Photo study of the boy cellist

Before starting to build and experiment in the virtual space, I have begun collecting impressions from my subject my son (the cello boy) as he learns and practices his score. I have taken a series of photos with my iphone of him playing at different angles and contortions of his hands. The instrument being fretless means that the player's hands and fingers must adapt and learn to play the notes. The hands must "remember" and touch is as important as sound. The body and the mind, the ears and eyes are used by the subject as it will be for audience.

Why black and white? As a stark contrast between Second Life's vivid RGB color worldview, I have decided to construct a scene in monotone. It isn't pure SL. Obviously, the concept of photography comes to mind and but also the gap between real life and virtual are needing to be dealt with. In many virtual artists' viewpoints, bringing in the real is taboo as it doesn't rely on the materials and physics of the 3D simulated space. I'd like to challenge this notion while transcending both the photo and virtual spaces to make something new that doesn't exist in either. Still not experimenting in the virtual space, I have yet to know how this imagery will be combined, how users will interact with them or what spatial form will come about. This is fitting to my process and a large part of the experimentation.

At the same time, I'm also doing audio recordings which are still quite rough and even hard to listen to as he endeavors to perform what lies before him on the sheet of music. I will post the raw audio soon.

Yoshikaze's second artist-in-residence: Juria Yoshikawa

Juria Yoshikawa aka Lance Shields is our next artist-in-residence.  (S)he will be with us until 15th January, 2011.  Here is the project description by her/him:

Project “In the Mind of the Cellist Boy”
 
For this residency at Yoshikaze which is an SL space by Humlab at  Umeå University in Sweden, I will engage in an abstracted audio-visual exploration of the experience of learning to make sound, music and art. Springing from my 12 year old son’s challenge to learn the cello, I have watched him as struggles with the fretless, unwieldy organic mass of an instrument. Attempting to recreate the sounds of past composers, he enters in his own “zone” meditating on rhythms and harmonies, making it his own. Other times in tears fighting to make the composer’s intended sound.

What is he thinking and feeling? What can a father who has never learned to play an instrument but who makes virtual art with interactive sound grasp and build from this experience? My son is coincidentally starting a new song (Johannes Brahms Sonata) and the struggle to make it his own will be the heart of this project. Improvising from recordings of his practices, combining photo imagery, considering the form of the instrument, gleaning insights from conversations with my son, I will attempt to create from his experience in order to come to some understanding of what could be going on in the mind of the cellist boy.

This collaborative experiment will not be a documentary but be more like an interactive abstract painting combined with a song that is imperfect as we all are. My own experiments will last for 1-2 months, close to the length of time it will take the boy cellist to learn his score. It will try to look at the identities of a boy (my son) and a man (myself) as they attempt to create order in chaos. At the completion of this project, I would like to arrange a participatory performance inviting other avatars in the installation while live streaming my son playing the song. It is my hope that the happening will somehow capture my own interpretation of what is going on in the cellist boy’s mind.

Juria Yoshikawa

After two decades of creative pursuits ranging from conceptual art, installation, poetry, performance, computer art, animation, photography and digital design. Juria Yoshikawa arrived in Second Life (SL) in the winter of 2007 looking for a new artistic spark. Rather than bringing in real life (RL) artwork, Juria is compelled to use mainly the elements that make up SL itself. A typical Juria Yoshikawa virtual artwork mixes kinetic objects, animated texture, ambient noise and avatar animations. She inevitably chooses scales larger than conventional gallery work because she is interested in people experiencing the work in a physical way - flying through them, riding on them and socializing within the art. To Juria virtual art is about freeing oneself up to create in ways she finds impossible in real life.


Juria's videos >> http://vimeo.com/juriayoshikawa
Juria's photos >> http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancesh/collections/72157613007188738

Lance Shields

Lance is the real life person behind Juria Yoshikawa. As Juria is a female avatar, he wants people to know that she exists in SL as one of his alter egos but that there is not a real life female face behind her. In his real life, Lance is a Tokyo based multimedia artist and designer. He has spent many years creating digital art, installation art and performance. Sculpture and installation are where he started his creative career but he became progressively more involved in the digital and interactive. Lance sees SL as a return back to his artistic roots yet at the same time combines his interests in the phenomenology in the virtual world. This can be defined as “the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of view”.

Some photos from Alan Sondheim's RL Humlab show & presentation

After more than four months' residency at Yoshikaze on SL Humlab sim, Alan Sondheim generously presented his work he had done at Yoshikaze at RL Humlab.  Yoshikaze and Humlab organised a show with his work on 11 screens at RL Humlab between 15-22 September, 2010, while at the same time Yoshikaze's studio in SL became open to the public.  Here are some photos from RL Humlab exhibition.  At the opening, Alan was present from New York via video link.