”Metanomics’ refers to the study of the business and policy aspects of the “metaverse” of virtual worlds. Metanomics can focus on issues arising within virtual worlds, such as how developers manage the economy of a game world (like World of Warcraft), or how residents of virtual worlds manage and regulate business. Metanomics also includes the study of how real-world businesses can use virtual worlds as part of their strategy, and how real-world law and regulation might apply to virtual-world activities. Finally, metanomics includes the use of virtual worlds as laboratories in which to study real-world business or policy issues.’

At the moment metanomics has a regular in-world talk show / discussion on monday nights (european time, its noon slt) with usually a pretty much filled up room. I have been present a few times now and it has always been busy. In fact, this week I couldn’t get in because the sim was full, which is when I found out about the partnersims. Such a nifty thing! Together with some belgian journalists I was able to follow the whole thing in another sim on live screen and read all chatcomments from the other sims due to another smart thing called chatbridge. Real nice. Last monday one of the sl-art-scene-celebrities Bettina Tizzy was on.

I must say, it was not that I heard so much new things but she took the words right out of my mouth when she spoke about commercial companies in sl and how they still can’t seem to find a suitable and effective way to present themselves in sl. You can see the video of last mondays metanomics session here (which btw I can recommend, and unless you are considering a career in wedding planning you can skip the first part). And so there it is, a pretty succesful metanomics, an alive-and-kickin-sl-art-scene, struggling-with-virtuality-rl-companies and google presents us…lively. Off course I felt obliged to at least take a look. So I did, and honestly? To me it seems like a pimped chat programme for teens. But I must say that until now I have only spent one hour there, and I have not yet figured out how to move around. Ahum, sl eye-hand coordination is playing tricks on me. Two big differences, and I think essential ones if you compare lively and second life, are the fact that lively is not so much a world but more a collection of visualised chat rooms, and the fact that users cannot create in lively. Up until now, that is. And there is no economy, up until now as well. Anyway, for anyone who wants to know, my lively name is vivermicelli.

board saying: TALK TO ME! Our rl text messages, sent to a given mobile number were then displayed in second life and answers, given by second life avi’s in sl chat were then sent to a mobile phone we were carrying with us in rl. And we had live contact! Unfortunately we couldn’t understand a word they were saying but in a way it also didn’t matter to me much. In fact I think it gave some extra flavour to the whole experience, it being very much the sound of a different world this way. Im not entirely sure how he did it but Sander made it visible for us to spot the locations of the sandbox avi’s on the google map of The Hague

so we could actually walk towards the (in the rl streets non existent) avi’s to speak with them. So in the pics below you see us, on the streets of The Hague with a laptop, gps device, mobile phones and a crappy megaphone…trying to move Overig around in a busy busy sandbox and trying to decipher martian textmessages. real fun it was anyway!

I’m waaaay too late with this post. But here it is anyway. There’s a new club in town. Or maybe it’s an old club, I have no idea really. It was new to me however. In a useless attemp to clean up my inventory I came across the sintetika landmark. Intrigued by the name I hopped over and liked what I saw. Little waving words all around me, made by no other than miss Strawberry (Holiday) herself. Such a nice surprise. Unfortunately strawberry’s words are no longer there, the concept of the place being a changing design monthly (by different artists, designers), or regulary anyway. I had the pleasure of being surrounded by strawberry’s words twice. Once just by myself, checking out the place. The other time I landed in middle of a great party, fab music! Some more pics:

In popcha stands a tower. A tower from which visitors to the Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in Williamsburg, New York can watch all that is happening on the popcha land. I found out about this project because Juria Yoshikawa sent out invitations to go see the work he made for Brooklyn is watching, called Neon Graffiti Party, and to my surprise I found a lot more works there by other wellknown names such as Dancoyote Antonelli and Strawberry Holiday. The owners of the land call the project a ‘hybrid RL / SL art project’. What to make of it? I don’t know yet, in the tower lives an eye, an eye that visitors can use to look around but I have not yet seen the eye in action so far. Besides that, the land appears to be a bit messy at he moment. What I do like though is that it is another way of making known what is going on in sl artwise without the immediate need for reviewing or criticizing in the most traditional sense. The sign next to the entrance says it like this:

‘and you will be watched, thought about, and commented upon…whatever…leave ‘something’ ‘here’ and it will be chronicaled on our blog and talked about on the brooklyn is watching podcast or….possibly….ignored….or possibly….mocked.’

So even though the tower seemed somewhat deserted when I looked up I can only applaud a rl gallery making a serious attempt in showing sl and its artists and thus trying to monitor these developments.

