Mechatiki Inworld Presence Closing

Due to a decline in the sales of trivial items on the SL Marketplace, which have payed for land tier in the past years, Mechatiki Space is in the process of being disassembled and most of the land will be abandoned over the next few weeks.
It has been an interesting 5 years of keeping and expanding this space, I loved to have a showcase for my work, so much so that I kept paying tier over the last two years in which I have barely logged in at all.

Dismantling Mechatiki Space will happen in steps, parts of the land are already abandoned, while I keep building down the structures on the rest of the land.
For now the Roboexotica permanent exhibit is still intact - but its days are numbered.

Looking forward to productive future inworld visits without the burden of dumping 90$ a month into Linden's pockets!
Cheers,
Magggnnus

M Linden's doodle art

The University of Western Australia (UWA) is well renowned for their furthering of arts in Second Life. This Saturday they were opening a quite special event - at their inworld location as well as on their real life campus: Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon / M Linden went to Perth, Australia to show selected pieces of his doodle art, exhibited to the public for the first ever time.


In the opening address M gave us some insight into his creative process, Chantal Harvey captured the main part in this video:

There are also two native SL sculpture doodles included in the show, which are "kinda cool" as M Postor Linden put it. Here's his take on the show:

Visit the exhibition at this location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/WASP%20Land/239/216/28

c h a i r at IMOPCA

Yesterday night the Invisible Museum of Post Modern Art opened the new c h a i r show, featuring chair art and art-chairs from over a dozen artists (including myself).

Visit c h a i r at http://slurl.com/secondlife/IMOPCA/169/121/122/ until, ok, I'll have to admit here I have no idea how long the exhibit runs! Visit fast ;)

Live Blogging from within SL with Viewer 2.0 Beta

Nice. I am writing this entry on the face of a prim inworld.
Heres's a video I just recorded at UWA's monthly winners party. This time inside Nyx Breen's winning flagship building entry. Video in video by ColeMarie Soleil, viewed on my newly adapted alien tablet - now a functional web-tablet. (Which, unlike the RL iPad plays Flash ;P)

EDIT:
I also took this video - I originally Live-video-streamed it with Ustream from my Nexus One handset, displayed it on my web-tablet an thus created an infinite regression ...

New Viewer (finally) brings HTML-on-a-Prim

Second Life Viewer 2 Beta is out and it brings advanced media capabilites!
Full html on a prim face will make lifes of presenters and educators a lot easier. No more uploading umpteen slides, just do it off the web.
Toying around a little I just successfully tested video-streaming from my Android handset via UStream and it arrived fine and safely inside SL on the face of a prim.
Webpages can be set interactive or not, and a few more settings, depending on the builder's intentions.
I guess artists around the grid will pick up the new opportunities shortly and find a million ways to make SL an even richer experience.

I talked

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Western Australia 3D Art & Design Artist Talks about Cocktail-Robotics in general and especially inworld.

Equipped with a few slides I faced an attentive audience, and I think my mention of a Virtual Cocktail Robot Award 2010 fell on fertile ground.

You can find a transcript of the presentation at UWA blog: http://uwainsl.blogspot.com/2010/01/artist-talks-magggnnus-woodget-cocktail.html

Thanks to Quadropop Lane and Jayjay Zifanwe for the invitation and friendly reception!
(Snapshot: Quadropop Lane)

Happy 2010! (And New Tray)

A happy new year from Mechatiki Research!

And a brand-new Martini Tray too:
When touched offers a choice of Gin or Vodka Martini.
(Hands out smaller glasses than Martini Tray 1, which offers three different Martini Cocktails)

One Million L$ Sculpture

I present to you: Cheers an interactive sculpture that has been showing at places like SL6B, Brooklyn is Watching, CYlandSL and currently UWA Imagine Challenge over the last year. A (very) limited edition of one piece is available for purchase on the virtual shopping platform XStreetSL.

