2011 - Art Year In Review

Despite having a completely-disrupted year and 6 months of hospital hell/enforced medication addiction, I was able to do some pieces this year I am happy with:


1. Commodity

When the Industrial Era began, it broke the connection between kinship and trust and began the perceptual shift of people as commodities to be used rather than human beings/resources. Datamining accelerates this process where people are dehumanized into aggregated sales data, market segments and things. I don't like this trend; it makes it that much easier to dismiss real human problems by abstracting them into some mental marketing model.

Commodity was done to point out the conflict between person as object and as human & to engage dialogue about the marketing/selling of artists. The dreams concealed in each part were very deep fears, wishes, hopes and yearnings of mine and I sold these intimate parts of myself in order to contribute to the UWA artist's prize pool. I really was astonished by the speed of the reaction to this piece.


2. For Your Viewing Pleasure

Involving the issues of art curatorship and accessibility as well as the problem of encouraging interaction with virtual art when people have been trained all their lives to be "hands off!" on artwork; the reality of a media culture where curators and institutions claim ignorance of their confederate role as perception & attention manipulators.


3. Prime Radiant/Chroma

Both pieces explored my love of the color palette & transparency of the pure light of a computer screen along with the problem of translating the CYMK [print] color model to RGB [screen] and mixing colors in light.


4. Daddy (for Sylvia)

This piece was a great break for me, as it was created in 3D from the memory of a painting I did at 16 and had forgotten. Plath's work touched me in deep places and has affected me my whole life. Daddy gathered many strong personal reactions from people.


5. Theatre of War

"War is entertainment" they say, and in these days of video-game-like rocket launches, remote Predator drones, breathless semi-pornographic weapons summaries on the mainstream media channels, it only seems more so; dehumanizing war and contributing to our alienation - it's easier to kill someone when they are just a blip on a screen and not a human being.


6. Time Considered As A Helix Of Semiprecious Stones

Another light-piece encouraging "slowing down" & working with overlapping transparencies mixing and blending RGB color and light, with a 9-track multi-directional soundtrack.


7. Down On The Data Farm

This issue had been concerning me for some time; I get very aggravated filling out soooo many forms for this blog, that blog, avatar, world, email, twitter, this & that - when I am painfully conscious of the reasoning and uses for this enforced data-cross-correlation (echo of Commodity) - so I had already been thinking (and talking about) these issues and started work on this piece at the beginning of July. I had only just completed it (and was still studying it to see if it needed trimming/additions) about 12 hours before the whole Google/Nymwars/PlusGate issue caught fire.


8. Big Winter

One of my most naked pieces, dealing with my feelings of isolation, depression, vulnerability and existential hopelessness. Big Winter is the main story subject of the upcoming film of the same title, which has been delayed by my illness (dammit!) although the 47-track soundtrack was completed in late Spring just before I got sick.


9. OccupyLEA

Inspired by the Occupy movement but continuing my examination of the curator/sponsor/patronage issues of art brought up in For Your Viewing Pleasure. #Occupy has become a deep and meaningful thing to me and this performance-work engaged the issues directly and with explosive reaction, bringing up issues surrounding the arts patronage of Linden Lab discussed in many blog postings and forums for 9 months and engendering heated dialogue among many.


10. A Reply From The Recalcitrant I, II, III

Writing pieces rebutting the perception that we who talk about the problems of Linden Lab hate SL and are the reason for its niche status. Meditations at length on how much we actually love SL/virtuality and wish it to succeed, even to the point of being unpaid (and mostly unappreciated) beta testers.

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Some other nice things happened for me:


My installation State of Mind was featured in a talk by Rik Panganiban (SL: Rik Riel), Community Manager at the Non-Profit Commons in his keynote speech "We Built This City: Creating a Better World" at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC).

I got to take part in both Spring & Fall semester interaction with students from Cal State University at Long Beach in their Art110 - Introduction To The Visual Arts program as a Featured Artist.

I began investigating materials and contacting fabricators in preliminary consultations for bringing my Radiant Stallions into physical manifestation; also experimenting with materials for fabricating Lady With A Fan and Big Winter. and continuing my focus on creating/translating digital pieces into physical works.

Was invited to speak at the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable on the realities/challenges of creating art in virtual worlds.

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Other things... at the suggestion of Wizard Gynoid I began my Netpolitik blog, which engages the politics of the Information revolution - issues I have been involved with since 1993... started making machinima/videos, which was something I tried in the late 80s to mid-90s but is much, much easier now that I have a computer than can handle rendering in less than 27 hours at better than 320x240 and don't have to tiptoe and hold my breath hoping it doesn't crash 80% into the rendering or completely fill my hard disk.


