MachinimUWA5: The Last Syllable of Recorded Time

The MachinimUWA5 movies are starting to be released in readiness for the deadline of 30^th June and prize pool of L$725,000

I recently attended the premiere of Ambrosia Lanley’s ‘The Unveiling’ which I thought was very well done. Ambrosia invested over 400 hours of work over six weeks on this movie and her hard effort shows. My only “criticism” – if “criticism” is indeed the right word – is that I couldn’t really see the connection with the UWA5 theme of “Seeking Wisdom”. But please do not let that put you off watching it – the film commends itself in and of itself, irrespective of any reference to UWA5.

Over the next few weeks I’ll get around to watching all the UWA5 entries. I will embed here those which especially tweak my interest.

Confession time: Contrary to prior promises I may not be able to enter. Sorry but time is against me.

It could very well be then that the nearest I will get to “entering” UWA5 is my cameo appearances in Tutsy’s latest movie.

Tutsy Navarathna – as any regular reader of my humble blog will doubtless already know - was joint-winner of MachinimUWA3 and outright winner of UWA4.

Tutsy is certainly “the man to beat”, so to speak, in UWA5.

“The Last Syllable of Recorded Time” was filmed at a number of regions in Second Life, including some scenes from when Tutsy and I visited ‘Daytime Dreams’ created by .::DoL::.. I have extensively blogged our experiences on that region here.

I am not going to go on too much about this movie but instead hope that you take the time to watch it. The one thing I would say about it – or rather, I am now the third to say it after Larkworthy Antfarm and Iono Allen – is that it uses an absolutely beautiful colour palette.

Tutsy’s delicacy of touch and deftness in post-production colour correction/management is I think more apparent in this film than any of his previous machinima.

I believe that this dexterity with colour is one of the four or five factors which mark out Tutsy’s machinima amongst others. In this film particularly Tutsy demonstrates that he is first and foremost an artist; an artist who just happens to be currently working in the media of machinima.

To really grok what Larkworthy, Iono and I are referring to you need to watch “The Last Syllable of Recorded Time” at 1080i but, regardless, you can still very much enjoy it at lesser resolutions.

MetaSex Movie Poster

.:: DoL ::., whose art-sim we’ve discussed before,  has put her formidable artist skills to good use and created this striking movie poster for Tutsy’s ‘MetaSex’.

I don’t know if .:: DoL ::. intends entering this poster to the MachinimUWA V Poster contest but I certainly hope so.

In fact, thinking about it now…maybe I should enter some of my own movie posters…I already have work uploaded to aviewtv and my movies are the only adult films currently allowed to be screened at their Machinima Gallery (an ‘adult’ section was especially built to accommodate my films), so I probably qualify to enter.

Now there’s a thought…

Pixie xx

I Fell In Love One Afternoon...

“I fell in love one afternoon
And wrote your name on a white balloon…”

The Rabbicon Story, Bryn Oh

With the help of endowments from a number of patrons including British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and a grant from the Canadian government, Bryn Oh is in the process of re-creating all three chapters of the ‘Rabbicorn Story’ on a resurrected ‘Immersiva’ region.

‘Immersiva’ is Bryn Oh’s Second Life studio. She will be using it for the purpose of creating a movie and real life exhibit of the Rabbicorn story.

(click to enlarge images)

For those unfamiliar with the story, the three individual machinima can be found here:

·        The Daughter of Gears (Part 1)

·        The Rabbicorn Story (Part 2)

·        Standby (Part 3)

The Rabbicorn story is a narrative expressed in poetry, images, speech and text. Byrn clearly understands her story, what she wants to say (via her characters) and how she wants to say it.

For me, Bryn’s work always has a feeling of desolation and abandonment. There is darkness there, a definite but undefined sadness.

When I look at the individual sculptures I sense the pain that many of us carry inside of ourselves – an emotional pain we attempt not to impose upon others because we intuitively understand that they themselves have a similar and equivalent pain.

We can never be quite sure of the type or degree of pain that our neighbour harbours; we can be only sure that such a pain surely exists.