Originally I raised the price of this artwork to L$ 1000000,- on XStreetSL a few weeks ago as a reaction to their proposed listing fees - with an item description containing a paragraph on how I could keep all of my items listed for a good while if someone bought this piece for that price just once. (Whereas otherwise I will have to remove a lot of listings that don't sell frequently enough, but still generating occasional income as of now.) I changed the available quantity to one and removed it from other marketplaces, where it had been listed, but never sold so far.
After an intervention from XST authorities I removed all text not related to the work itself, which is fine, apparently the price itself proves to be attracting eyes to my works, and in the end I don't really want anyone to buy "Cheers" for other reasons than wanting to have it.
The price also seems to be attracting attention from startled users who are seeking clarification on the price in the item's discussion thread: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=discussions&ItemID=1420408.

Guest at Brooklyn-is-Watching podcast

I had the honour of being invited to join #76 (or #75?) of the Brooklyn is Watching podcast to talk about SL artworks along with Pinkpink Sorbet, Misprint Thursday, Jay Newt ... and Dancoyote Antonelli (in RL: DC Spensley) who embarassingly enough had to remind me to credit him for the artwork shown in this video sneakpeak of the recording:

... In which the topic of proper crediting along with plagiarism and related issues were discussed at lentgh, triggered by a series of photos displayed showing SL sceneries that were at least in part recognizable artworks themselves, with an artist who's on record not welcoming fan-art. By a "photographer" who had the leisure to put a (c) in the picture's description. Without crediting the original artist, which has to be considered morally wrong if nothing else.
Not my fault your artwork covers all of the sim and is in the view at all times, DC! *shakes virtual fist*
(Actually the video ends with a tour of DC's installation we took after finishing the podcast ...)

The podcast will go live within the next few days, so keep checking the brooklyniswatching website regularly!

VCRA 1.0 Winner: Misprint Thursday

In a successful mixed-reality ceremony, Misprint Thursday was awarded the first Virtual Cocktail Robot Award for her creation Wodka Bot.
The RL ceremony of the Annual Cocktail Robot Awards was video-streamed into SL, and when the moment came to award the virtual prize the RL video projector was switched to show the inworld scene, where an illustrous round had assembled to celebrate - and witness another world's first: qDot Bunnyhug's RL cocktail robot being controlled from within Second Life. A former Linden Lab employee specializing in controlling sex-toys via SL, he wrote the needed code in 15 minutes as he claims.

Thanks to CYlandSL for hosting this event, Pinkpink Sorbet and 5tefan Negulesco for keeping the stream alive and everybody involved for making this work!

Update: qDot's mixed reality Rum & Coke contraption is featured on Hamlet Au's New World Notes blog!

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.

SnailsLab Video

Here's a video from last Sunday's CYland SL opening - featuring Pinkpink's painting RL snails!

Snails Lab Pictures

Here's my snapshots from Sunday's CYland SL opening, complete with live-painting snails on the video stream ... http://www.flickr.com/photos/shifzr/sets/72157622612000482/
And here's qDot Bunnyhug's pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/qdot76367/sets/72157622487293035/ who got them online right during the event!

And the CYland Flickr Group - http://www.flickr.com/groups/1267956@N23/

Snails Lab - Opening of CYland SL

Our russian friends (http://cyland.ru) have been developing an inworld gallery which is due to be opened sunday next week.

Cyland Media Art Lab, an artistic laboratory based in St. Petersburg and New York, arrived in SL! As it opened its doors quietly in summer we now want to point out that there will be an opening-event on Oct. 18th, 10 am SLT!
["Every snail is an artist." - video streaming from RL]

Pinkpink Sorbet will be streaming painting snails from her RL home and Magggnnus Woodget has been preparing a couple snail themed surpises!
Join us for the event Sun Oct 18th, 10am SLT - There will be robots. And there will be cocktails! Follow this SLUrl for a teleport.