‘collide’ and ‘sense’, this is a pic of ‘push’. What it does, see the blocks hanging above my head? You can change their size and thus decide on the tone you want to hear. Each block has the complete C scale and by clicking it you can hear all the notes. So, once you have set the tones you can go and push the thing on the ground which then makes a controller trigger the notes. So you can vary in the notes by clicking the blocks but you can add even more variation by pushing slower or faster, forward or backward. The ‘mechanics’ of the thing are actually a lot like those of an oldfashioned musicbox. And like Strawberry Holiday’s journey (see this post) this also can be used as a training practice where avi locomotion is

concerned. A nice video with a demonstration can be seen here. Anyway, next pic is my other favorite one called ‘stretch’. This one measures the size of your avi and converts it to a tone. It is not an installation that is best experienced on your own since hearing only one tone could easily become boring. So when Angrybeth joined me I could fully understand the working and fun of this installation. If you have 2, 4, 7 or 10 different avi’s with different heights it gives you 2, 4, 7 or 10 different tones. And then the note order is based on whoever is closest to the pole in the middle. So, thats nice right? But now think of the possibilities. In sl I can not only put on heels or take of my shoes, I can also grow and shrink! And so can my fellow avi’s! And then we can change position. Lots and lots of possibilities.

Angrybeth: ‘you need friends to play this, so I suppose it also encourages people to be social in a social online world’. This is me and Angrybeth being 1.35 and 2.0 meters long which gave us the high and low C. Short being the high one and tall being the lower one obviously. I must be honest, I was a bit reluctant changing the height of my avi and I don’t really understand why, since I do know how to work the sliders. I guess it has something to do with me getting a bit attached to my sl shape. Angrybeth: ‘what I like about this piece is seeing how many people WILL not alter their avatar’. And that brought us to one of the most important ingredients as to why this piece can not be done in rl. Angrybeth:’you can make sensors to calcute height, but I can’t grow instantly, and also you’re in the Netherlands, I’m in UK. Yet it feels like we’re interacting within the same space.’ She couldn’t be more right. Exactly that last point made me almost

forget about the rl impossibilities and asking the fairly stupid question why this work could not be done in rl. Last one I want to show here is ‘sense’. What this does is it takes the unique key of your avi, which is called a UUID and can be considered the equivalent of our rl DNA I guess. Angrybeth: ‘This unique number is translated into a 16 note scale and so these data are transposed from numbers to a phrase of music which is unique to your avi. That phrase is then stored in a bank of the last 50 people that visited the installation. So what you hear is in fact the traffic of the place.’ So, all and all I was pretty impressed with Angrybeth’s work and really enjoyed the few hours I spent with her talking about her work which I think is really great. Unfortunately the PLAY exhibition has only been up for the month of april but mostly everything can be found on the Pencil Factory, which is Angrybeths gallery, or as she prefers to call it, her sketchbook.

In the house I thought. Wrong. As it turned out I actually was in the dollhouse, in the house. In the enormous house I may say.

I suddenly shrunk to the size of the greenies that live and play there.

And even though it was fun playing with the radio control car, me being a girl and all I immediately ran for the gigantic handbag lying on the gigantic chair.

Hehe, girls and their handbags. See what happens if you loose yourself in sl cosmetics? You think Alice would have used lipgloss?

This was fun, physics class by edo. Boy, why do I still have to learn so much? Needless to say, physics never was my best subject in school. Quoting my high school teacher: ‘she doesn’t understand and she never will’. Can you believe that man? I say he just wasn’t ambitious enough to teach me! Anyway, I don’t think one half hour on the behaviour of wooden balls will cut it so I hereby claim my right to the rest of the lessons.

I always like being in edo’s workshop but this time he turned the whole darn thing into a swimming pool. He could have warned me! Oh well, besides learning about the existance (yes, I really am that bad) of a physics engine I also learned another interesting thing. I had been wondering quite some time now about the total lack of privacy in our sl profiles when it comes to joining groups. Those group lists can contain a lot of information you really don’t feel like sharing. But thanks to edo’s playing soccer with his wooden boxes I discovered the possibility of hiding your groups. Aha! This instantly answered a lot of questions. Now I just have to think of a group that would be worth hiding.

