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.

Walking, not Running, and Getting Nowhere (Exploration #1)

My residency is now underway at the Yoshikaze space at the HUMlab Island in Second Life and for the last two days I have been working on a mixed reality experience for my avatar, full details below. This is the first in a series of works exploring place in and out of Second Life (SL) and combinations with 'real' life (RL). Works undertaken over the next 2/3 weeks will take the form of:

• Performance props
• Wearables
• Sculptural objects

Walking, not Running, and Getting Nowhere is the first performance exploration. The intention here is to explore an immersive experience for my avatar and myself as my avatar in 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 from RL. Alongside is a heads up display (HUD) showing my RL position as the walk occurs. My RL walk is source media/experience for my avatar, augmenting its SL experience and inverting what is often the purpose of virtual worlds, augmenting our RL experience (i.e. through SL social networking etc.)

The result is a mixed reality experience for my avatar, walking in a visual space beyond its own yet with no control or actual locomotion, extended as a result of streaming lag, augmented in some ways yet futile in others.

Garrett Lynch - Yoshikaze's New Artist-in-Residence

From 1st December, Garrett Lynch will be our new artist-in-residence, replacing Lance Shields, the man behind SL avatar Juria Yoshikawa, who, due to RL workload, has to take some time off from his Yoshikaze residency.  We wish Lance good luck and look forward to welcoming him again in the near future.

Our next artist-in-residence Garrett Lynch is an artist, lecturer, curator and theorist. His work deals with networks (in their most open sense) within an artistic content; the spaces between artist, artworks and audience as a means, site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse. Recently most active in live performance Garrett’s practice covers net.art, installation, performance and writing.

Educated in England and in France at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Garrett is currently Senior Lecturer in New Media at Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Wales. For more information about Garrett’s work please refer to a recent interview by Noema (http://www.noemalab.org/sections/arte_focus.php?IDFocus=208).

Practice: http://www.asquare.org
Research: http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch

Here is the text by Garrett about his residency:

"Since January 2007 I have created performances and installations in Second Life.  The basis of all my work has been identity.  Creating an avatar that is not an alter-ego, what is usually an artists opportunity to start afresh and explore new practices, methods or even themselves being new, my avatar is instead a projection of my 'real' world identity into a 'virtual' world.  It looks, dresses, acts and even bears the same name as me, yet my avatar is not me.  It is a representation of how I am In Real Life (IRL).

My residency at Humlab's Yoshikaze space will continue to explore these ideas of identity as they relate to Second Life and its relation to or representation of 'real' place.  As such emphasis will for the duration of the residency focus particularly on the specifics of place and how it can inform/influence identity.  How does place, our 'real' location and our ability to simultaneously represent ourselves within a 'virtual' world, define what becomes a new facet of our total identity?  How can a singular dispersed identity (as opposed to a dualistic identity) enhance our cumulative experience of both 'real' and 'virtual' places?

A series of works will be produced during the residency that respond to these ideas and the location of the residency at Yoshikaze.  These will, due to their subject matter, investigate a number of mixed and augmented reality techniques and entail outcomes including objects, devices and environments.  On completion of the residency these will be intended for display and use in an exhibition and may form the basis of a performance."

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.