NMC Campus Observer

Hyperformalism Teachers Buzz Tour

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Oct 1, 2007 07:40pm

We so much appreciate today that DonCoyote took the time to give a tour of his Full Immersion Hyperformalism exhibit on Arts and Letters, one of the NMC Campus sims. Our apologies for a few folks who we may have missed the mark with the SLURL location- things get tricky when you are working at an elevation of 700 meters!

Photo courtesy of DanCoyote

I had even more challenges as my internet connection went out completely just as the tour was about to start! We were experimenting with live streaming the tour as video, which worked great… until my network disappeared.

At the exhibition, you click the red cubes to be transported to different “nodes” of this Class 5 sim (which means it has a powerful engine under the hood).

Thanks to folks who were there, we have a chat log transcript (plain text and pretty text versions) plus photos (remember, anyone can toss us photos by flagging them in flickr with the teachersbuzz tag).

Some quotes from today’s session:

Stealth architecture is an innovation that helps alleviate clutter in a visual world. I believe that architecture should be pretty much invisible until it is needed to divide space or guide the user.

Peregrine Juneau asked “I was wondering how much of the exhibit was shped by your experience of SL and its “capabilities” and how much you conceptualized independently of SL.”

My work is native to SL. I have been dreaming about a SL like space since I was a child a place I could fly and build at a monolithic scale Hyperformalism (what I call my art) is not limited to SL but is expressed in other forms from OP art to process based computer based arts.

Hyperformalism is formalist abstraction in hyper medium. Formalim is an art historical term and hyper generally is a technical term more contemporary that means you can explore non linearly - like hyper linking. I believe that with abstraction I can get closer to my goal which is to remind the viewer of their sense of wonder in a cynical world a sense of wonder can sustain us and provide hope. I believe the job of the contemporary artist is to supersede ideology and attempt wonder. I make it a point to push in SL push as hard as I can to expand boundaries

For those wanting to see DanCoyote’s art, it is still available at Arts and Letters (43, 135, 706).

Story filed under: Teacher's Buzz, Teaching and Learning

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)