The Metaverse Gallery in Second Life opened this weekend. It was the most
fun I think I’ve ever had at an art opening. It was very well attended.

A lot
of people go in to Second
Life, walk around a bit, look at all the ugliness,
porn, gambling, and then say something like “I tried it but it was boring.”
And for the most part, they are right. A lot of these people are used to games,
where the expectations and rules are set. In Second Life
you have to work pretty hard to make compelling places and created meaningful
events. And that’s just
what the Worlds Lab team
did - they worked really hard for several months.

The Metaverse Gallery in many ways is the culmination
of a series of Online Worlds courses and research that has taken place over
the last year at UT Dallas. What we’ve come to is the idea that Second
Life is an awkward, temporary, highly flawed, difficult, very early version of
something that will evolve in a most painful manner into an immersive 3D metaverse. At
the moment, it’s the only place to really test out ideas about how to do things
other than games in participatory 3D spaces. And I’ve been adamant in my belief
that in very short order the non game 3D shared spaces will eclipse the game
spaces. This is where a lot of people have it wrong in thinking that the game
spaces will expand and merge somehow. Not a chance. But that’s a different
topic I’ve written about elsewhere.

For us, we’ve given a lot of thought to the the structures themselves, and
what kind of art work we wanted to show. Our view, hotly debated in SL circles,
is that rather than just dumping things from the physical world in to SL we
need to build environments that suit the structure and rules of the online
world itself. The same thing goes for the art - why scan in things from the
1st world or from the 2D Internet when you can show work made in world?

The
Metaverse Art Gallery is basically an example of our thinking. We chose to
build a floating platform without stairs or other gravity dependent details.
Some of the walls are transparent from one side and opaque from the other -
try that in
fleshspace. The entire structure floats on a semi-transparent platform. For
the inaugural artist, we chose someone who is an artist in SL, and makes her
work there. In some ways she is very traditional - she makes portraits of other
avatars. It is very accessible work, which is also on purpose. Obtuseness for
its own sake helps no-one.

The building will evolve over time as our team, their skills, and our thinking
matures. In this show we included a small area where chat conversations are
re posted Jenny Holzer style on the floor. A kind of reactive public sculpture.
We’re also talking a lot about dynamic architecture (or really, dynamic
UI). Most of the structures on the island will eventually incorporate dynamic
elements that respond to several kinds of inputs: avatars in the immediate
surroundings, in world data such as time and communications, and external web
data such as database feeds from RSS and XML (stock market, weather, blog entries,
flickr postings, etc). All of these combine to do what is impossible in the
1st world: structures that change dynamically based on a set of external conditions.

We’re thinking a lot about these and other ideas and
the experiments that we are doing can be viewed in real time in the research
area on the island. One of the projects is, at the moment, called “the proximity
noodle.” It’s a pretty simple set of objects that bend toward you when you
approach. Now on the one hand I despise “gee whiz” art - art basically art
made to demonstrate some technical achievement. There’s quite a bit of this
in SL - “sculptures” that wave around in the “wind” for example. You look at
them and say to yourself “gee whiz!” And that’s the end of it.

And while we may get close to geewhiz art in the coming months I hope we
push it well beyond and into expressiveness, or simply play. I think some of
the work in metaverse spaces will be more about mature play and surprise than
the contemplative befuddlement you see visitors engaged in inside many a traditional
art exhibit. This is important, because even though these places are not games,
the element of experimentation and play is certainly present. We don’t want
to have to pretend to be serious. If there is any place to knock some holes
in the often elitist, noxious air of contemporary art it is here.

We
intend to continue to develop and take seriously the idea that the
conventions of the metaverse are far from developed. Some have come from gaming, the rest
are in development, and mostly invisible. One thing that is not helping is
all the corporations and educational institutions building real world structures
in Second Life. It’s seriously missing the point, and I think all the new design
firms who are doing all this building need to do some client education.

The opening was a first, and really felt like something. This is the bar for
3pointD space events.
Most of them are just frustrating, stupid, or, as many have found, boring.
But if you want a meaningful experience,
you are going to have to create one.

Here’s some reference links:

Go
to The Metaverse Gallery Now (Second Life required), or check out
the pics
on flickr.

Press Coverage (so far):
SLNN posted this
review of the event, and the Dallas Morning News ran a
story on it as well, excerpt of it is here.
There was also a bit in Glass
Tire, and my friend Dennis Hollingsworth gave
us a
visit (a little early!)

Artist: Shoshana
Epsilon | UT Worlds Lab Team members Christi
Nielsen (”Juliette Cordeaux” who curated the show) Russell Smith
(”Rusmi Taka”), Jeff Martini (”Jerry Tones”), & Steve
Petterborg. More about the lab at UT
Dallas Online Worlds Lab.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Metaverse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.