how we can better assist with your project.

Best regards,

Richard Wallace
Chief Science Officer
Pandorabots, Inc.

changing room

Collaboration with Arahan Claveau, part of Michael Takeo Magruder's Changing Room project. See Arahan's blog, his slideshow, and his machinima for more info and visuals. See Michael's documentation about the event with even more pictures! 
And here is a text written by Nusch Ray specifically for this occasion:

We, the visitors in the virtual world, are not the audience of this collaborative work of Arahan Claveau (Steve Millar) and Selavy Oh. In fact, we do not even know what the audience outside was experiencing, or whether there was such an audience at all. The changing room does not exist, even though it is documented. Changing Room is a conceptual work of Michael Takeo Magruder, who invites artists to work under heavy restrictions for a very brief time and remix a virtual space, that is, change the space by using only the virtual objects that are already present in that space. The visitors in the gallery, here it was a space in Belfast, can watch the transformation on a big video screen while it happens: a performance of restricted creativity.

Arahan Claveau and Selavy Oh used the time and space for a Warholian composition on the role of the audience: the space, which was supposed to be seen by the visitors in the gallery, was transformed in a non-space, an auditorium full of empty chairs, while semitransparent screens featured a film by Claveau, a succession of avatar portraits, clearly inspired by Warhol's screen-tests. Claveau and Oh not only changed the appearance of the virtual room, but also the function of the real gallery space: the virtual room became the auditorium for watching the visitors of the gallery at the other side of the screen, who would see the screen as projection surface for Claveau's 'screen-tests'. And to make these changes completely confusing, we can think of it as the artists' work within the work of another artist for an invisible audience, which then became the subject of observation, referring to the work of an artist who reflected on the relation of artist and audience ...

Nusch Ray, November 2010

Changing Room was a very challenging experience, it pushed us as artists to work within constraints that were in direct conflict with our usual practise, but it was these limitations that really defined how the space evolved throughout the construction. The inability to reproduce objects in the usual way forced us to approach the build differently, and we had to work closely together to overcome certain obstacles that would normally not be an issue. We started with some initial ideas which developed throughout the day, because there was a time limit and much of that was spent making and positioning objects and experimenting with scripts, we really had to focus on creating a space that would be visually strong but still use the medium of Second Life to its full potential. The end result we felt successfully conveyed our concept; a deconstructed cinema where real-world rules such as physicality did not apply, and when that was taken out of the equation it allowed for a disorienting environment that was contrary to conventions and expectations, something that was importantly in tandem with the spirit of the project.

Arahan Claveau, January 2011