I was lucky to be contacted by my friend DanCoyote Antonelli to go along to the last two performances of his invigorated ZeroG SkyDancers as part of Second Life’s 4th birthday celebrations. After my popular one take video film and article “The Organic Beauty of Hyperformalism” from last year I had a much deeper understanding of the group’s vision and this time, 6 months later, captured what I believe to be film that ‘really’ gets under the surface of these wonderous experiences – but thats just my opinion. I edited the film out of order from the original performance to hopefully enhance the structure of the piece, to make it build and grow and look forward to DanCoyote’s take on it. It is very hard to put these immersive surround experiences into a 2D linear environment – but I am getting better and about two and a half minutes in things start to happen!

The ZeroG dancing troupe are now a year old and it showed with much greater synchronicity between the the music, the voluptuous large scale hyperformalist moving art and the flying dancers – the flyers particularly demonstrated amazing feats of acrobatics and sublime balletic motion than in previous performances. Anyway the video goes some way to capturing the “oh you really had to be there” statements, while I was filming this and travelling along through the air with the dancers at high resolution, it really felt like I had a privileged glimpse throught the matrix to the next level, I was ‘dancing with angels’.

Credits approved by DanCoyote from the video.

ZeroG SkyDancers Spring 2007 Production June 29th 2007 at Ars Simulacra, NMC Art Showcase in honor of the Second Life Fourth Birthday Celebration and the ZeroG SkyDancers 1st year anniversary.

Created by DC Spensley

Produced and Directed by DanCoyote Antonelli

Machinamatography and Editing by Gary Hazlitt

Original Score ZeroOne Paz

SkyDancers:

Assistant Director Anhinga Chaika

Assistant Producer Callypian Christianson, Deborah Stranglove

Prima Tatiana Kurri, Angelique Menoptra, Lina Lageos, Kensai Uriza

House Manager Onyx Bijoux

Technical Director ZenMondo Wormser

Costume Designer Sabine Stonebender

Posted by Gary Hazlitt from inside Second Life

There, that got your attention, in true call-to-action style! I went to an interesting panel discussion today down at the Electric Sheep tower about ‘alternate reality games’ in our world. There was an eclectric crowd such as one (devon1234 Allstar you know who you are) who insisted on setting off fireworks at the beginning (pic above), people wearing cubes on their heads and the omnipresence of DestroyTV, the sexy camerawoman broadcasting video (not just stills as in my other post) to the bio world at destroytv.com.

There is a link at the end of this post to a bio site run by SL’s Future Salon that explains the speaker’s connections to bio world games and those strange recorded ‘speech’ things, avies in a podcast? Still beyond me how this works. Anyway back to the event, panelists were skillfully moderated by Electric Sheep’s (ESC) own SNOOPYbrown Zamboni as they tackled the complex issues of running alternate reality games here in Second Life. Among the other panelists (shown in the images below) were Zero Grace, Adrian Vanalten, danhon Giles and Aip Pomegranate I believe, although they kept using their alternate names a lot, confusing? Anyway to the discussion.

Zero Grace (who is also known as Tony Walsh apparently) did a nice text introduction about ARGs while the audio was fixed:

“Over the last 12 years I’ve worked as an artist, writer, and designer primarily with web-based sites and games for the youth market. In the last few years I’ve been involved more heavily in game design. I designed game play and wrote storylines for two editions of Xenophile Media’s ReGenesis Extended Reality Game based on the Canadian TV series ReGenesis. and I was a game designer and writer on the Xenophile and Double Twenty co-produced ARG “The Ocular Effect” based on the ABC Family TV movie “Fallen.” My work in alternate reality gaming over the past couple of years has involved a heavy broadcast component and combines some traditional elements like puzzle design and interactive storylines with non-traditional elements like interactive video and working with gaming hooks embedded into broadcast TV.”

When the 90 minute panel really got going there were lots of issues and questions that kept coming up:

• How to devise a ‘game’ that truly plays against and parallel to the consensus reality of our world vs just a ‘treasure hunt’, and if this world is enough in itself (what a question!)
• How to make money (Linden dollars obviously) from running these games
• How hard and time consuming it is to develop a rich and deep narrative and keeping it going
• How to keep control of the ‘game’ as many players take it to areas you never considered possible
• How to make the media in this world, video, sound, text, im, chat, objects, outdoor media, role playing avies etc: etc: work together seamlessly – merged media.

The audience as they do were asking lots of parallel questions and comments (which I find intriguing as a parallel narrative) to the slightly ‘from another world’ audio. One that stood out was from Matthias Eisbar who in relation to a game where a player was set-up to play guitar in front of everyone, talked about the 4th wall and players trying to get behind the mask.

” There are serious privacy issues for any actors though everyone wants to pull back the curtain but breaking the 4th wall like this – sometimes the idea that it’s a game gives people the excuse to cross lines – what if he gets hit by a car getting the guitar?”