So, last week I went to the performance seeing spots, being dots by Juria Yoshikawa and Nnoiz Papp. Allthough visitors were asked to participate in the performance I didn’t do so because I couldn’t be there for the whole performance. I realize that because of that I have not experienced the work as I should have but at least I saw half of it. The first time I saw work by Juria was in june 2007 when he was ‘doing’ the white cube gallery with his work called 4. For this work, being a collaboration between Juria and four composers, he gave each composer a number (being 1, 2, 3 or 4) and asked them to create soundscapes based on that number. Juria himself ‘took on the challenge of using the art space itself as the raw material of the sculpture. As with light, sound, motion and time – the art space is material for the creator‘ as he wrote it on his website. The whole work/exhibition lasted for 4 weeks and every week Juria changed the gallery completely. In all four episodes Juria integrated us in the work, using all aforementioned ingredients. In the first week for instance: ‘Each panel contains a unique voice audio sample and visual text that is activated when viewers walk through each panel‘. This was one of the first sl art works I experienced, and can be considered an eye opener to me. In most of Juria’s works I have seen since, I recognized the same ingredients. His use of colours, sound, movement and the integration of the visitors in the work. All and all I can say that to me Juria has a pretty distinct signature to his work. However, lately I have been wondering if it would be possible to actually develop one’s work in sl. What I mean by that is that a lot of, what we now consider, great artists have earned that status because of the radical changes they made in their own work and in arthistory in general, no? So here I witness sl artists at work and I consider this kind of art, a radical movement in itself. Juria describes it as follows:

‘Rather than bringing in rl artwork, I am compelled to use mainly the elements that make up Second Life itself. Typically, my virtual artwork mixes kinetic objects, animated texture, text, ambient noise and av animations. I inevitably choose scales larger than conventional gallery work since I’m interested in people experiencing the work in a physical way – flying through them, riding on them and socializing within the art. To me virtual art is about freeing oneself up to create in ways impossible in real life.’

New materials, new techniques, a new way of experiencing art. It’s all new. But will the possibilities be endless? Or will we end up with more of the same? In sl that is. I hope not. In light of these thoughts I was very happy with the invite for the new performance and, allthough not everyone may agree, with the things that happened afterwards. The day after I was asked if I thought Juria and Nnoiz’s performance was too much like Dancoyote Antonelli’s ZeroGskydancers show. I had to think about that for a while. Since there were indeed similarities, there also were essential differences. Whereas the skydancers performance was a more ‘classic’ style show with an audience, in the spots & dots performance the audience was in fact part of it. Whereas the skydancers were moving according to a well prepared choreography based on a storyline, the spots & dots were of a more improvised character. Where in fact the instructions were shouted by Juria in general chat, in the skydancers performance this was, very theaterlike, done behind the scenes. I don’t think that I have been looking at a case of plagiarism. To me that would sound like one photographer telling the other he is being a copycat because he also uses a camera. Or a painter telling the same to another painter because he is using canvas and a brush. But I’m not sure. Hence my questions about development in sl art. I guess my real question is, what is in fact the newness. Is it the genre (a term used by Juria) in total, or do we already have to look at the differences in language (a term used by DC). Whichever one it turns out to be, the fact is that as in RL, artists are also being inspired by other artists. And sl art is, even if to us it feels like a big thing, still a small niche. I for one am really curious to find out how long we will be able to experience newness in sl. The more detailed discussion on the works by Juria and Dancoyote Antonelli can be read here. A video made by Evo Szuyuan on the performance can be seen here.

‘Seeing Spots, Being Dots (Dance of Mayhem Plus Homogeneity)
Juria Yoshikawa: Kinetic environment and participatory performance
Nnoiz Papp: Musical composition and musical performance
Olga Wunderlich: Curator in rl and sl

Let us suppose that we’re all just a temporary mishmash of dots on a screen. All of our energy, personality and uniqueness is just a collection of bouncing color dots creating seemingly meaningful patterns we call a virtual world. Zoom in and you are a sea of dots with no form. Zoom back and you’re just a spot on the map. In celebration of all of our dottiness and spottiness, virtual installation artist Juria Yoshikawa will join up with composer-artist Nnoiz Papp to perform “Seeing Spots, Being Dots” at Diabolus Island as part of the current art show CARP3. The performance will be simultaneously shown at  the Scala in Friedrichstr. 112A as a part of the Directors Lounge Festival in Berlin. Participation welcome: The “dance” is open to all attendees of the virtual event. People will receive a dot costume and large kinetic sculptures to wear to take part in this improvised performance. If you would like to participate, please IM Juria Yoshikawa by 2/13 and she will give you the costume, sculptures and event instructions.’

Time schedule:

In SL: 02/15, 9:15am slt, part of the Carp3 show, Diabolus Art Space

In RL: 02/15, 6:15pm, part of the Directors Lounge Festival in Berlin Scala in Friedrichstr. 112A Berlin-Mitte