In a stylized world where taste is often found below deck, bound and gagged, you sometimes wonder “why bother?”. In a place where social pornography is the breakfast of champions, you don’t often run into anything of consequence. What’s below the surface, after all, except more surface? Certainly nothing special.

Tonight, however, I had the good fortune to be given a tour of something particularly special in a place just like that.

This evening, during one of my brief visits to Second Life (opening an island takes a lot of planning – not much time to socialize), I asked my good friend Eshi Otawara how the opening of her collaborative project, Parsec, had gone Saturday night. Apparently it had gone quite well and she almost immediately offered to teleport me over to the installation area. After briefly tweaking my headphones and mic (which I had been warned were required!) and a couple of other technical difficulties, I was whisked over to a dark room with a couple of other individuals.

This, apparently, was a waiting area of sorts while everyone got themselves in order for the experience. Eshi handed me some animations and told me to activate them. Seven people were normally required to “operate” Parsec, I was told, but we were going to make do with 3-4 and the animations were a critical component of the piece.

Finally, we eventually all touched the grey teleport sphere and were taken up to the feature presentation. At this point I still wasn’t sure what it was about, other than there was some interactive tie in between voice, music, and visual imagery.

We found ourselves standing on a transparent floor inside of a giant white sphere, the inside of which was textured in a way that reminded me of hundreds of CD’s. Around us were seven black balls, each with a unique pattern of dots on them. Eshi essentially then turned us loose and just told us to…talk. So we did. Not sure, at first, of what was expected of us (what DO you say when someone asks you to just ‘talk’?) we wandered around vocalizing somewhat arbitrarily. What we found was that, as we spoke the balls moved. As the balls moved, we heard the sounds of instruments.

What we were experiencing was the first installation in Second Life where the environment responded to the sound of a voice. Each person in the sphere was linked to one of the black spheres around them. As an individual spoke, a certain behavior by the sphere – and thus a certain set of sounds – was triggered depending on how your voice sounded at the time. There were 10 (or 16? I dont remember the exact number) of “ranges” that each person could trigger from his or her sphere.

The sum effect is that, as 7 or more people have a conversation in the installation, the environment reacts visually and audibly and creates a multi-sensory symphony written just for those people in those moments in time. The visuals were minimalistic, at that point, but effective. (And they got better, I found out later!)

Another particularly interesting facet of Parsec is that there is a piece of it (pictured below in an image from their Flickr pool) which can only be unlocked through the unguided collaboration of the participants! As you “play” the Parsec instrument/exhibit with others, you apparently might find that there are patterns or connections embedded and that, if you speak in cooperation, this new visual component is revealed and you find yourself immersed in something akin to a starbursting eye of horace.

As an artist, I’m intrigued by this cooperation required to complete the artwork. People have to figure out the problem and then work together to solve it. Rather than just being something built with the mathematics of music and aesthetics in mind, a human element and the human mind if required to make it “work” completely. For all of the traditional art out there with NO connection to the human condition, it’s cool to see a virtual one that manages instead to stay true to (what I think is) one of the primary roles of art in society – exploring ourselves.

For those naysayers who get visibly -angry- when they found out people spend time in Second Life and that there’s nothing there “to do”, this kind of art not only unequivocally proves that not only are there things “to do” that you don’t find anywhere else, but also that the it has been and is continuing to evolve as an art medium in its own right.

Congrats to the creators of Parsec for creating such a cool contribution to art and technology:

Concept, Music and Sound by Dizzy Banjo
Virtual Architecture by Eshi Otawara
Scripting by Chase Marellan

More info and a video can be found here: http://eshiotawara.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/41/

Eshi, thank you so much for the on-the-spot tour. It was fun to hear your voice for the first time and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to you in the role of a tour guide! I also am still smiling at the thought of you, alone, standing in Parsec singing to the machine.

New Year’s Eve at Chronic&Shock’sOriginally uploaded by sintixerr

Eep. The year’s over! That might seem old news (God, we’re already a week into 08), but the sad thing is that to remember what I’ve been doing for the last few months I had to go back to my Flickr stream and -look- at the photographic evidence! Kind of cool…but not?

But before I get into what -has- happened, I’d like to talk about what is and -will- happen. I just spent a lovely evening at the soon-to-be-no-more Dr. Dremo’s in Arlington with a bunch of the Art Outlet volunteers, artists, other board members, and friends.

One of the reasons I was there was to talk about digital art shows and the imminent re-opening of my free space for Washington, DC artists and arts events in Second Life – the SintixErr Gallery. (About which Amanda Hess has written a great article: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=34394 )

It looks like Art Outlet (the board of which I chair – at least for one more year!) will be, as a 501c(3) non-profit arts organization in DC, will be sponsoring an entire island in Second Life. My high level goals for the island will be to:

• Provide a place for any DC-based artist to exhibit their work to worldwide audience
• Host mixed-reality events in support of Art Outlet shows
• Provide a central Second Life hosting capability for other DC arts organizations, museums, galleries, etc.
• Allow for additional research into interesting ways to use virtual worlds to aid art through technology and technology through art.

There’s still no -monetary- sponsor for this (and it’s not a done deal till it’s done), but I can front the cost initially and hope through grants, donations, shows, and by way of small fees for other organizations to use the space, the area will support itself and break even.

In addition to the pure Second Life announcement, I’ve also been working on putting together (and participating in) one or more digital arts and technology shows in the DC area. These are still in their infancy, but there are a number of great, dedicated, reliable people working on them and I expect some cool event news to show up here in the next few months.

You can find more info here on what some of the participating artists’ thoughts on technology, culture, and art are in this thread:

http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=7860.msg33345#msg33345

I’ll close out this post with my own thoughts from that thread:

I have two perspectives on technology’s role in culture, as it pertains to my art. First, I’ve always struggled with the concept that there is “technology” and “stuff that isn’t technology”. I never really believed that there was an inherent line there. The only thing that really rings true is Douglas Adams’ quote on the subject. He said something to the effect of “Technology means ‘stuff that isn’t quite working right yet’”. Pencils, oil paint, paper, cameras – they’re all technology. They’re absolutely the same thing as computers and any other digital mechanisms for interacting with human senses.

So, my first interest in technology, art, and culture is in the process of cultural integration of new technology into the “stuff that works” category. Things we forget about. I’m interested in the creation of and interaction with art that REFUSES to distinguish between itself and any other “old” tools used to create art. I like to see moving images framed behind museum quality glass hanging from a wall. I enjoy the idea of traditional tools being used as part of the creation of what would otherwise be considered “new technology” art.

Along these lines, I’m also fascinated by the artifical lines and boundaries we (humans) create to keep our perception of the universe coherent. Technology has always helped people do more better faster, but until the advent of science allowing long distance communication between people, our boundaries expanded, but tended to retain the same shapes. As people began to communciate over vast distances, however, our sense of “place” began to erode a little bit. TV accelerated that process, cell phones turned the process into an avalanche, and the internet looks like it might eradicate the bond between place and self altogether in our culture. Not only that, but with the variety of identities we are begining to maintain, our most basic sense of “self” is getting fuzzy. Who are we when we can “be” in multiple places at once. Who are we when we can be physically perceived by others in different ways at the same time? We have IM accounts, blog accounts, we exist (well, some of us ) in virtual worlds, etc. Part of how we perceive and understand who we are ourselves is by how we are reflected back by other people. What happens to us as our reflections become fractured and non-contiguous?

Art, over time, has often been used to explore our relationship – as people – to the universe around us. In my mind, these particular technologically-wrought changes in our culture are acute and our exploration of them as humans is well-served by doing so through art.