You can catch this show for the next few weeks at NMC Campus West (127, 47, 612) every Friday and Sunday at 2:00pm PST. If you land on the ground there, just look for the comfy green/white chairs which lift you to the venue.

Be sure to turn on your music player to catch the audio stream and do lots of alt-zooming to watch the action.

Show up early, mingle, and you are invited to be active in chat during the show.

And after the closing, be sure to join the actors on stage as they launch into original music. Bring your dance animations and hop on the wall!

Again, the NMC is very excited to bring you cutting edge art and performance to our Second Life campus.

This was not only taking place in a gorgeuos real world facility, Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, but was also live streamed to a remote audience gathered in the Second Life version of the same room.

We have the presentation available as video, audio, and on the NMC media archive site you will find a MediaSite version synced to slides.

Quicktime video
(129 Mb Quicktime, 1:04:11)

MP3 audio (58.8 Mb MP3, 1:04:11)

Jenkkins opened with the story of rapper Soulja Boy who not only used web media to reach his dream of stardom but instigated the whole following of fans from all walks of life who created and published their own versions of his dance moves — right up to the MIT Nerd version featuring legendary Richard Stallman.

This was one of many examples Jenkins weaves in as Participatory Culture, which in interestingly, ought to have parallels or relevance in Second Life:

• low barrier for engagement (not the barrier of entry for learning SL, but that it does not take much for one to be active, if they choose)
• strong support for sharing creations with others very much evidenced by the freebies one fiinds, the giving nature of the education community, the numerous web sites, photo sharing sites sharing SL creations.
• informal mentorship which happens all the time be it Orientation Island, accidental, there are countless stories of experience Sl-ers helping newbies
• members believe that contribution matters which is the underpinnings of a user generated world
• care about others opinions of self and work - pretty much describes the grooming of avatars, the importance of building reputations

From his MacArthur Foundation white paper on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education, Jenkins shared the 11 competencies young people need to pas new media literacies:

• performance
• play
• networking
• collective intelligence
• multitasking
• distributed cognition
• appropriation
• negotiation
• judgment
• simulation
• transmedia navigation

And he expanded more on appropriation as the competency for creating remix content:

the ability to meaningfully sample and mix media content within a context

and then went on to argue that we have a fallacy of looking historically at creativity as coming form nothing, or all as original (which as taught in school tends to intimidate learners creativity):

• The Sistene Chapel is a mashup of prior imagery
• Shakespeare practiced fan facition, re-writing characters and plays from existing works into new contexts, new meanings
• Homer was remixing Greek mythology every time he spoke

Culture operates in dialogue with other existing cultural materials

Jenkins went on to demonstrate the newer versions of this concept via fan videos, and offering remix as a form of pedagogy as demonstrated in Scratch the mix, mash, and generate software tool that allows people to create games, art, interactive stories via a simple tool set– so much that there is one new item created there every two minutes.

And he went on to show the Moby Dick was a classic example of absorbing everything from a culture and recasting it into a new, mixed form- that Melville was a “protofan” of whaling culture. He then moved into to modern remixes of Moby Dick, ranging far from political cartoons to Moby Dick House of Kabobs, and a video of how a modern version of Moby Dick was retold by kids in a contemporary setting.

Jenkins closed with some strong words on copyright, parents using media of their kids in less than appropriate ways, and took some questions from the Second Life audience (see the SL chat log for more).

All in all this was an incredible session, both in RL and SL.

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As many as 20 NMC Virtual Learning Prizes will be awarded in 2008. Each of the US$5,000 awards will provide a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create the learning experience. The range of inworld services available to awardees to actualize the proposed ideas includes professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services.

The NMC is committed to pushing the boundaries of how we collectively view teaching and learning in virtual space. The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is envisioned as a way to surface and realize creative ideas for how to make optimal use of a virtual setting, using a process that provides recognition, financial incentives, professional development services, and a return for education as a whole.

"Projects funded under the NMC Virtual Learning Prize program will be those that make learning fresh or novel, or that illustrate concepts that are usually very difficult to teach," explains Dr. Larry Johnson, NMC's CEO and director of NMC Virtual Worlds. "We are seeking immersive learning experiences in particular, as well as tools that support the craft of teaching. We hope to see a number of proposals with broad applicability across disciplines as that will allow us to maximize the reach of the shared resources that are to be developed under this program."

As a requirement of funding, all materials and content produced as part of the program will be licensed for broad use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Proposal authors will retain full copyright to finished products, and all funded materials will be made available to educators and educational institutions at no cost via either the NMC's Educational Resource Center on Learning in Second Life or via the NMC's website, as applicable.

