Noetic Grace - Epiphany No2

http://vimeo.com/24270301

Another context / field which I can navigate on to, is the sky. Sky and humans are in the same context as long as they are matters, even if they are set of fields that correspond to different genres.

Jump into the context

http://vimeo.com/24176892

A field of sets is a pair (X,F) where X is a set and F is a boolean complex.
A context (where X ,F exist) is a field
Whitout gravity I can navigate into any field
So I can navigate into a context
The jumping without consequences is occuring when the physical laws have been defeated.

http://vimeo.com/24069420

Epiphany No1

http://vimeo.com/24069420

Log in to SL island:
An entity shall arise out of the abyss (1) - instant TP
The abyss is lacking any physical appearance (gravitation, mass, etc)
The entity has no relative density
A manifestation of vision _Epiphany- (2) has no relative density
THUS:
The New Entity is an Epiphany (walking on the sea)


Lexicon:

1. Abyss: botomless, without depth (from a [alpha privative] and the word deep. The word is applied both to the waters under the earth which is originally covered it, and from which the springs and rivers are supplied to the water of the firmanent.

2. Epiphany: a sudden realization/appearance/ manifestation of a vision

Katerina Karoussos - Yoshikaze's New Artist-in-Residence

Yoshikaze is pleased to announce Katerina Karoussos as our next artist-in-residence.  She is currently a PhD candidate at Planetary Collegium.  Her residency starts from 20 May and ends on 5 August. We look forward to wonderful works she will be producing at the Yoshikaze studio during her residency.

NOETIC GRACE - FROM IMAGE TO IMAGO

This residency regards the process of “virtual vision” such as St. John of Damascus yielded, back in the 7th century. It refers to a course of action that disregards the conventional way of viewing as it entertains the idea of intellectual vision which is beyond any sensory origin. The intellectual eye gazes without any supporting images to the image itself as an endoscopic procedure. In this context the noetic awareness faces all of what can be seen and unseen as epiphanies.

The concept of virtuality has made once again its appearance after fourteen centuries when virtual environments made their appearance throughout the use of technology. But although virtuality has entered dynamically to alter the idea of time and space, the persistence to conventional visual schemata has not yet allowed the real shift of art/science/technology assemble to an authentic virtual vision that could open “windows” other than Alberti’s one.

Even if Second Life is a virtual life, it uses the same visual techniques that people use in the regimented life. The excess of images and their interpretation according to conservative Western principles, create a “déjà vu” environment.

In this two and a half month of ascetic residency I will unfold some of the basic concepts that seem to be juxtaposed between the early “virtual vision” of John of Damascus and that of the contemporary time. By that, the image can gain its notion of imago, thus the mechanism of the metamorphosis of a self and the ability to communicate with the unseen throughout an endoscopic technique.

Katerina Karoussos is an artist and researcher. Her research is based on the convergence of old and new media and especially between Byzantine and new media visual practices. From 1994 to 2003 she was the director and a co-founder of the Hellenic Center of Fine & Applied Arts. From 2004 since 2010 she was working at The Athens School of Fine Arts as a free lancer at the Fresco studio. She holds a Master of Arts from Middlesex University in Art & Technology Interdisciplinary Methods. From 2009, Karoussos is a member of Planetary Collegium (CAiiA) as a PhD Candidate under the supervision of Pr. Roy Ascott. She has participated in many international conferences (ISEA, Aber, Dimea, Consciousness Reframes Series etc).  Apart from her work as a Byzantine mural painter at Orthodox churches her work has been exhibited in various international media exhibitions (Athens, Japan, Madrid, New York, Frankfurt, Montenegro, Cuba etc)

Summary of Selavy Oh Residency

This is a cross-post from the HUMlab blog, that summarizes some of the attention that the residency and exhibition by selavy oh has received.

Last week HUMlab hosted an exhibition of works by avatar artist selavy oh. The exhibition followed a two and half month artist-in-residency on the HUMlab Island in Second Life by selavy oh as part of the Yoshikazi Up-In-The-Air Residency project. Since the vernissage and exhibition, which closed yesterday, there has been attention given to the exhibition both in the virtual world of Second Life and in other media.