How many of us in our quietest, most personal and most insecure moments feel as Munch’s ‘The Scream’?

Byrn’s work, for me, often expresses the as yet incomplete process of the “mechanicalisation” of the human spirit. By that I mean that we appear as a civilisation to be increasingly implementing processes which tend to robotise thinking and feeling – and in fact, in some cases. making them entirely redundant. We seem intent on having our human interactions and friend selections overseen by a series of computer algorithms and programming sub-procedures.

The phrase “Human Resource,” for example, is now a literal truth. Surprisingly this term has not yet captured and sanitised by the guardians of political correctness because, within this ubiquitous term comprising two innocuous words, lies a deep literal truth about how the corporate world views its employees – a “resource” which just happens to also be a human being, as opposed to a desk or chair or any other item of stationary. Within the methodologies and terminologies of the corporate world, the difference between a human resource and, say, a hole punch resource is largely one of functionality and expenditure.

Ironically, the term “human resource” has grown to be one of the most dehumanising words of the Western world.

Now, in some senses the most interesting thing about the above statements is that we have no idea if Bryn knowingly endowed her installation with these qualities or not. That is, those are my ideas and reflections that arose from interacting with Bryn’s work. They may or may not have been in Bryn’s mind as she was creating. Furthermore, short of actually asking her, we have no way of knowing.

We have touched on this subject before on this blog, when we explored the Innsmouth region. We noted then that once an artist releases their work to the wider public they relinquish control over the “meaning” of the work. Although the artists’ fans, academics and art dealers will always consider the artist to hold the “definitive meaning” behind the work, the simple fact is that anyone can project whatever meaning they wish onto the work. This may be a deliberate and conscious act or entirely involuntary and unconscious but, regardless, it is now wholly outside the control of the artist.

The result of this is that the artist will likely discover interpretations of their work that they had never previously considered. Some of these interpretations the artist will find interesting and instructive – others she may well find to be bizarre and bewildering!

In my experience most artists find this process of re-interpretation of their work to be at worse mildly entertaining and, at its very best, enlightening.

We have previously attempted to examine the dynamics at play when we considered the ‘Daytime Dreams’ region. There is a “union”, we suggested, between the subject and object of consciousness – the seer with the thing seen – which sometimes results in the generation of a third element - the creation of an entirely new idea or concept; one quite independent of the original artist, albeit obviously inspired and ignited by their work.

All aesthetic considerations aside, it might be that the primary importance of artistic installations such as The Rabbicorn Story is their ability to gently prod us into thinking for ourselves, to subtly nudge us into feeling emotion.

Regular readers of this humble blog will know that I am not overly optimistic about the long-term viability of our civilisation in its current form. Many different civilisations, nations and cultures have arisen, peaked and fallen over the last 4000 years. I have seen no evidence why our civilisation should prove any different.

However, this viewpoint is not rooted in the logic of “immanentizing the eschaton”; it isn’t something I actively *wish* or pray for; it isn’t motivated by any political or religious ideology. Rather it is a belief based on the observation that those who have not learnt the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. 

But, even with this belief, I am most certainly optimistic about the future prospects of Life itself, and of the resilience and fortitude of DNA to star-seed distant corners of the cosmos. I just happen not be too species-concentric about it.

Entwined in the weft and warp of this admittedly gloomy forecast for the short and medium term is in fact a positive, hopeful and life-affirmative message. It establishes the idea that in the long term at least, élan vital, so-called by Henri Bergson in 1907, will prevail; that the process of evolution is fundementally creative and progressive.

And, again, I believe I can detect similar sentiments in Bryn’s Rabbicorn Story. I see ingrained in the narrative, in the textures and prims the idea of the vanquishing of dark forces; of prevailing against the odds.

As we advance through each stage of the tale, we come to realise that running parallel with the emotional-mechanical-artificiality of the human condition - represented by the gears, the cogs and other motorised components - there is actually a sense of the triumph of the spirit, a reunion with natural humanity, a reclaiming of human resources for ourselves.

