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Flickr Gettr v5

posted by tayzia at March 8th, 2009
Tags: Announcement Opening Performance Showcase Uncategorized artBall State UniversityFutureImmersionimmersiveinstallationMencius WattsNMCsculptureTaggart Alsoptayzia abattoirVirtual Art

What is a Flickr Gettr you ask?

In my words:

The Flickr Gettr is a beautiful creation of collaborative art with pictures forming on different planes and levels.  Full immersion inside the installation allows you to experience the total concept, the musical background is mesmerizing.  Interactive art such as this is the new art, it is virtual art, the art of now and the art of the future.

In the words of the artists:

Live Flickr photo sharing search from recent users’ public photo folders which sorts meta data tagged from user uploads via a custom webserver. Primitives appear with textures of Flickr photos and are re-sized to match aspect ratios of each unique image. Music is emitted from each generating prim as they spawn and decay.

Virtual worlds provide a platform in which to construct compelling experiences not possible within the material and temporal constraints of the physical world.  The virtual realm has the potential to be united and engaged by physicality – informing and transforming the audience’s experience of performance and installations in a profoundly transformative nature.  John Fillwalk (Mencius Watts) and Jesse Allison (Taggert Alsop) have been incorporating mixed-reality approaches into musical performances, installations, interfaces, and performance art over the last several years, including explorations of the opportunities of the Second Life environment for mixed-reality experiences – analyzing approaches to bridging the worlds such as media streaming, client-side interaction, an external web server communication hub, as well as opportunities for human/computer interaction.

In Flickr Gettr, the external web service was used as an intermediary to query Flickr, receive images and format them for delivery as a second life texture.  It then passed the aspect ratios in a second query to be able to map the textures properly.  To make these interactions more flexible, an intermediary web server can be employed to collate and prepare information for Second Life and retain states that can be queried from external applications.  The web application effectively serves as an intermediary between Second Life and outside environments, providing the communications link and logic to assimilate the information.  This can make the creation of Web 2.0 mash-ups much simpler as the code for doing these sorts of queries and logic is already highly developed in Java, Ruby, and Perl for example, and would be difficult or impossible to accomplish with the in-world scripting language of LSL.   Flickr Gettr also triggered music files upon the rapid rezzing of objects to create a cumulative ambient effect.

Title: Flickr Gettr v5
Year: 2008-2009
Artists: Mencius Watts and Taggert Alsop

http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/ball-state-digital-artists

http://eurekadejavu.blogspot.com/

http://npirl.blogspot.com/search/label/Mencius%20Watts

http://www.idiarts.org/projects

SLURL Flickr Gettr installed at Aho Museum – New Media Constortium

http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus%20West/136/120

This Installation is a part of the permanent collection at the Aho Museum located on NMC Campus West.

Artist Biographies

John Fillwalk serves as the director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIAA) – an interdisciplinary, collaborative research and studio environment exploring intersections between art and technology – in which faculty, students industry partners engage in innovative digital media projects employing technologies such as virtual reality, visualization, simulation, and human computer interface. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in Intermedia and Video Art. His film and video work – as well as interdisciplinary collaborations have been exhibited internationally at numerous festivals, galleries and museums including SIGGRAPH, CYNETart, ASCI, Videoformes, Synthese, SEAMUS, and Prix Ars Electronica.

Jesse Allison serves as Virtual Worlds and Interactive Arts Research Specialist through IDIAA at Ball State University and is also President of Hardware Engineering of
Electrotap, LLC, an innovative human computer interface firm. Mr. Allison has designed numerous HCI based interfaces
involving research in both hardware and software. He has developed several instructional and artistic bridges in and out of
virtual space through a variety of input and output methods, employing several scripting environments. Through his
research at IDIAA, he has structured the live interoperability direct from virtual worlds, both through webservices
application programming interfaces as well as database driven and webserver based solutions.

• Where: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus%20West%20/132/91/21/
• When: Mar 15 2008, 09:00:00 am UTC (check local time)