For the 2008-9 award year, funded ideas will be limited to those that can be implemented in the virtual worlds of Second Life or Project Wonderland. In future years, the program may be expanded to other virtual world platforms.

Review of proposals will begin on June 16, 2008, and proposals will continue to be accepted until all funds have been expended.

For further information, or to download a proposal submission form, please see the Virtual Learning Prize website. Questions related to the criteria or the submission of an application should be directed to virtual-learning@nmc.org.

Virtual worlds are a place for discovering new territories and exploring meaning outside the context of the material world. Even in virtual worlds there is an avant garde, a native artform spawned from unique conditions. “Kiss the Sky” is an exhibition of artists that have been wowing viewers since 2006 with art installations indigenous to the virtual world that artist/curator DC Spensley calls Hyperformalism.

We caught up today with DC and recorded a brief interview where he talked about the new show, what Hyperformalism is, and why he thinks this is a historical moment for these Second Life artists. Be sure to check out his new Hyperformalism Ning social networking site.

Interview with DanCoyote (13.3 Mb MP3, 19:22)

On May 17, 2008, 12PM PST, DC will unveil “Kiss the Sky” the definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism as expressed by over a dozen artists working the discipline in Second Life.

Artists included are the most notable creators in the virtual world of Second Life, chosen specifically for their Hyperformal direction. On display are Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The reception and exhibit are at the NMC Arts Lab (43, 135, 706)

Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.

With a figure in the picture, nobody notices the landscape. Hyperformalism proposes that that by removing the comfortable cliché of anthropocentricism a viewer will be more open to a whole other class of experiences that resonate on a more basic level of awareness and reflect back to the viewer their own humanity. The perception of immersion and variable point of view implicates the viewer into unique relationships with the work destroying all of the usual boundaries between the viewer and the work.

While space in virtual worlds is a simulation, place can be real. In fact art experiences are the only thing that can be real in both the virtual and material worlds at the same time. Abstractions that exist as discoverable objects are somewhere between object and concept. It is the state of half existence between object and concept that differentiates formal abstraction in virtual worlds from preceeding expressions of formalism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. Hyperformalism is not Modernism, it is not Post-modernism because it is native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.

In each story circle, each teller will prompt the next teller the American Indian way, by handing him/her a talking stick.

• Organize a group! Make sure at least one member has the talking stick, which anyone can get by visiting the SL Campusfor the Center for Digital Storytelling at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%202/209/109/23 and opening the pink box in front of the screen by the dome.
• There should be one talking stick per circle. Circles should have 10 people or less. If more folks show up, they initiate a new story circle
• The topic is a ‘miracle story’, no religious meaning implied: a story centered by what, by its impact on your life and/or surprise, felt like a ‘miracle’ to the teller - quoting Joe Lambert - “from ‘life’s little miracles’ as in the way a Buddhist might say if you pay attention every moment is a miracle, to those truly metaphysical and inexplicable events in our lives that suggest transcendent power or possibility”.

Your group should do this activity at noon, Friday May 16 for about 20 minutes.

On Saturday, May 17, the Center for Digital Storytelling is organizing a panel discussion at their home in Second Life. Join the activities at 10:00 AM PDT at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%202/209/109/23

The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) and the Museum of the Person are celebrating the International Day for Sharing Life Stories on May 16. The following day – May 17 – the CDS is proposing a reflection on storytelling in virtual environments in the form of a panel in Second Life. The approaches to this theme will be very different as a result of the panelists’ distinct academic backgrounds.

Panelists include:

• Jen Friedberg, Multimedia Producer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
• Dale Jarvis - Storyteller, folklorist, and performer
• Adriene Jenik - Telecommunications media artist & Assoc. Professor, UCSD
• Joan Llobera - PhD candidate, Starlab, Barcelona, Spain
• Joe Sanchez - PhD student, School of Information, UT Austin
• Vicki Smith - Visual Artist, Aotearoa, New Zealand

Moderators are Joe Lambert (Center for Digital Storytelling) and Ana Boa-Ventura (UT Austin).

At the April 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups, we showed the winners of the 2007 contest (the archive is available for viewing); this is your chance to see the newest collection that we announced just a few weeks ago.

When: May 14, at 12:00pm PDT (check local time)
Where: NMC Conference Center, Babbage Amphitheater

Plenty of good seats are available and we will provide free popcorn!