state of formation

presented by IBM EXHIBITION SPACE (IBM 3, Secondlife)
Curated by Andrew Sempere (Tezcatlipoca Bisiani)
OPENING: 2pm SLT (5pm EST) SEPTEMBER 16th, 2009
SLURL: IBM 3/83/39/22
IBM SPACE: Gallery Information

UNTIL: December 1st, 2009

blogs about state of formation:

• tezcatlipoca bisiani (the "official" blog)
• soror nishi
• arahan claveau
• hamlet au
• masoon (a japanese blog, no idea what's written there)
• avenue magazine, october 2009, page 219 ff (by nazz lane)
• featured in lyric lundquist's sideways time

notecard text for the show by Mab MacMoragh:

An expressionless blank avatar turns, seeming to be a fountain statue, centered over a dark round basin.  Around the well, little black cubes crawl on a white ground splattered in black, a big white cube orbits the air generating a suspended vanishing trail in its wake, and five identical white chairs await.  All is enclosed within a constantly transforming structure of semitransparent panels screened with typeface characters.

Selavy Oh's state of formation reveals itself only to the one willing to explore the installation beyond its superficial appearance. Beginning outside, the visitor walks through moving lettered planes and leaves behind short-lived traces of landforms risen in the water ringing the center.  Finally, the visitor reaches the inner boundary to sit on each of the chairs facing the fountain--and to surrender control.  The visitor's fixed gaze is taken over in a brisk encounter with changing viewpoints and flashing images.

fourty four flowers

forty four flowers is a sound piece for mab macmoragh's sim eryri, and has also been shown at the artificial lawn of brooklyn is watching (mentioned by jay in a comment to this blog, but erroneously attributed to another work, see other comments). invisible moving sound sources play the names of forty four flowers, whispered by two different speakers. the visitor is confronted with the contradiction between the simulated environment, the invisible whispering human voices, and personal memories evoked by the flower names.
voices by amy freelunch (amy wilson) and arahan claveau (steve millar). arahan also made a video (well, more a sound recording) of it, see it here.

dancing mountains

the dancing mountains are the first artwork in Second Life using scripted terraforming. dancing mountains, being more a sketchy proof of concept than a fully developed piece of work, gained much attention for pushing the boundaries of artworks in virtual worlds. thanks to bettina tizzy for the blog at NPIRL, and mab macmoragh (see soup blog) for giving me the possibility to realize this work.

the galleries: final show

machinima by penumbra carter

contribution for the final five show of Brooklyn Is Watching, on display in SL at East of Odyssey and in RL at Jack The Pelican Presents in NYC (picture of the gallery setup).
contributing artists:

• Arahan Claveau – "Adrift"
• Dekka Raymaker – "Artbortion"
• comet Morigi – selected works
• Oberon Onmura – "Fight for Order"
• Misprint Thursday – "Suspended Hang-Ups"

see also mab macmoragh's soup blog, comet morigi's blog, moncherie afterthought's blog post at BiW, and the interview with jay at the npirl blog, and it was mentioned at art:21 by nettrice gaskin.

talking art

there are no pictures of this work, because it was an invisible chatbot specifically written for brooklyn is watching. you can read about it in jay's blog post "art critical chat bot" and hear what they said in their podcasts 58 and 59. the bot scanned the environment for objects, and made specific comments about them on the chat channel, mentioning the title and the owner of the work embedded in a statement such as "did you see XXX by YYY?".
here's part of my comment at the BiW blog to some of the reactions to the work:

what the bot chats is “rather empty”, it lacks subtlety, it quickly becomes “boring and annoying”. yes. this was my intention. the bot’s phrases are dull, repetitive, and uninformed. that’s the reason why i used a pretty simple ‘algorithm’ for generating the phrases, about 20 prefabricated ones (including one with a typo) with a placeholder for the work. far from anything intelligent. i even chose a fixed delay between each utterance, which adds to the machine-like stupidity.

why creating such a work? this spambot was my reaction to the decreasing quality of discourse at BiW, a reflection on the current state of BiW, and as such it should mention the names of the objects on the sim and their owners, but it was intended to be uninformed and annoying (again: i really like the comment in the podcast: smart but uninteresting, yes!).

the circle (chain reaction)

the circle is the centrepiece of my level at the museum of hyperformalism curated by dc spensley. it evolved from several experiments with uniform units influencing each other locally, that is, within a certain range. each of the 180 cubic cells of the circle is identical, and touching anyone of them will start the chain reaction, which slowly will destroy the whole circle. upon touch, a cell will spawn rectangular prims, which slowly float away from the mother cell. when one of the child cells collides with another cell, that cell will also start spawning. each cell can only spawn a limited number of children before it vanishes. once all cells have vanished, the circle will start its life-cycle again by rebuilding itself.
a modified version of the circle can be seen at imagine plus: 180 portraits together with bark aabye, see the video by bark!

rebuilding structure

work for the show THE POST-CRISIS ERA curated by aino baar (for that occasion, i called it resurrection, but i prefer the more descriptive title). a chaotic pile of simple white poles slowly configures itself to a perfectly regular structure when an avatar comes close enough, and breaks down again when the avatar leaves. the work was also shown at BiW, but with an additional component: each breakdown caused some poles to get lost, because they went off-world or ended up on adjacent parcels from where they could not return. thus, the structure became more an more incomplete, slowly loosing its form, and never returned to its initial perfection. see machinima by DC Spensley.