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.

Une Région, mais pas Centrale

Une Région, mais pas Centrale (A Region, but not Central) is inspired by Michael Snow's seminal video art from 1970, La Région Centrale. In Snow's work a camera is mounted to a pre-programmed robotic rig which allows the camera to move around two axis and film the surrounding landscape. The landscape is familiar and yet as a result of how it's filmed becomes alien.



Above: La Région Centrale by Michael Snow (1971)

Une Région, mais pas Centrale reinterprets the work for the landscape of Second Life. Instead of a robotic rig my representation moves around three axis within the 'virtual' space and becomes a camera through which the viewer sees the HUMlab region. In addition to seeing through my representations monocular 'eye' the viewer sees the location of my representation within the region revealing both the seen and the mechanism of seeing.

Choreographed movements are decided ad-hoc by a controller software, external to Second Life, automating my representations movements. The landscape, already alien, unreal, 'virtual' becomes even more so as it's seen in detail through patterns of observation that are programmed and yet without a clear objective. Similar to Snow's thoughts on his own work which could be a probe to another world, here my representation becomes a probe for the viewer to a 'virtual' world.

Sound for the performance is atmospheric audio taken from Second Life and reworked live in a number of ways.

All footage and imagery shot at HUMlab Island, Second Life.






Above: performance images.




Above: Contoller software and audio generating software for performance.

Three Wearable Devices for Augmented Virtuality - Device #2: A Wearable Map of the Region

Device #2: A Wearable Map of the Region is the second in a series of three wearable devices for performance in Second Life. These devices are intended to give myself and/or my representation a heightened/augmented sense of place.

This devices title alludes to Alfred Korzybski's statement that "the map is not the territory". The metaphor, that subject and representation are not one and the same, forms a key role in philosophical discussions around what has been termed as the Map-Territory Relation. The work itself attempts to visualise a description of a map so perfect in detail that it incorporates itself and so to infinity. This has been employed by Lewis Carroll, Josiah Royce, Jorge Luis Borges etc. to explore ideas of the 'real', representation and the issues these pose in relation to each other.

Similar to device #1, this device is a visual prop for myself as viewer of my representation from a non first-person point of view. My representation wears the device which displays a live aerial map, scale 1:10, of its position within Second Life. The map rotates and moves as my representation moves showing a view of the immediate surroundings. This gives a different point of view and forms a continuation of a space that is itself already a representation. This map however even scaled 1:1 can never be a perfect representation of the original representation. Separated in time, due to periodic (one to three days) server caching, from the original representation the map can only incorporate itself if the wearer remains motionless during this time.

All footage and imagery shot at HUMlab Island, Second Life.

Seeing the Seen

An automated performance within a constructed set, a sphere. My avatar and its gaze is moved randomly by a keying application to explore, pan, tilt, zoom etc. through the space. The resulting vision of my avatar, a video feed, is fed to the interior of the sphere allowing the avatar to see it's own sight in feedback with a slight delay.






Above screenshots from the performance and below the keying application made with Max/MSP which orchestrates the movements.

Three Wearable Devices for Augmented Virtuality - Device #1: A Wearable Garden

Device #1: A Wearable Garden is the first in a series of three planned wearable devices for performance in Second Life (SL). These devices are intended to give myself and/or my representation a heightened/augmented sense of place.

Device #1 is primarily a visual prop for myself as viewer of my representation from a non first person point of view. It functions in much the same way as a flat used in theatre, providing a background and context to the presented content. Here the background is worn by my representation and so moves, clumsily, with my representation through the 'virtual' space. The imagery, a live video feed from my garden in Cardiff, Wales, 'real' life, is static while my representation moves. Seen in relation to the environment of SL, computer graphics overlaid with a graphical user interface and framed within a windowing operating system, it is the video feed which becomes more unreal, representative, virtualised and affirms the visual identity of the place we would normally call 'virtual'.