Betty Tureaud Exhibition Opening

Today Betty Tureaud opened her exhibition "Cube of Infinity" at Danish Visions. Inside a gigantic cube there is plenty to explore, colorful kinetic installations and most striking an ensemble of tall robot figures - a dancing couple and a mother and baby!
The exhibition runs for one whole month, here's the Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Danish%20Visions/166/114/497, it's sure worth visiting.

The title 'cube of infinity' describes a form but it doesn't gives us a clear idea of size. infinity isn't something that we are confronted with in our direct life. the work shows elements of classical attributes and concepts from western religion. such as Memento mori, purgatory and the traditional idea of a supernatural realm. (inkspots Voom)

CYland Media Art Lab inSL

This spring the St. Petersburg media arts gallery CYland commissioned Pinkpink Sorbet with creating an inworld presence in Second Life (TM). Since Mechatiki have been honored to assist in the effort we noticed the place has been looking more and more complete as the summer progressed, and first random visitors are showing up. Yet there hasn't been an official vernissage and we are wondering when we will get to munch free pixel sandwiches. Our Magggnnus Woodget will address this question in the following interview with Miss Sorbet:

M: CYland SL has been quietly opening it's doors to inworld visitors during the summer, but there hasn't been any official opening yet ...
P: That's right. We allow already residents to explore the inworld gallery as it evolves right now, and we will have a kind of opening event in October with Pinkpink´s SnailsLab. Then in November during Cyberfest, which is organized by Cyland in RL in St. Petersburg, we will have a mixed reality event in which CYland SL will be presented officially to the outside world.
M: What can one see at the gallery right now?
T: There is already a lot to see and explore at CYlandSL - several videos from the CYland archives are being streamed, there are a number of info-displays and notecards to find which give some background on CYland in the real world, as well as interactive artwork like a representation of Anna Frants's RL interactive piece Drum Painting and of course the sculptures by Mechatiki.
M: There is a significant number of ashtrays at the gallery ...
P: Right. Those are a personal project of Pinkpink - some of them are vehicles to explore the gallery in, others are pieces of furniture, which for example circle over the gallery. I am hatching a plan for an inhabitable ashtray the size of a house. In general that is one of the things I love about second life - that it gives you the architectural freedom to ignore conventions that consider gravity or weather and other RL nuisances. Here we can have an open air gallery floating 2000m above the ground.
M: An important part of CYlandRL seems to be to have artists in residence. Is that part of the plan for cyland SL as well?
P: In some form yes. We are thinking of working together with the RL artists to represent some of their work inworld, but also to approach inworld artists at some point to show here.
M: I heard Anna Frants and Sergey Teterin of CYlandRL have been at this year's Burning Man event in Nevada. are you planning on participating in Burning Life in October?
P: Yes, Anna and Sergey are Burners now. And no, we won't have parcel at BL - mostly because the mode of allocation confused me and the landrush times were not so Euro-friendly but i plan to go there as a spectator and witness the creativity of inworld Burners.
M: Tell me about the mixed reality event in november.
P: Cyberfest is happening from Nov. 20th-29th and features a variety of international media artists. I will be in St. Petersburg to present the virtual CYland to the real life festival visitors. The RL festival will be video-streamed into SL and the virtual gallery will be displayed on one or more computers in the real world. I am planning to set up a PC for visitors to go inside the virtual world and show them around the gallery and help them interact with the SL environment.
M: That sounds groovy. Thank you for the interview. I wish you the best! The Slurl for CYland SL is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Chronocules/218/211/2001/ btw.

Miss Sorbet has also recently opened a blog for CYland SL - http://cyland-sl.blogspot.com/ that you can watch for future events.

Oillonaire

An animated sculpture that reacts to the greeting "good day sir" when spoken in chat by drawing his hat. With his right hand Oillonaire toasts with an Oiltini, what else.
Have a first hand look inworld at CYlandSL gallery.

