LPDT2 (all images and video in this post) is more than a reincarnation of Roy Ascott’s 1983 work La Plissure du Texte (The Pleating of the Text), it is a reworking, a version 2, of said works ideas within the space of Second Life.

The full original title of the work La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale:

alludes to Roland Barthes’s book Le Plaisir du Texte, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation ‘distributed authorship’, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a number of human storytellers positioned around the globe; in the three dimensionally embodied metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: An emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous ‘bot’ avatars which dwell inside this bizarre, literary landscape are pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale: The persistent distributed authorship is now accomplished by many writers throughout the ages: A text generator telling a non-linear, multi-faceted, often times poetic, story harvested from the famous online Gutenberg Project is now distributing its output amongst architecture and its inhabitants, generating dialogues and iterations taking their trajectories from masterworks of classical literature. The pleating resembles musical sampling, the connection between the sentences fades, text becomes noise, from which the audience generates meaning. The structure on the simulator adds yet another layer of pleating by visually mixing the different sources of text, while yet another layer of textual input will be provided through a contribution by i-DAT.org from the University of Plymouth, UK, by means of which Real Life visitors will be able to contact the LPDT2 by sending SMS messages. Thus all pleated text - the generated, the contributed, and the stored - is simultaneously visible as a massive, ever evolving literary conglomeration.

In La Plissure du Texte, version 1, the network allowed performers from distant locations to share a networked ’space’ where they could collaborate. Authorship was live and originated from distributed locations. Within this new version, distributed authorship has undergone dramatic changes. The network itself becomes the principle performer. Authorship is distributed across both distant spaces/places and times as text for the space is retrieved from digitised copies of classic works from the whole of documented English language.

The work is open to the public from today, September 1st. It has been co-authored in Second Life by Selavy Oh (programming and architecture), MosMax Hax, aka. Max Moswitzer (architecture and terrain) and Alpha Auer, aka. Elif Ayiter (avatar design). Further associates are Frigg Ragu, aka. Heidi Dahlsveen (avatar animations) and i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK (Real Life SMS input).

More images of the installation can be seen here.

Hallucinations (and the real) (image above, video below) by JD Walsh is audio-visual work which composes itself as a result of search engine query results based on key phrases from a text taken from Albert Hoffman’s recollections of early experiments with LSD. A database cinema of sorts.

The result is a dual-channel projection of the software’s output - the text on one screen and the image on the other. Sound is projected into the room. Because of the random elements in the software, the perception of the images are always changing. Each image seems to take on a new meaning depending on which text is next to it and which sound accompanies it.

Vibrator by Prokop Bartonicek is another work I stumbled across via the Cycling74 Projects page a little over a month ago. The work:

is connected to the world’s most frequented porn video server. Vibrator pulses and shines based on the growth and decline of the top video’s ratings (views per second). A small button on the end of object [sic] can be pressed and held. This function will activate the previous vibration and light settings for comparison. The vibrator is controlled by a personal computer via wireless technology Bluetooth, and is powered with a chargeable battery supply.

It is a result of an investigation on:

“beauty” in networks [sic] of networks - the internet. I looked at how the widest audience today is seeing beauty in digital space. The beauty of feelings, ideas, curves of bodies. Global, anonymous and mass interest in pornography on the network led me to concentrate in my work on the pleasure and beauty for one person…The anonymous interest of the mass of users from the entire world is thus concentrated into an object for one.

The work bears a striking resemblance to FuckU-FuckMe, a net.art product with its own website which (to my knowledge) has never actually been available to buy.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (image above) by Caleb Larsen is a work which perpetually auctions itself on eBay accumulating (or not) value as art markets and the perceived value of the artists work rises.

This sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

To view the current auction of the work (image above) visit its eBay page here.

The work will be showing at the Lighthouse in Brighton from the 28 August - 5 September 2010 as part of the digital design conference, dConstruct.

The 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival finished last Saturday, August 14 with a performance by Alan Dojoji/Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin, Flesh Meat - With Coastal Avatars (images below).

The performance was totally immersive, a hard feat in Second Life, and immense in scale but apart from that difficult to describe. These are a few lines from Alan about the work:

I’m still looking at being-avatar in terms of sexuality, flesh, language; I do this through the lone avatar who goes nowhere, gets nowhere. There’s no plot, nothing to reveal, nothing you don’t already know, getting up in the morning, looking in the period. What’s staring back at you has a name.