From the blogosphere, Dividni Shostakovich comments;

"One might describe CONSTRUCT as a thinking machine, a machine that thinks, which one can watch as it ponders images, observes its own perceptions, making and unmaking connections unceasingly. To call it a "machine" is not a criticism. On the contrary, there is an significant history of art-machines, not least among them those created by Marcel Duchamp: "Bachelor Machines," optical illusion machines and many others."

Of course Marcel Duchamp is the source of the name of our artist in residence, Rrose Sélavy. Oberon Onmura of Second Life Arts and Entertainment [SLANE] has written a long post at New World Notes about CONSTRUCT, stating in relation to the complexity of the work,

It's all there, and much of it is purely magical. All of it is important for every artist working in SL to explore. You will be disoriented for a while, but that's OK. When you visit, you'll probably see me there, wandering about. Visit with a friend so you have someone to toss your reactions around with. If you pay attention, it could change your (second) life.

Finally Mab Macmoragh has dedicated several posts to CONSTRUCT, and describes the work in a 'dreamed' interview with salevy as

Morton Feldman: …we don't know where the passage begins, and where it ends; we don't know we are in a passage… The overall experience of the whole composition becomes the passage.

Mab: If you zoom out, Morton, you can see that the passages interchange

Robert Irwin: It's a psychic build-up, but it's also a pure energy build-up.

Mab: and a day build-up too

Robert Henri: ...not only in the pleasure it inspires, but in the comprehension of the new order of construction used in its making.

Evelyn Underhill: ...it is not strange that certain maps, artistic representations or symbolic schemes, should have come into being which describe or suggest the special experiences of the mystical consciousness…

Mab: I'm pretty sure that Selavy Oh would not say that about this construct

Carolyn Forché: ...language breaks, becomes tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic. The form of this language bears the trace of extremity, and may be composed of fragments: questions, aphorisms, broken passages of lyric prose or poetry, quotations, dialogue, brief and lucid passages that may or may not resemble what previously had been written.

Following the time of CONSTRUCT on the HUMlab Island it will be moving to Mab's Island where is continue to mutate and evolve.

From the world of online radio, CONSTRUCT was featured in on Soup Radio, where

Arahan Claveau is joined by Second Life artist Selavy Oh whose new works 'CONSTRUCT' and 'LPDT2', both open this month. Selavy talks about his experiences creating the projects and how they will integrate with visitors to the physical gallery spaces in Sweden and London. (Duration 59 mins)

There is a detailed interview with salevy done by myself and the curator of the Up-in-the-air Residency Goodwind Seiling aka Sachiko Hayash, where a lot of the technology and concepts behind the work are explained in some detail. The diary form of the work, with the code from each of the 75 days displayed as part of the exhibition (see image below), made the work a document in time, an interactive manifestation of the architecture of the work that includes the visitor;

The visitor is a participant; the permutations provide freedom of interpretation. As mentioned above, the days are created like entries in a diary, but then transferred into a three-dimensional structure like a stack of boxes. But is that initial order the most meaningful? Was it meaningful at all except for its occurrence in time? Instead of understanding the diary as a storyline, we can read it differently.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of selavy's residency on the HUMlab Island for me is how much I have learned and how it has provoked considerable thought. The materiality of time, bringing the image into the realm of change, in this case according to the passing of days and the visits of avatars, is something I will consider in my own work and research for some time to come.

Thanks to Selavy Oh, Sachiko Hayashi, Karl-Erik Enqvist Johan Lindskog, Toby Reid, Jon Svensson and the general HUMlab crew for making this exhibition possible.

UPDATE: Lori Landay, Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts Department, Berklee College of Music, gave a presentation on virtual art at Media in Transition 7, at MIT, May 15, 2011, with presentation slides: http://www.slideshare.net/LoriLanday/virtual-art-inand-transition, featuring CONSTRUCT.

Interview with Selavy Oh on CONSTRUCT

 

At the opening of the RL exhibition of CONSTRUCT (11-18 May, HUMlab, Umeå Univeristy), Selavy Oh gave an artist-talk via Second Life, moderated by James Barrett at HUMlab.  Below is the essence of her talk from the opening, with slight modifications for this web publication. The questions were prepared by Yoshikaze curator Sachiko Hayashi and HUMlab sim manager James Barrett.

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Jim: Would you mind beginning by introducing yourself Selavy and telling us about who/what you are and what/how you do?