Although I lost half a year, I am still satisfied with the work I've done and look forward to doing even more in 2012.

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Subject of Study - Art110

Subject Of Study
Cal State U at Long Beach's Art110 class

You Tube link (better-quality/full-size)

Flickr photo set

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I've been working with the Cal State University at Long Beach Department of Art's Art110 - Introduction to the Visual Arts Virtual Art Gallery program since last year. I've seen a lot of the gallery builds; some of them wonderful craftsmanship, but I have not seen anything like my students presented yesterday for their class; the gallery they created for my work.

This year's team has produced a stellar piece of artwork. Not a mere gallery for displaying pieces of my creative output and beyond a build, these three students have crossed many bridges and created a work that is not only structural but meaningful.

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Two weeks ago this team was faced with a disaster known to all of us; the loss of their entire work output. The preliminary structures produced from their sketches and ideas were good (for noobs) although they were running into the realities of digital (or any) art: costs (in prims), time limitations and struggling with bringing their vision to obstinate materials. Because they are creating separately and because they do not have full-perm copies of my works, everything was lost, torn apart in the Return.

In less than two weeks, their building skills jumped to a point where some people in SL much longer than them wouldn't be ashamed of this build. Their vision also took a leap, integrating their first sketches and physical ideas into a comprehensive whole, a look into my life and the meaning of my work.

This is far and away not only the best gallery I have seen from these students in two years, but a real work of art, with meaning incorporated into the structure and layout of the gallery. It's a very deep understanding of my psychic roots, personal motivations and creative processes.

I am incredibly impressed, and also flattered and honored to have been a catalyst for such work. This is great stuff in any art world. To have students, new to SL and to virtual reality, produce such a work in less than two weeks is amazing.

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I do not know if the gallery is in a permanent location (they shift them around while in Presentation mode) so I can't include a SLurl in this post. If you see me inworld, IM me and I'll check if the gallery's still there. It might be (probably, because this is a showcase build) be set up later for ongoing exhibition, as some galleries were last year (mine among them). If so I'll publish that SLurl when it comes.

I have requested a copy of this artwork/gallery because I believe it to be a great piece of work. If so, maybe I'll be able to host it myself sometime. In the meantime I've made a small video for the girls, to express my gratitude, honor and joy at having worked with them and for other people to enjoy their work; they deserve it.

Elayne, Robin, Leticia: thank you so much for the opportunity to interact with you, talk about art and explore the creativity in virtual worlds. You made art for me; you should be very proud of your work.

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Machinima, UWA last call, Art110 and friends

CITY

Link to You Tube: better resolution and size

I finally got around to filming CITY, which was first created in early 2009 and shown at the Brooklyn Is Watching open-rez area, where it remained for an (unusual) 6 weeks and was written about by Siri Woodget (who took fantastic pictures). CITY won Honorable Mention for Immersion in the January 2010 round of the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge, and was shown once more at Pirats Art Network gallery in November 2010 (where my good friend Apmel amazingly bought one and has written about it several times). I even wrote a dab about it myself.

CITY is filled inside with light and movement and takes some exploration and some forebearance for the integral sound. Here is the display card for CITY:

"I lived in Los Angeles for 18+ years, most recently on Hollywood Blvd. & LaBrea, just one block catty-corner from the famous Mann's Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Los Angeles is a stage show; a Hollywood production. The city looks lovely and shiny from a distance or on television, but that reality is lived by less than 1% of its population. Most of us live in a "behind the scenes" reality of filthy streets, unresponsive or missing police, no air conditioning, crime, mini-mall blight, high unemployment, racism, virtual slavery (undocumented but useful workers) and incredible noise. This city is never quiet. It is never still. It is not 'Baywatch' or 'The OC.' Everyone doesn't live in Santa Barbara or have a pool.

This piece is about illusion being just as much a part of "real life" as anything "illusionary" in SL.

The sound for this piece was recorded out my own apartment window between 12-3am on various occasions; at times the sound in my apartment exceeded 130db! The side photos were taken in my apartment and outside it. The floor and ceiling are overlays of traffic patterns on the all-encompassing freeways, as are the flowing parts of the "star."

To experience CITY fully, please right-click the glowing star and SIT; Mouselook is recommended."

I am very pleased to have learned enough machinima to help you experience CITY the way that I feel it. I have entered this machinima in the MachinimUWA IV : Art of the Artists contest.

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Note: because of some of the comments I have read on machinima pages, I'd like to clarify that except for the two whiteout transitions to the wall photograph sets, there are no special effects in this machinima - what you see is what you can experience yourself from inside CITY, especially in Mouselook mode.