In summary, what finally emerges from one afternoon at Bryn Oh’s installation, is Love...

Pixie xx

Credits:
All ideas, concepts and artwork relating to the 'Rabbicorn Story' and  ‘Immersiva’  belong to Bryn Oh.
Photography in this post of Bryn Oh's original work is by Pixie Rain.
The opinions expressed in this post are Pixie Rain's alone and are not intended to represent Bryn Oh.
Bryn Oh and Pixie Rain are real avatars in a Virtual World on a lonely planet orbiting a really rather ordinary G-Type star. How cool is that!

Perchance to Day Dream

"Yoga is Union.

Yoga is first of all the union of the subject and the object of consciousness: of the seer with the thing seen.

Now, there is nothing strange or wonderful about all this.

The study of the principles of Yoga is very useful to the average man, if only to make him think about the nature of the world as he supposes that he knows it.

Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, colour, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese. All 'material things,' all impressions, are phantoms.

In reality the cheese is nothing but a series of electric charges. Even the most fundamental quality of all, mass, has been found not to exist. The same is true of the matter in our brains which is partly responsible for these perceptions. What then are these qualities of which we are all so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and the seen, of subject and object in consciousness as the philosophical phrase goes. They have no material existence; they are only names given to the ecstatic results of this particular form of Yoga."

from 'Eight Lectures on Yoga' by Mahatma Guru-Sri Pramahansa (orig. pub. 1939)

.:: DoL ::.

There is a subject that I have wanted to discuss for a while but exactly how to contextualise it didn't become clear to me until I visited the 'Daytime Dreams' region created by Dolphin Aeghin (.:: DoL ::.).

(click images to enlarge)

It concerns the relationship(s) between virtual art, education in virtual worlds, human relations expressed through an avatar and why some Second Life sims are clearly more "popular" and "successful" than others.

.:: DoL ::.'s work at Daytime Dreams manages to capture something which I think is important to the success of a sim and, by extension, important also to Second Life itself.

But before we address that issue, let us first take a detour and look at examples which empathetically are *not* what I am thinking of.

I remember being invited to one particular educational sim to listen to a lecture.

They had built a decent-enough auditorium in a semi-circle; seating was individual chairs.

Except...

Expect that the chairs hadn't got a "sit" in them. That is, it wasn't possible to actually *sit* in the chairs (except in a most deformed and ugly manner).

My point is, the educationalists who owned and built the auditorium didn't consider for a moment that avatars might actually want to *sit* in the chairs! To them, the chairs were architectural features necessary for a visual authenticity but, within a virtual world, totally redundant for actual usage.

So we all stood behind the chairs looking like vertically-stacked pilchards, watching and listening to the lecturer.

But the story doesn't stop there.

Because as the lecturer looked down upon us and pontificated about "the purpose of Second Life" and "how Second Life should be used" and "the future of Second Life and virtual worlds", I was thoroughly distracted by the fact that the guy looked like a complete fucking noob!

Worse in fact, because he had obviously attempted to do *something* with his avatar but had clearly decided "this just isn't worth the effort".

As I observed this lecturer's avatar and listened to his words, I realised that he had a massive "disconnect" between himself and his avatar; between the virtual world he purported to be an expert in and his actual existence within that world.

In short, it was clear to me that, although he was *in* Second Life, he wasn't actually *part* of Second Life - he knew nothing about its culture (or sub-cultures) or how people use it on a daily basis.

For me, he lost all credibility at the moment of that realisation.

Please understand, I am not talking here about some lofty point of philosophy like the "Augmentation vs Immersion" argument.

Rather, I am talking about much more down-to-earth things; I am talking about things that people do every day in SL, as normal activities.

I am pointing out that this educationalist lecturer was completely unaware that avatars *do* actually sit down in virtual worlds and that people *do* make judgements based on the appearance of avatars.

I am also suggesting that he had probably never danced in Second Life or hugged or had a blowjob or fucked.

Or felt the hurt and upset of one human being to another through the medium of an avatar.

Or comforted another human in distress simply by the act of two avatars cuddling.

