ACRA 11.0 + VCRA 1.0 = Awesome Beta

Re-post from SHIFZ-blog:

You are questioning the rationale behind virtual cocktails made by virtual robots? Well once upon a time people thought making real robots mix drinks was crazy. Hello?!

In any case we are showing our appreciation for cocktail robots in their virtual incarnation by awarding the first Virtual Cocktail Robot Award this year in an inworld ceremony in Second Life (TM), that will be part of the ACRA event at Roboexotica which will be video-streamed into SL.
Join us either in real life in Vienna, or if you prefer at the virtual venue which is hosted by our friends of CYlandSL.

"Electric Alien"

Today as part of Cyberfest Andrey Bartenev's performance "Electric Alien" was video-streamed into SL at CYlandSL Media Art Lab while inworld visitors were given alien avatars to wear and be part of the SL-side random social choreography.
It was a lot of fun despite I was having problems with viewing the stream ... after the performance we found out riding the Alien-Ghost-balloons when they were turned physical was great entertainment, as you can see on the pic above, and the Aliens brought a couple yummy Uodka Martian cocktails.

You can still come and get your own alien avatar and check out the themed room downstairs from the main gallery for the next few days, I suppose until Cyberfest ends Nov 29th!

Cyberfest Opening Photos on Flickr

Cyberfest opening streamed from St. Petersburg live into CYlandSL gallery in Second Life.
Photoset on Flickr

Cyberfest Opening in about 2 hours! (7am SLT)

The opening of Cyberfest being imminent, I am in last preparations for my performance/interactive installation "Physical Attraction".
I will be blurring the line between those two art-forms by making it so that it is not clear who rezzes what of the physical objects that will be let loose. I will be pulling stuff out of my inventory, but visitors will trigger the rezzing of objects as well when the step on my little sensors!
If you can join us at CYland SL Gallery!

Colossus: Bend over, Merchants!

Colossus Linden posted a blog announcing steep comission hikes on XStreet plus a listing fee on all products, which is a blow to all creators of niche products that don't get bought often enough and/or aren't pricey enough.
The whole thing comes under the pretext of "some" merchants complaining about the cluttering of the marketplace with freebies. This solution to a non-existant problem is so FAIL that I will likely have to de-list all of our Mechatiki listings, which are niche products at the end of the day.
See you on slapt.me, apez.biz or any new market-site I am going to find.
Watch this place for updates.

Update 11-19-09: I started marking my items "Get it while you can" with notice of imminent de-activation, but got tired soon. 300 items, out of which 5 may be worth keeping after these fees kick in. Tough shit, but I can't or won't afford to risk losing virtual money on any item I have listed, so I can only keep those items that have shown to be frequent sellers, like certain full perm sculpty bottles and some animations. I will lose out on the occasional sale of a niche product, and LL will lose the comission on that sale. C'est la vie.

Cyberfest 2009: Nov 20-29

Cyberfest is the only International festival of cybernetic art in Russia (i.e. art, that combines living, biological and somatic substance with technical and computer devices). CYBERFEST is carried by CYLAND media laboratory, organized by National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg Branch and non-commercial organization Saint Petersburg Arts Project, New York.

We are preparing a bunch of inworld contributions to this international event with mixed reality components - especially busy we are kept by the making of the avatars that are going to part of the Andrey Bartenev performance. Below a shot from Andrey's RL Electric Alien ...

The date for the Bartenev performance has yet to be determined, but as we had opportunity to learn last year - Cyberfest's organizers are no less chaotic in their planning than we in our RL ventures ;)
So, please come by CYland SL, the inworld gallery anytime between Nov 20-29 to learn more about the schedule. SLUrl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Chronocules/214/224/2001/
A bunch of RL events will be streamed into SL, there will be an opening of some sorts, Pinkpink Sorbet will make a tour through the gallery and parts of SL for the RL visitors, and more ...

Nebraska unveiled

SL Enterprise aka SL in a box aka SL behind a Firewall aka Nebraska has been officially presented yesterday in a mixed reality event at the San Francisco E2 conference. Along with the SL Work Marketplace which is to be launched Q1 2009, in which Gold Solution Providers can offer bundled content to corps that got themselves a Nebraska.
In short Nebraska enables the buyer to to run a Second Life grid of 8 simultaneous regions (can be switched on and off at will, so ayou can shuffle between more than 8 regions) connected to existing infrastructure, easy user registration etc.
It was also mentioned corps that have assets on the main grid already will be able to transfer content they have the IP rights to to their standalone SL.
Not all open questions about this whole thing are answered yet - here's the discussion thread on the Linden blogs.
In the long run the new Marketplace is supposed to be opened to the wider public, and we are already quite curious in what form we will be able to offer our pencils and clipboards to the suits. The way this will work sounded a bit confusing to me, like content would be "packaged" in a region and the region-file would be transfered to the client?
This should all become clearer over the next months as businesses (or orgs like the US Navy who are beta users and co-presented at E2) start to use this $55.000,- virtual world software.