The Winner Is ...

Now that I have a trophy I just need to come up with a competition to award it to somebody.

tikiTOUCH 1

A smartphone prop from our electronics lab - no communication features incorporated, it simply makes the owner look busy and connected ;)

On touch it switches between eight different screens, two of them screenshots from this blog.

The touchscreen mobile which is available on XSL and inworld animates the avatar wearing it with a texting / smartphone animation.

Recursive Life

Above video demonstrates the plugin Aimee Trescothick wrote for the recently introduced new media API connecting the parcel media stream to a remote computer via VNC (Virtual Network Computing).

This will be generally very useful for any type of presentations that run  on a PC, but the specific use to sign into SL from within SL will also help tutoring new residents, when they can see what their tutors do on their viewer.

Alas, before we can all reap the fruits of Ms. Aimee's labor we "will need to wait for now for the LLmedia plug-in API to find it's way into the normal Second Life viewer, right now it's still under active development and only available in a developer release that is not guaranteed to be stable. I would hope to release the VNC plug-in around the same time that happens."

(via NWN)

Back to School with Mechatiki Office Supplies!

If you are trying to look busy this fall, Mechatiki Research has just the items for you, whether your avatar is sinistral or a righty:


Pencil with writing animation for right handers and for lefties. These two differ in that the right hand version includes an animation for the left hand - which holds something like a notebook or clipboard. The left hander's version is more for writing on a table.
However the Left Handed Writing Pack includes an animation (Full Perms) that provides a right hand holding animation too.

The right hand Writing Animation (Full Perm) we have to offer is the same that is in the pencil above.


Next up we have this Clipboard that lets you use your own pages to browse through.
We offer it with a reading animation included or without.
The Reading Animation is available seperately (Full Perms) as well.

Maybe we can also interest you for these beautifully designed Office Chairs ... Xccutive version and regular.
Next you'll need some stylish Desk Lights (in a choice of three colors: Charcoal, Bordeaux, Steel)


And last but not least there's the Desktop PC and flatscreen Monitor to decorate your busy, busy desk.

(PC and monitor are also bundled up in this Office Pack with some other items not mentioned above!)

Just btw and totally unrelated: for alcoholic beverages check out our other offerings - click the Xstreet link in the sidebar to the right!

T Linden shows direct Mesh import Sneak Peak at SLCC09

At his keynote today at SLCC09, Tom Hale aka T Linden presented a sneak peak of 3D mesh import into Second Life. Despite his cautionary reminder that sneak peaks have no release date and some might never be released, this is a large step forward from just talking about mesh import as something to support "in the future".

This means a) greater possibilities for creators who know how to work with standard 3D software and b) 3D creators who have not thought about using SL before may find a new environment for their work.

After going on to present new media support features T concluded by mentioning the Lab wished to bring the presented features into reality during 2010.

SLCC09 - Keynote by M and Philip Linden

Today Mart Kingdon and Philip Rosedale held their keynote at the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco. And my avatar went to the inworld location where they streamed the audio. Just the audio. Which lead to members of the virtual audience asking why there was no video stream from the convention at the point where M started showing and commenting on slides to the RL audience. I overheard one avatar saying that budget cuts were responsible for the cancellation of 5 actually planned live video streaming events. Which sounds at least bizarre.

Below two segments of the Q&A that followed the keynote (video from inworld, audio from RL):

It's Raining Fish

Recreating an unexplained natural phenomenon, this interactive installation makes it rain fish. (All fish involved are animated using Puppeteer)
When a visitor steps on one of the two dark rings on the ground, "physical" (they interact with environment) fish start falling from the air and helplessly twitch around (for a minute, as they are "temporary"). Visitors can both kick the fish around or move it using the mouse and play fish bowling sorts of or something.

The big fish in the center reacts to the visitor too. When it is touched it goes through an agitated animation.

Visit It's Raining Fish at Brooklyn is Watching!