reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 15th, 2008
A stunning new Second Life art show will be opening this Saturday on NMC Campus. “Kiss the Sky” is the definitive exhibition of Hyperformalism in the world of Second Life®, and is a brand new collection of Second Life art curated by DC Spensley (aka DanCoyote Antonelli).
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.
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.
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.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 15th, 2008
Look for two events coming up tied to the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, which is Friday, May 16, 2008. During the day, you can be in a Second Life story circle! Any group in SL can get self-organized and participate.
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.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 12th, 2008
One of the more surreal aspects of Second Life is having a vivid voice chat conversation with a character where their mouth never moves. For years, avatars at There.com have had lip sync or at least, mouth movement, to audio.
Well, my Second Life talking friends, you can have that too with the Second Life Lipsync Viewer. This is a set of files you download and replace in your original Second Life application (see the bottom of the docs page and the Readme that comes with the download).
Now your lips move with the volume of your voice! Here is a brief test (it did not work with my dog avatar, so I had to play a human)
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 11th, 2008
Come on over to the Babbage Amphitheater this Wednesday, May 14, as we have a live video screening of the videos created by students from University of Pennsylvania’s 2008 Mashup Contest. Join me and my co-host Ninmah Ash, along with Anu Vella from UPenn, as we show all of this year’s student mashup video entries, and hopefully have on hand a few of the students who created the videos so they can share their thoughts behind the movies.
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.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 6th, 2008
This Friday May 9, Global Kids is hosting a live event on NMC Campus at Teaching. The new Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be streaming their inaugural, invite-only symposium on “Logging into the Playground: How Digital Media are Shaping Children’s Learning.”
As children everywhere tap into the new digital playground through gaming, mobile devices and the Internet, educators, researchers, policymakers and high-tech industry leaders are joining forces to examine how these latest technologies are shaping the education of today’s children. Galvanizing this effort is the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, an independent, not for profit research institute named for Sesame Street’s visionary founder. Today, Center executives announced plans to host a May 9 symposium in New York, “Logging into the Playground: How Digital Media are Shaping Children’s Learning.” This first ever, invitation-only event will explore how digital media can improve children’s literacy, learning and development.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 5th, 2008
In May of 2007, the NMC conducted a survey of educators in Second Life, and learned much about the habits, interests, goals from the more than 200 responses to this first survey. These results are available for free under Creative Commons licenses.
But given the continued expansion of educational places, events, and over all activity in Second Life, we thought it would be useful to redo the survey again 2008, so maybe we can see what changed (or not). So we just sat down to the survey machine, twiddled some knobs and…
Please share the survey link far and wide, as we hope to get a larger sample this time around. We will keep the survey open at least til the end of May 2008 and we will again publish the results to the NMC Campus Observer and the NMC web site.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 5th, 2008
On Friday April 25, NMC CEO Larry Johnson (or as we know him in Second Life, Larry Pixel) was a guest interviewee for the Metanomics series, the weekly live show that takes place in, and is broadcast live from Second Life.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 5th, 2008
Join us on at 1:00 PM PT on Wednesday, May 7, for the opening of the new Second Life campus for the University of the Pacific. Meet at U Pacific (166,141,22) under the iconic replica of Burns Tower.
“U Pacific” is a based on the real campus area around Burns Tower. For those at the university, you can meet at Pacific Theater for a live demonstration and virtual ribbon cutting of the Pacific campus. Elizabeth Griego will officiate the ceremony. For all attendees, a virtual dance party with live DJ will follow.
These other sessions will also be live streamed (see the full program for more detail) - times here are PDT:
6:00 – 6:45am LinkedCommunities — Case Western Reserve, OneCommunity, and the Community Wireless Mesh Project
7:00 – 7:45am Learning 2.0: Making Sense of the explosion of Web 2.0 tools and their relevance and consequence in Higher Education
8:00 – 8:45am Rich Media and Participatory Culture - The Experience of YouTube and iTunes in Higher Education
9:00 – 9:45am New Frontiers in Video-Based Collaboration: Adobe Connect and Lifesize
8:45 – 10:45am President’s Address: Barbara R. Snyder, President, Case Western Reserve University Keynote Address - Speaker: Anthony Williams, Co-Author of Wikinomics, Mass Collaboration and the Future of Higher Education
11:00 – 11:45am Virtual Worlds and the New Frontiers of Learning — From SecondLife to Wonderland
12:00 – 12:45pm Panel Discussion: Collaboration Technology - What’s Next: Bold Predictions, Cautionary Notes and Take Away Lessons
We look forward to seeing you there. During the simulcast the ClevelandPlus Islands will be open to the public. If you have any questions please IM Susanne Patrono or Aimee Later in world.
reported by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) May 5th, 2008
The weekly Metanomics show has been on a 35 week sprint marathon, with live shows each of the last 35 weeks, and is taking a breather in May.. but there are still things you can tune into. Every Monday and Tuesday, they will be showing rebroadcasts of the top interviews and as a live audience, you can tune in and discuss the topics with other people.
Monday May 5, 2008, 11am PST: Gene Yoon, VP of Business Affairs and architect of the Second Life Economy, provides his view of inworld commerce. Can you figure out which part of the interview made a Danish investment banker want to cry?
Where: Amphitheater on Outreach (87, 125, 34) (no group membership is required to teleport)
Tuesday May 6, 2008, 3pm PST: Find out the answer to which part of the interview made a Danish investment banker want to cry in Metanomics Rewind, when we see the followup panel discussion, Virtual Finance and the Reality of the Linden Dollar, with with inworld financiers Arbitrage Wise and IntLibber Brautigan, Saxo Bank’s Jillian Falconi and David Karsbol, and journalist Gigs Taggart.
Finally, after some of the snarky television response to the April 2008 Virtual Worlds congressional testimony, check out the The Metanomics Colbert Challenge
Tune into NMC Studio One for the latest audio segment from NMC Campus! Now playing:
Listen to "Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action" keynote presentation by Howard Rheingold at NMC Symposium on Evolution of Communication (Dec 5, 2007)
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. 
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