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.
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]
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)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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):
The big fish in the center reacts to the visitor too. When it is touched it goes through an agitated animation.
A short video of the Mechatiki Public Lab at the Second Life 6th Birthday Exhibit.
We are currently preparing the the proper fencing to keep the chance of escaping creatures at a reasonable minimum.
At the exact opening of the events we will release various live kinetic creatures on our parcel and watch what they are up to for the next week! (Inviting you - the public - to interact with them.)
Here's the SLUrl already, though I don't think the public can access the sim before June 23rd ..
... There will also be free drinks.
Recurring readers may remember I mentioned that I had exposed a family of kinetic Marsdog sculptures to the visitors in SL as well as RL of Brooklyn is Watching - an interworld art project interfacing a Second Life sim with a gallery in Brooklyn.
Last weekend it was kindly discussed in the weekly podcast - click here to listen to it.
This was a really, really interesting listen for me , for more than one reason. Firstly my art was being discussed by people I had never met in either world - interesting, but a situation that can easily occur in real life too. So taking into account that the few lines of info I had provided on the brooklyiniswatching website were disregarded I thought my work scored pretty good - the four debaters at first didn't know what to think of or do with the objects, and yet they were discussing one of the larger ones (I suppose from listening to the podcast) in it's seeming stasis, lying on the back, gradually finding out about the tounge-sticking and feet moving, ending up learning about the physical character of the sculpture through collision. I regard the discussion a win for my art in that it seemed be able to make four guys talk about it quite intelligently about it for several minutes without saying it sucked big time - on the contrary it seems to have invited interaction.
To me the discussion had a special twist and was particularily interesting because one of the panelists apparently wasn't familiar too much with SL itself, so his reaction to Second Life art was not filtered through the lenses of limitations seasoned users are aware of and generally was to be expected to approach the works with a more intuitive attitude than someone who has internalized the workings of the UI.
While I have never met any of the illustrious round I have already had time to google the two non-regulars ... and the one I suspect must be the SL noob, Jason Robert Bell, is not only author of a caveman-robot comic, but he is also selling what I have just ordered as a first gift for little Emma Danger over the pond: a little plush Caveman Robot!
All in all the podcast has made me curious for more, Brooklyn is Watching is definitely a project to watch for some serious world connecting art discourse. Follow this SLUrl to visit the inworld location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Popcha/72/140/27.
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