Selavy: Selavy Oh has been created as an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life in 2007. She started in the same year with her first art project in Second Life. Selavy thus acts as something between a pseudonym and a representation of her creator. You can think of her as impersonating specific aspects, like a novelist may choose a pseudonym, not to hide behind it, but to express different aspects of authorship. In this sense, talking about “Selavy” and “me” is most of the times synonymous, but sometimes useful to distinguish not only between the avatar and the person, but also between the different facets of identity.

Jim: The diary-form of the construction seems to be intrinsic to CONSTRUCT. Could you explain something of how the work could be seen to function as a diary?

Selavy: What happens when you write in a diary? Of course, some people write down “got up at 7am, drank a coffee, had lunch with Jim, went to bed early”, but that’s not the type of diary I’m referring to. It is rather the idea of keeping a record of selected thoughts, feelings, moods, ideas, etc. The important part is, of course, that you do that regularly. And that is exactly what I did in CONSTRUCT: I added one room each day. Every one of the 75 days of the residency has its own room, often relating to the topic of the residency itself, a time capsule of ideas, artifacts, or reference to other work.
If you read a diary, you may get an idea about the writer and her life. If you visit CONSTRUCT, you may get an idea about Selavy Oh and her residency.

Jim: There are bots in the work and this is the first time we have worked with bots in the Yoshikaze Residency Program here at HUMlab.  Could you explain something of the bots and what they do in CONSTRUCT?

Selavy: Bots are avatars, which are controlled solely by software, that is, there’s no person behind. But since they look exactly the same as an avatar with a person behind, they are an extremely interesting aspect of virtual worlds. The bots in CONSTRUCT are all called Selavy Oh, they look like Selavy Oh, but they are not, let’s say, engaging you in a conversation. Nonetheless, they are interacting with the visitor in a way: the visitor can sit inside the same day together with the Selavy-bot and perform the same movements. So, on one level of explanation, the bots are actors or dancers playing the role of the artist and performing a simple choreography, which is connected to that day.

Jim: I wonder if you could say something just to introduce the transformation/exchange of the rooms and temporal transparency of the outer shells (walls) in CONSTRUCT?  How are they triggered, for example? What are the emerging patterns? Where does the material come from as I noticed very specific references to avatars when they enter the space?

Selavy: The cubic rooms, or days as I prefer to call them, have been set up one after the other just as you would when writing a diary. But the linear structure of a written diary doesn’t, except trivially as a line, translate to a spatial structure. In space, each day, i.e., each cube can have six neighbors instead of just the usual two, the before and the day after. That means that the order of days becomes somewhat arbitrary. You can start shuffling them around and permute them. There are several ways to do that, but I chose a simple one: from time to time, two days randomly exchange their positions. Thus, after a certain time, the whole structure will be different, even though its overall shape remains the same. Since each day has at least an entry and an exit - two walls are missing – the paths you can take within the structure will be different. There are even days that are inaccessible at a given moment, but maybe tomorrow they will be part of an open room. The visitor can also trigger exchanges or transformations: two of the days change position when the visitor enters, there’s a day that will cause all walls, also those of other days, to become transparent, another one is encaging the whole structure in a huge sphere, yet another one performs a Google search for the name of the avatar, etc. The visitor changes the installation by being present and, in some cases, this change is not just temporary, but affects the future of the installation.

Jim: Developing further the idea of interactivity, could you give us some of the details concerning the interactivity of CONSTRUCT- especially the chairs which automatically change the camera view of the avatars who are seated?

Selavy: Two days contain chairs on which a visitor can seat her avatar. Upon sitting, the camera, i.e., the viewpoint of the visitor, will be taken over by the script attached to the chair and will temporarily loose control of the avatar and the user interface. The scripted camera movement takes you through all the days, but unlike a video loop it has random elements and is never completely the same.
While interactivity usually means participation of the visitor - you can click on objects to trigger an event, can bump into things and make them break, etc. – I use the chairs to temporarily take away that participatory aspect. Suddenly, the visitor is sitting again in front of the computer screen watching a moving scene instead of embodying her avatar and being inside the virtual installation.

