Jon Stewart interviewed by Bill Moyer (PBS)
Fantastic interview. Available in Windows Media Player or Quicktime.
stimulus
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Game the System
Great panel in SL right now… Am there… Link. Click for enlarged image and see SL art stars….
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body in quotes
There’s the “Body in Quotes” panel at the Borders, Boundaries & Liminal States conference in Second Life. Sponsored by Ars Virtua New Media Center, and the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, and hosted at the Amphitheater on Learning (NMC Virtual Worlds). From stage left to stage right is Xerxes Druart (Stuart Bunt of SymbioticA) , Wirxli Flimflam (Jeremy Turner), Natberg Sternberg (me) and The Unknown (Carlos Castellanos – moderator). I think I’m cool cuz I know that Pling Ping, the avatar up front and on the left from the camera lense, is Jo Greene of Turbulence. We like her.
WIrxli has a fantastic summary of his talk and some images of the panel etc over at his blog. I had no idea he had so many avatars, and it was fun to have a bodyguard protecting the guy sitting next to me in SL. He also says my audio kept crashing, which sucks. I had no idea. Oh well. I’m not gonna paste my notes, like he did, cuz they are mostly disorganized, but I will say that a draft of the short paper where most of my ideas come from will be online in the next few weeks. It mostly looks at affect and body-environment coupling in and around the space of the computer, network, crying babies and spouses, all between RL self and avatar self, and how those might disperse and interfere with one another. Next time I try to use ventrilio and SL at the same time, I will go into the office rather than trying to use my home connection….
Stuart’s work blew me away – he is a bio-engineer that works on a team facilitating art and artists (the likes of Stelarc). Some of his recent work includes pigs with wings, and attaching a homegrown ear to Stelarc’s forearm; oh and, the one my veggie wife likes, they “grew” a leather jacket so as not to harm a cow!
Thanks to all on the panel, and to Carlos…
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armed response II
Nice group show at the Goethe in Joburg; my buddy Christo Doherty (head of digital arts at Wits) in participating. Recommended if you are in the area!
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remains – Second Life panel discussion
The ‘Remains’ panel discussion @ Borders, Boundaries & Liminal States, from letft to right: Rubaiyat Shatner (James Morgan, Ars Virtua), JOE Languish (Laura Jones, anthropologist and archaeologist), Chloe Mahfouz (Renée Ridgway, artist & curator), Kliger Dinkin (Brad Kligerman, artist & architect).
Yesterday marked my own first interaction with other avatars in SL, and, unfortunately for the organizers, it was kind of like how most skeptics might’ve imagined it. To quote James Morgan via Rhizome:
If you haven’t been in Second Life then you cannot understand the lengths to which something can go wrong. It was certainly odd for the world to be offline at the beginning of our conference yesterday [and they didn’t get the sound working – imagine giving a prepped 15-min presentation by typing just the important bits in real time!], but I have to say that Laura Jones, Brad Kligerman, and Renée Ridgway managed to maintain composure and have an interesting session on remains.
Yes, the second part of his statement is dead on – despite technical problems. It was admittedly more like a chat, where other things interrupt (BRB!), than like being at a physical conference, where that is the sole thing you are doing (and I think audio might have helped there), but that is the nature of SL, I imagine, and I think the generosity and interest of everyone I spoke to actually showed an enjoyment in navigating that space. There were continual slippages between SL and “RL” names and activities, my favorite part being when Brad / Kliger’s beautiful but dopey-looking avatar (which had just finished giving a pretty intense “talk” about his work) said he was “fried.”
SL means never looking bad or having morning breath, no matter what happened the night before.
Hopefully I’ll ‘see’ some of you at today’s sessions – I’m on the second one, “Body in Quotes” – program here and instructions on participating here.
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iCommons Summit 07 — help us increase the number of scholarships
via Lessig Blog (they do artist residencies, too!):
iCommons Summit 07 – help us increase the number of scholarships
iCommons is an entity Creative Commons helped incubate. Its purpose is to enable a platform for commons-related projects from around the world to interact — including A2K, Wikipedia, Free Software, Free Culture Movement and Creative Commons.One core project of iCommons is an annual summit. The first year was Boston. Last year was Rio. This year is Dubrovnik. Tomorrow, CC will be launching a special fund-raising drive to raise money to sponsor scholarships to the Summit. Click here to help.