Or broken another's heart.

Or had his heart broken.

He studies a tree but knows not the beauty of a forest; he knows the chemical composition of sugar but has never experienced its taste; he measures the distance to remote star-systems without ever being awed by its wonder.

Similarly, I was once in a club when a very rare bird indeed flew in - The Lesser Spotted Linden Employee.

A number of us said "Hi" or otherwise greeted her - no response whatsoever. I totally get that - she was at work and possibly studying region performance stats or whatever. Who knows what she was doing. But not a big deal regardless.

However, what was remarkable was she had absolutely no control over her avatar! She was walking into walls, bumping into people and even walked straight over a couch. One year in SL and she had no more ability controlling her avatar than a day old noob.

I kid you not.

It was stunning to see.

And as I watched her, I suddenly understood the attitude that must be so prevalent within The Lab that it resulted in the decision to remove surnames when registering for an SL account.

To them, Second Life is just a "technical" or "engineering" matter, a case of "instances of software and servers" or whatever.

They apparently have little or no understanding of the social implications of their decisions within Second Life.

The removal of avatar surnames has created a "class" or "caste" system in Second Life. This was predictable to anyone with any depth of experience of human relations. It is not nice or desirable nor indeed have any positive aspects at all - but it *was* predictable!

Expect, it seems, to The Lab. 

And worse, they show no signs at this time of either understanding or even caring about the negativity that that ill-fated decision has caused in-world.

How can this be?

I submit that the same malady that affects the aforementioned lecturer also affects some Linden Lab employees - they may well be *in* Second Life but they are certainly not *part* of Second Life.

There is nothing especially wrong with any of this, of course.

It just seems to me to be a very emotionally barren approach to virtuality in general and Second Life in particular.

Concretely, I am saying that these so-called "experts" are misunderstanding and missing out on experiencing the single most important aspect of Virtual Worlds - the capacity to conduct sincere and warm human relationships through the expression of an avatar.  

And that brings us roundly back to DoL's Daytime Dreams installation.

Because in most every aspect of this installation, we, as avatars, are able to express ourselves socially and emotionally.

This is not a "dry-as-dust" intellectual exercise  - it is sensual, moving and poignant excursion into avatar emotional expression.

In amongst the various individual artwork and installations on the region are discretely placed couples seating, couples poses and couples dance balls.
The overriding message is not so much "Please admire *my* work" as it is "Please admire *each other* while at my sim".

It is clear from spending quite a lot of time at Daytime Dreams (once before it was open to the public, twice since opening - a number of hours on each occasion) that .:: DoL ::. not only understands SL technically (building/scripting), and understands it artistically (as evidenced by this wonderful "newspaper rose", for example)...

 ...but she also understands it emotionally, socially and sexually.
And these things together - technical, artistic and socio-sexual - represent the runway to the zenith of experience in virtual worlds.

Frankly, I trust the opinions of an artist like .:: DoL ::. regarding SL far more than I do a lecturer or employee who can't be arsed to fully engage in the subject matter that they claim to be an expert in but nevertheless use to pay their mortgage.

You see, in my opinion, .:: DoL ::. has proven her credentials as an "expert" within virtual worlds by creating Daytime Dreams - I challenge the educationalists and Lab employees to prove theirs!

"Yoga is Union."

.:: DoL ::. has create a virtual space which successfully unites technicality, artistry and simple human connections and engagement.

She is to be applauded and thanked.

We sincerely hope that she will also be emulated.

Pixie xx

The Adventures of Pixie Miku: Daytime Dreams

In the space of a week, from three different sources, I was made aware of Hatsune Miku

Hatsune Miku is a female persona developed by a Japanese company using synthesizing voice technology (Vocaloid 2 speech synthesis engine ).

"Hatsune Muku" can roughly be translated as "First Sound of the Future".

Have a look....





I saw from a video posted by Ann O'Toole that Gantz Nishi sold a Hatsune Miku avatar and so had to go and get one!

These photos were taken at a sim called "Daytime Dreams" which has many visually interesting pieces.