day after day

day 01 tries to keep track, while day 02 started reading. day 03 is quoting a question, but day 04 turned to another topic. day 05 responds with a shower of metaphors. day 06 missed the meaning but came to its own conclusion. day 07 turned out to be inaccessible and day 08 only has an exit. day 09 glows from the inside, but day 10 is a very dull day. day 11 spills over from time to time. day 12 is a strange experience. day 13 is counting, endlessly, as days go by. 

Selavy Oh - Yoshikaze's New Artist-in-Residence

Yoshikaze is pleased to announce Selavy Oh as our next artist-in-residence.  Her residency starts from 15 February and ends on 30 April. We will be organising her exhibition early May in collaboration with RL HUMlab at Umeå University, Sweden. We look forward to wonderful works she will be producing at the Yoshikaze studio.


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 placeholders.  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.

Selavy Oh was created in 2007 as an avatar in Second Life, where she works using the virtual world as medium.  Since then, she presented her work in solo exhibitions within Second Life, e.g., at IBM exhibition space, Arthole Gallery, and Odyssey.  She participated in mixed media exhibitions around the globe such as Virtual Renaissance in Florence, Italy, the Cyberfest in St.Petersburg, Russia, and INDAF in Seoul, Korea (in collaboration with Roy Ascott, Elif Ayiter, and Max Moswitzer).  She was selected for the Final 5 exhibition of the mixed-media project "Brooklyn Is Watching" at the Brooklyn art gallery Jack The Pelican Presents, New York.  Her artistic collaborations, often initiated as spontaneous intervention, included many of the well-known Second-Life based artists such as Gazira Babeli, Jeremy Turner, DC Spensley, and among them also one of the former residents at Humlab island, Alan Sondheim.  Her work has been covered by prestigious web publications such as SmartHistory and art:21, and recently in the journal Metaverse Creativity.

See http://ohselavy.blogspot.com for more information.

Some Photos from Garrett Lynch's RL Humlab Show & Mixed Reality Performance

On 8th February Yoshikaze and HUMlab opened Garrett Lynch exhibition at HUMlab's RL show space at Umeå University, Sweden. During the opening, Garrett, present from Cadiff, Wales, performed a mixed reality audio-visual performance with SL audience.  We even had some employees from Umå Municipality drop by to experience his work during the performance.  The exhibition, which shows Garrett's work completed during his two months' residency at Yoshikaze in Second Life, runs between 8 - 14 February, and shows SL art of the new generation.

The Green Stage

The final work created for the Yoshikaze Residency involves a live mixed reality performance before an audience in Second Life, in Umeå Sweden and streamed on the web.

An enclosed stage was constructed for the performance. This was populated with a set consisting of a green house, silhouettes of 'real' people and props of reclaimed and reworked Second Life marketplace items (image top). Behind the house through the trees a live vista of a mountain range (the Rockies) can be seen. Next to the house is a floating Second Life client window.



During the performance, props within the space and client windows which appear and float through the space are timed to change colour periodically (images above). My representations movements and direction of gaze is choreographed by a controller software external to Second Life and it is this gaze that is broadcast live to the Second Life client window. The audience simultaneously see the performers representation and through its point of view as my representation moves through the space panning, tilting and zooming.

The live broadcast however is manipulated. Green within the imagery has been keyed out and replaced by a video of the artist from the 'real' world (images below). As my representation moves around the space, my photographic representation moves around its surfaces as they change to green, flattening the 'virtual' world, looking through its very window into another and breaking its stylised illusion. Sound heard is the artists heart beat from an ultrasound monitor reworked in a number of ways. Image and sound links the constructed space to the artist.



While the space of the performance as a whole exists as a combination of 'real' place, constructed 'virtual' representations of place(s) and physical personal data directly experienced by all present, the client window displays a unique vision of a multi-layered hybrid space, an inner 'virtual' world replete with representations, seen only first hand by my representation.

Garrett Lynch - Artists Book

To celebrate the completion of my Yoshikaze's "Up-in-the-air" Second Life Residency and the launch of my exhibition, an artists book has been published which documents all works produced during the residency.

The book is €10.84 / US $13.60 / £9 (+P&P) and published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. To purchase simply click on the Buy Now button below.

Garrett Lynch Exhibition

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

GARRETT LYNCH

8-14 February, 2011

at HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden

Opening Hours : 8am-4pm (Weekdays)

Opening : 8 February Between 2pm-4pm

Mixed Reality Performance by the Artist at the Opening at 3pm (CET) 8th February

Open to SL Audience at 6am (SLT) 8th February

Live Streaming of the Performance: http://www.asquare.org/work/yoshikaze

Yoshikaze Second Life Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/HUMlab/95/215/351

The catalogue of this exhibition can be ordered from: http://tinyurl.com/garrettlynch-yoshikaze

During December 2010 and January 2011 Garrett Lynch has produced a number of remarkable works at the Humlab island in Second Life as the resident Yoshikaze's "Up-in-the-air" artist.  Yoshikaze is proud to present these works in an exhibition at HUMlab, Umeå University, between 8-14 February 2011.  In conjunction with the HUMlab exhibition, the Yoshikaze studio in Second Life will be open to the public. Please visit Second Life to experience Garrett Lynch's work.