InKenzo also raised a point about writers for ARG’s

“writers must be embedded and fluent in ARG worlds….it will not work with two separate teams.” and on linking games “for ARG developers, why must it be competition? there are ways to float between worlds here and there’s no shortage of ways to link games”

I haven’t quoted much from the panelists themselves as they will be on the recording coming up at the Future Salon site which has more information from the bio world here.

Tomorrow looking forward to my friend DanCoyote Antonelli’s SkyDancers 2007 – I have a VIP seat at the 9pm performance, now wheres my glad rags

Posted by Gary Hazlitt from Inside Second Life – using OpenSource – SL Mail, Postie & Cron

One of the main items on the lower level was Amoration aka ManorMeta – Crystalline Home by In Kenzo and Common Cure. A magical place of translucent geology and dispersed colours.

Next to Amoration was a truly interactive item called Aqua that required you to enter, a sort of living maze of blue and pink walls that rotated and created never-ending perspectives combined with an element of survival! Created by Selaras Partridge you can also click panels out of (and in to) the way while walking in and through the installation. That black dot is me by the way…

There were a few smaller traditional items and I really liked the very detailed texture and voluptuous shape of the metallic Brass Dragon by Lynnor Richelieu

Another favourite was also the most simple. Giovanni Tweak’s Light Path had 12 changing colour lights, in parallel lines that you walked within. It cast very interesting light patterns on me as I travelled through it. I am wearing a black top hence the bodyless look

I have seen something similar to ‘Primolution’ by Stella Costello on the NMC campus so not sure if this is by the same artist or not. This piece took the concept one step further by having one of us avatars jumping out the end of the piece. Very cute.

In the main New West gallery building there were a lot of two dimensional paintings and moving texture based art works, but I was in a 3D mood and two items that caught my eye were there as decoration I think – in the blurb they were referred to, I think, as 3rd generation Second Life Art, made entirely here in this world and appropriate to this world – and there is me thinking everything was made in here. But Dancoyote Antonelli, who is the featured artist here at the moment, used this principle of 3D fly-through, dna/fractal structures in some of the larger works in the sky I will talk about later. The two here were called ‘Round Flappy Tree’ (according to the edit name) and another untitled (or I couldn’t find it), here they are

Going skywards now and one has two options, to use the teleporter to the top of the Modernist Marvel building here:

and to look at the 2D art on each floor (which I did aswell) or to put on the jet-pack and explore even further vertically. I went to the middle level a hundred metres above this building, an exhibition sandbox, which was fantastic and had my real favourite works. The first really hit my Second Life aesthetic soft-spot, the Morphing Sculpture by Sasun Steinbeck. Here is some blurb before the pics:

This piece was born of my desire to create something beautiful that can only exist in SecondLife, something never before seen that exploits the power of the 3D environment. I wanted something very beautiful to look at, as well as fun for owners to play with. SecondLife gives us all amazing control over the shapes of the prims that we work with – but I wanted to make something that would create beautiful, complex, and unexpected shapes completely on it’s own, as if it were a living thing, morphing into completely different shapes with every touch.

I just so loved this. Think I will go back and buy it as it is the foundation of what I consider ‘my’ art in this world. A similar item on the sandbox platform (here are a couple of overview pictures by the way)

was Orbital Trip-lg by Sabine Stonebender. This reminded me of some of the early works by Clames Clanger, who is another, rotating metallic morphing, particle specialist. This had wonderful pastel colours and lovely smooth motion.

The final item I will talk about on this platform was the Pixel Board by ZenCoyote (who are Dancoyote Antonelli & ZenMondo Wormser). Pixel Board was very minimalist, basically black and white squares but a smaller control board allowed viewers to control the much, much larger screen and create a collaborative, changing grid. Fun to use and see what others have left.

On the way up to the very top platform I bumped into a ZX4 Attack helicopter, literally. Built by David Street I am not sure what it was doing floating here, but thought I would walk on it and grab a photo

And so to the final area I visited on this short exploratory trip was the ZeroG Skydancer Performance Space. There were performances here a few days ago and I have seen videos and it looked staggering. Avatars flew around with long trails behind them and the piece rotated and morphed. Here I am floating in the centre of the performance, fractal/dna type centre piece.

Antonelli calls his art “Hyperformalism” and to quote him “I am using a modernist mode to inch the viewers forward into a 3rd generation mode. First generation is art brought into Second Life, like I have here. Second generation is art made entirely in SL.”

Here is a final shot of the whole performance space in daylight which is probably not the best time to see this, but we can see the audience area, control platforms above and some of the grand, bold and 3rd generation work.

Phew. Great fun looking around and plenty to inspire. I love art that is evolving here in my world, less so the art that is imported from wherever, doesn’t quite fit. Will continue to generate my own works when I get time, and that is the difficult thing when I only seem to be living in here a couple of hours a day? Wish I had a full 24 hour day that I have heard those bios get.

Posted by Gary Hazlitt from inside Second Life