Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0806192154570.22187@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: process of reverse excavation
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:55:17 -0400 (EDT)
Reverse excavation and installation of materials for Second Life solo exhibition, The Accidental Artist It's difficult manipulating since the Nikuko avatar flies blind; it's impossible to see around the body extrusions. Mouse-view only works so far since nothing can be done except looking when it's open. Ctl-Alt-D, which changes camera viewpoint, helps a bit, but not much. The prims are so many and so complex, it seems that the world is close to overload; at one point I had set most transparent, but the ray-tracing gets too complex for slower machines. There will be three video streams, twelve sound sources with ten-second samples, and a continuous source, as well as these sculptures and other images on the wall. Sugar likens it to pinball. Even with a small avatar body, moving about the gallery is difficult. Most of the objects are impossible in physical space - or at least would require a lot of Plexiglas support. Most of the images on or within the sculptures are external body, some imitative of internal organs. The images are distorted and have to be perceptually disentangled; they're either tiled or awkwardly wrapped. The affair is a gaudy circus one. It's a stage for performance (by Sandy Baldwin and myself) as well; moving about the space in alien choreographies will be just as difficult for as as for the spectators. I can easily imagine a dancespace filled, as this one is, but with phantom or invisible objects; the avadancers would find themselves and the rest of us among the absent ruins. Here however garishness is the premise and the promise of the virtual; there's no reason for camouflage in an airless space. But it's difficult maneuvering in an eyeless space, literally flying or walking blind, sometimes falling out of the gallery altogether, ending up wedged and lawless. Occasionally a section of floorboard appears like a vector; we (Nikuko and myself) might be headed in the right direction. Camera angles, when the avatar stills hirself, through a series of alternating rotations and translations, can approach just about anything within ten meters or so; beyond that, chaos reigns. While these images are somewhat hit or miss, they convey the sense of new physics, lost structure and boundary within the space. Now Nikuko hirself is at rest, in a realm as absent as the rest of us, until we log on together, momentarily, to work on installing sound. (Thanks to Sugar Seville and Sandy Baldwin for everything.) http://www.alansondheim.org/ slshow jpgs - go to the webpage, click on 'Last Modified' twice to bring the most recent files to the surface; there are 20 of them. ========