[Curator's Statement]

If Eva and Franco Mattes, Adam Nash and Gazira Babeli represent the first generation of Second Life artists who in the midst of its golden age heralded SL art, Garrett Lynch belongs to SL's second generation artists, for whom the shift in focus from novelty in the virtual to a deepened sense of the virtual has come to emerge as a natural progression. 

Captured in avatar reality, the subject of identity is an inescapable topic in Second Life.  The Gracie Kendal Project by Kristine Schomaker and the documentary film Life 2.0 by Jason Spingarn-Koff both address interconnections between the parallel worlds of RL/first life and SL/virtual life.  Garrett Lynch pursues a similar path by making his avatar Garrett Lynch (IRL) an ongoing project.  However, whereas the aforementioned works by Schomaker and Spingarn-Koff straightforwardly documents psychological impact of virtual experience, Garrett Lynch employs another, more subtle, approach to investigating virtual identity. 

Stripped of any relation to other humans/avatars, Garrett Lynch (IRL) is an entity, almost an essence, whose existence is formed purely in relation to RL artist Garrett Lynch and to the environments his creator carefully selects.  By consciously examining the two worlds through various reference points, Garrett Lynch (IRL)'s unique performances delicately yet deliberately reveal the enigmatic intersection between the real and the virtual.  Beneath his tech savviness that expands Second Life's boundary into several external devices lies the core of his exploration into the nature of representation in the era of virtuality, the unknown territory of multiple realities which even encompasses several layers of virtualities.

It is not surprising then that amongst his last works during Yoshikaze residency is Une Région, mais pas Centrale, a work inspired by Michael Snow's La Région Centrale which agnises the interplay among place, perspectives and perceptual recognition of familiarity-unfamiliarity.

Sachiko Hayashi
Yoshikaze Curator

[Artist's Statement]

Identity is the basis of my practice in Second Life, a practice which forms a part of my larger networked practice that deals with networks as a site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse.  Within a network the significance of identity becomes even more problematic than it is outside of the networked arts.  While being distributed and in many ways omnipresent it also frequently imitates and results in a stereotype.

Online worlds such as Second Life however move identity beyond the codified online usernames or static visual iconography that we have until now employed.  They are a step closer to our interpretation of identities in other media forms.  The visualness of the place, the representation of a world within Second Life, is in no small way a factor in this.  We see a place, framed from a point of view as we might in a film or told in a story, this helps to place us there however now combined with a choice of movement the delineation between what is 'real' and what is 'virtual', the differences between the here and there, becomes difficult to establish.

As a starting point for a 'virtual' world residency, identity and place offer a wealth of opportunities to explore.  The exploration of a networked site, opportunity for example to re-interpret what is a site-specific work, and its context, opportunity to create with the specific form of the 'virtual' world.  What becomes immediately evident in this exploration is that language is of utmost importance and yet can not sufficiently articulate its complexities.  Words such as site, place, world, here, there all relate back to what is 'real' and what is 'virtual', two inescapable words that are wholly inadequate.

This is however no surprise.  Language has always played a key role here, I refer to my avatar as my representation and not I, it is never seen without its sandwich board stating that "I am Garrett Lynch (IRL)" (in real life) so to be artist in residence through a representation within a representative space the artist must question and challenge all preconceptions of that space, their own identity and the place of residency.

Garrett Lynch

Artist in residence
http://www.asquare.org

Slideshow of residency

The following is a slideshow of all works and activities during my residency at Yoshikaze.



The residency produced:

• 11 works in total:
  
  
  
  • 3 in world
  • 3 in Google Earth
  • 4 as mixed reality between Second Life and 'real' life or Second Life and Google Earth
  • 1 as live performance before an audience (8th of February, details to follow)
• 10 videos
• 89 images
• 1 publication (coming soon)

Three Wearable Devices for Augmented Virtuality - Device #3: A Wearable Sea View

Device #3: A Wearable Sea View is an attempt to create a 'virtual' and augmented Celatone. The Celatone was a device conceived by Galileo Galilei which enabled its wearer to see a distant place through one eye while using the other to navigate their immediate surroundings (Ayala, 2010).

In this interpretation of the device my representation wears a Celatone which completely covers the view however is transparent enough to mix both distant and local views. Similar to the previous devices, it is a visual prop however this time its purpose is to allow my representation to see beyond its 'virtual' location to a location that is distant in another sense, other worldly outside of the 'virtual' and impossible to reach for my representation. The place seen and mixed with the view of Second Life is Inchydoney in County Cork, Ireland where the artist was born and so attempts to create a connection between the artist and his representation through place.