Jim: Your work requires the visitor to have some SL skills in relation to the space where the work is operating, but at the same time you present videos of the actions of CONSTRUCT. For me this is very interesting in the sense of where the work is located. Is it a virtual work, and the videos are documents of that work, or are they each an extension of each other? If one is part of the other then I wonder about the avatar as viewer/participant. Do avatars have art also? Or are they our keys to access the work, as they cannot share in the videos?

Selavy: For me the virtual world is a medium, just like a canvas. The work is realized using the virtual world. The videos are not documents of the work, but an extension in a different medium; they are part of the work. Documenting a virtual installation such as CONSTRUCT with screenshots or video is impossible, anyway, because the participatory aspect cannot adequately be captured. Of course, just as a visitor of the gallery space needs the physical skills (and make the effort) to leave home and walk into the gallery, just as the visitor of a web site needs to know how to navigate through the pages, the SL visitor needs some basic skills to navigate a virtual space. In this case, that means also you need to know how to fly or teleport, because CONSTRUCT is not a physical space with stairs and elevators and so on, just like a web site is not a book. Thus, as a visitor of the HUMLab gallery space, you experience part of the work. As a visitor in Second Life, you experience another part. The work as such has no single location: it is distributed.

Jim: The permutations of CONSTRUCT are very interesting, you have already stated that permutation “is indeed one of the recurring themes in the installation. There are several days with permutations such as the CONSTRUCT letters, the 10 cubes inside a day, etc. the top and the bottom of the whole thing are also permuting, the chair sequence permutes days and their descriptions, the days permute, - and in the video, which takes up this theme, we have the permutations again.” Could you elaborate further on the permutations? I am particularly interested in if you attach meaning to them or if you expect the audience of the piece to do so?

Selavy: The permutation as a central motif in this work appears already in the first announcement, the little text on the Yoshikaze blog. And of course the visitor is welcome to attach a meaning to the permutations. Maybe the accidental neighborhood of temporally distant days evokes a feeling, a thought, a new association. The visitor is a participant; the permutations provide freedom of interpretation. As mentioned above, the days are created like entries in a diary, but then transferred into a three-dimensional structure like a stack of boxes. But is that initial order the most meaningful? Was it meaningful at all except for its occurrence in time? Instead of understanding the diary as a storyline, we can read it differently. The nine letters, which may by chance again form the word CONSTRUCT at some moment, certainly do have a preferred order. But what if we try to imagine all the possible configurations of days, to look at them at once, instead of looking for the one, which maybe doesn’t happen or which we just missed?

Jim: As you say the permutations are days, and I notice in the exhibition space, each day is represented or replaced by a code sequence. It is as if time and space have joined in action. Could you comment on this?

Selavy: As I mentioned above, time and space are indeed in a way equated in CONSTRUCT. The code – one page of code per day – is the instruction for what happens in each of the rooms, each day. Some days need lots of code. Others do not require specific code, because they contain only a static texture or a specific shape. You can see the code as a reduced form of the work – the code as concept.

Jim: What is the future of CONSTRUCT?

Selavy: CONSTRUCT will continue to change. With 75 cubes and one exchange per minute, the chance that you see the same configuration again until the end of the solar system is almost zero. CONSTRUCT will be transferred to one of the Soup Sims owned by Mab MacMoragh. Thanks, Mab!

Selavy Oh's CONSTRUCT Exhibition

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

"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.

Mab Macmoragh from Soup/Lovers Lane Studio has kindly contributed with a 23-minute-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:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/mabmacmoragh/sets/72157626065546768

Curated by Goodwind Seiling/Sachiko Hayashi in collaboration with Didge Burroughs/James Barrett at HUMlab.  The image above is part of the original exhibition poster designed by Carl-Erik Engqvist at HUMlab.

CONSTRUCT: info

CONSTRUCT

a project by Selavy Oh

May 1-18, 2011

Yoshikaze/Up-in-the-Air Residency

curated by Goodwind Seiling / Sachiko Hayashi

space provided by HUMLAB / University of Umea, Sweden

informal opening: Sunday May 1st, 2011, 1pm SLT

CONSTRUCT is a 75-day project performed during Selavy Oh's residency at Yoshikaze/HUMLAB. Selavy Oh was present every day adding one room representing one day to the installation. The resulting installation is built of 75 hollow cubes, most of them reacting in various ways to the presence of visitors. It 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 and allowing for novel relations between its constituents. The single days continuously exchange their positions, resulting in an ever-changing 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.