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CITY: Soundtrack

The soundtrack for the machinima consists of the soundscape of CITY mixed in to an adaptation of a 138-track soundpiece of mine called "The Angel Is Aerodynamically Sound" which I have worked on now for two years. I have no keyboards, so everything is hand-done, note by note, sample by sample, in a sequencing program. It features many world instruments and voices.

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Big Winter

Big Winter is now showing at the last UWA 3D Open Art Challenge *sniffle*

I cannot begin to describe what Jayjay, Quadrapop and FreeWee Ling have done for the arts community through this program in three years. Beyond myself, I know that they have encouraged so many artists to show for the first time and brought much of the arts community in Second Life together to meet, view each other's work and to have a rallying point for community.

I am very sad it is coming to an end.

Corcosman Voom has also taken a nice photo of Big Winter.

PS: if you right-click on the figure, you will sit on the rocks and stare at her; good for photos :)

SLurl: Big Winter @ UWA

my good friend Apmel has written two very nice posts about Big Winter:

Heartbreaking Cooling [when she showed at Kelly Yap Galleries]

At the last UWA 3D Challenge, where he has awarded me the unofficial Gallery Villa Apmel Award in a tie with ush Underwood's Popeye the Sailor's Heritage ^_^

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Art 110

My students from Cal State University at Long Beach's Art 110 Virtual Art Galleries program are busy building the galleries for their artists; I can't wait to see them done!

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... and finally, just cuz, here's Trill Zapatero as the Magical Ballerina Horse...



... Wizzy Gynoid demonstrating her mastery of zazen by sitting on Rod Humble's Sparkle Pony Linden Bear...


... and finally, one of Lalo Telling's friends sent him this scan from a real menu:

Miso to go!! ^_^

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CSULB Virtual Art Gallery Fall Semester!

Last year I was invited to take part in the Cal Sate Univerity at Long Beach's Virtual Art Gallery program, part of the Art110 course at CSULB as an artist-of-study. You can read last year's program here.

I am pleased to be again asked to participate in this program, curated by Glenn Zucman (SL: Lothar Leborski), an instructor at CSULB who is featuring a lot more Second Life artists this year in the program. It's very cool; Prof. Zucman and his TA Elizabeth Juarez (SL name: Mu5icliz Frentis) are very serious about the possibilities of virtual art.

Here's what Prof. Zuckman said after last year's class:

I’d hoped to have as many of the groups meet with their artists as possible, but without the pressure of a formal requirement, few actually did this. Your group got to meet with you in SL, and another group was able to meet F2F with an exciting performance artist / sculptor, Jocelyn Foye. Most of the other groups had much more minimal contact with their artists via email or Facebook.


I think actually interacting with your artist is so important, that I’m restructuring the course for fall, making this a scheduled part of the work. We’re also letting go of wonderful but dead artists like Ana Mendieta and amazing but inaccessible artists like Banksy, and putting together a group of Second Life artists they can meet with in-world, Southern California artists they can meet F2F, and a few New York and beyond artists they can meet with via skype.


A lot of my friends have been asked to participate this year: Gracie Kendal, Betty Tureaud, Trill Zapatero, Douglas Story, Desdemona Enfield, Vaneeesa Blaylock, soror Nishi, Wizard Gynoid, Tuna Oddfellow and Alizarin Goldflake. Quite a stellar lineup!


"The students will create both an architecture (or un-architecture) for the gallery, and also work with the artist to curate a compelling and insightful exhibition of their work. Note that we have 2 sections of this course, and would like to have a team from each section work with you, so there would be 2 independent, different galleries created. We will give you 3D copies of both galleries and also 2D photos of them."

There's a Facebook group and a student wiki. The students will speak to the artists about their work, tour some of their installations and galleries and then construct their own virtual gallery on the CSULB sims.

He says "The commitment from you should be minimal. We'd like for them to have one in-world meeting with you... we would like them to spend an hour or so with you so they can develop an understanding of your work and your ideas. This, and permission to exhibit your work, are the main things we are asking from you."

I had a BLAST with the students last year; I spent a lot more than one hour with them. It's true that a lot of time was spent explaining the basics of SL... but that made me think back to when I was a noob, and made me think harder about exactly what I was doing and how I was approaching it; that gave me a better understanding of my own work, so we all learned something. I really enjoyed talking with the students while I explained what LMs and TPs were, how to move stuff and how to rez a prim. Nothing like the enthusiasm of a noob to give you a vicarious thrill as they rez a wooden block :D

I'm looking forward to it again!