All footage and imagery shot at HUMlab Island, Second Life and in my garden in Cardiff, Wales.

Blue Screening from Second Life

Testing a blue screen plugin for CamTwist I'm developing for the residency. In the video above and the first image below the plugin is capturing my representation in Second Life (which has a blue screen backdrop) and a video stream. The blue in Second Life is removed and replaced with the video stream in real time. In the second image a test with a flat blue is being carried out to see how sharp the colour mapping is without issues such as light/shaders etc.

After

After, documents the site of numerous performances by Garrett Lynch at the Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon in Google Earth during the artists Yoshikaze Residency.

The camera moves around the site to view both historical 'real' and performative 'virtual' artefacts. Artefacts left by the artist include a flag to mark the location of the performances and his customary sandwich board worn during all Second Life performances.

Moon Walk

A simple moon walk performance at the site of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in Google Earth during the artists Yoshikaze Residency. In the background is a flag to mark the location of the performance.

Meeting Sang (Colorado/Cardiff)

Sang (Sang Ahn, a Google SketchUp employee) is the default Google SketchUp in-application person used for measuring the scale of 3D constructions. SketchUp's primary use is to allow 3D builders to populate Google Earth with models of 'real' life (RL) buildings in their correct place. Sang is the sole inhabitant of SketchUp's 3D world and occupies a space next to the point of origin (a north pole of sorts). His is a lonely existence.

Visiting Google Earth, Sang arrives at the default geographic position for English users of SketchUp, Boulder, Colorado (Latitude: 40.0170N, Longitude: 105.2830W), where SketchUp is created. Sang is a representation of the RL Sang, no attempt has been made to create this avatars persona, instead he is an extension of himself beyond a singular existence.

Venturing outside of Second Life, Garrett Lynch, my representation of myself in Second Life, goes to meet Sang and then invites him to visit the representation of my home in his virtual world.



Above: Meeting Sang in Google SketchUp at the point of origin.



Above: Meeting Sang in Google Earth at the point of origin, Boulder, Colorado.

Walking, not Running, and Getting Nowhere - technique

What follows is a description / tutorial of the central technique employed in creating Walking, not Running, and Getting Nowhere.

While both performances are distinctly different and use live video recorded from different locations piped through different live video feed sites there is a common set of scripts, software and site(s) to enable their viewing in Second Life. All of these are free and / or open source. The setup involves bambuser.com, php, json, html and CSS.

Live video feed (e.g. from CamTwist or an iPhone) -> bambuser.com -> php -> json -> html (styled by CSS).

Above, is an example of the flow of the live video feed in Walking, not running, and getting nowhere (exploration 2). For full details on how to get this working for yourself, download the zip provided below and follow the readme.txt and comments in the various scripts.

To download the tutorial files click here.

Walking, not Running, and Getting Nowhere (Exploration #2)

Walking, not Running, and Getting Nowhere, the second mixed reality exploration, consists of a 'walk' on the Moon in Google Earth. The intention here is to explore an immersive experience for my avatar and myself as my avatar in Second Life (SL) through a first person point of view.

My avatar is set to animate a walk on the spot, on top of a screen broadcasting a live video feed of a 'walk' on the moon in Google Earth around the perimeter of the Apollo 11 landing site. Exploration of the perimeter of the site reveals one of a few locations on the moon which is documented in detail and has a distinct edge / boundary where photographic detail is of a noticeably lower quality outside the site. This site and its boundary are reminiscent of virtual worlds, notably traditional gaming worlds, which often have a boundary that hems users in.

The moon walk is source media/experience for my avatar, augmenting its SL experience. Unlike exploration #1 however where SL and 'real' life (RL) are mixed, here another virtual world, itself a representation of RL, is employed and folded into SL.

The result is a virtual reality experience for my avatar, already within a virtualised world, walking in a visual space beyond its own with no control or locomotion yet constantly reminded of the limitations of that virtual experience.