From 01/12/2010 to the 31/01/2011, I will be artist in residence at Humlabs, Yoshikaze Up in the Air Residency in Second Life (teleport there). Please feel free to drop in and see work in progress. What follows are details of what the residency will entail.

Since January 2007 I have created performances and installations in Second Life. The basis of all my work has been identity. Creating an avatar that is not an alter-ego, what is usually an artists opportunity to start afresh and explore new practices, methods or even themselves being new, my avatar is instead a projection of my ‘real’ world identity into a ‘virtual’ world. It looks, dresses, acts and even bears the same name as me, yet my avatar is not me. It is a representation of how I am In Real Life (IRL).

My residency at Humlab’s Yoshikaze space will continue to explore these ideas of identity as they relate to Second Life and its relation to or representation of ‘real’ place. As such emphasis will for the duration of the residency focus particularly on the specifics of place and how it can inform/influence identity. How does place, our ‘real’ location and our ability to simultaneously represent ourselves within a ‘virtual’ world, define what becomes a new facet of our total identity? How can a singular dispersed identity (as opposed to a dualistic identity) enhance our cumulative experience of both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ places?

A series of works will be produced during the residency that respond to these ideas and the location of the residency at Yoshikaze. These will, due to their subject matter, investigate a number of mixed and augmented reality techniques and entail outcomes including objects, devices and environments. On completion of the residency these will be intended for display and use in an exhibition and may form the basis of a performance.

REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory published in Italy by DeriveApprodi and FakePress has just come out this month with some of my work in it. Yes any publication of my work is a good thing but I’m particularily proud of this one due to it being a connected/augmented publication which has used free/open culture software right through its creation, publication and how the end user interacts/reads the publication.

The publication has been published with the byline:

The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.

however is itself a reinvention of what a ‘book’ such as this can be and do these days through combinations of innovative new/print media, tags of various types, augmented reality and pervasive networks. Building this publication has from the start been a collaborative process between the editorial team and contributors (artists, writers etc.) who could, through a wordpress website and a plugin designed specifically by Fakepress (more info on that here) for this style of next generation collborative publishing, constantly add to/amend/correct and ultimately compile the book as a print ready pdf for publication from the site. Now, post-publication, the website is part (the online part) of the finished book but the site has also been the ‘site’ of collaborative networking to make this very forward thinking publication happen.

The publication is essentially in three parts;

1. The print version (available here).
2. The website.
3. The iPhone/iPad app (click here to download via iTunes).

The print version contains Fiducial Markers and QR Codes. The Fiducial Markers can be used to view extra augmented reality content on the website via a computer with a webcam (click into the section Augmented Reality). The iPhone/iPad app can be downloaded and used to access the QR Codes. These connect to online multimedia including extra texts, music, videos, photos and maps of the book’s contents/authors.

The image above shows me using the augmented reality section of the site with one of the Fiducial Markers featuring my work (I don’t have a copy of the book yet so I had to improvise with a marker on my iPhone).

Above a screenshot of the iPad app and below a Flickr slideshow of the iPad app in use at the preview launch of the publication at the Share Festival, in Turin, Italy.

An innovative book of course needs an innovative foreword and who better than Bruce Sterling to write it:

Right now, the behaviors and activities commemorated in this book are bizarre. Very. They are so peculiar that they are inherently difficult to describe, because they come from the outer reaches of an emergent network-culture…Basically, they resemble the activities of time travellers. Time travellers don’t actually exist. However, they can be hypothesized. They can be faked. Time travellers would be people among us who come from a different historical epoch. By their nature, they have a different set of attitudes and expectations from our own. Time travellers would be people behaving differently, and also effortlessly. They are not being perverse, arcane or difficult. The time travellers have just as much custom and logic as we do. Their behavior would make perfect sense some day. Only, not just yet.

Read the full foreword here.

Some of my own recent works.

A performance entitled I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL) (image above) which took place on the 28th May 2010 at Odyssey Art and Performance Simu in Second Life. Full details here: http://www.asquare.org/works/im-garrett-lynch-irl

I’m Not Here (image above). The first in a series of interventions about place and identity at I AM Columbia island in Second Life. There are three planned but we’ll see how it goes. Documentation will appear on my site when the series are finished.

I’ll be in Toronto, Canada tomorrow for a week (10/06/09 – 17/06/09) for the Subtle Technologies Festival titled Networks this year. I have a presentation / performance at Innis Town Hall on Sunday which I’m hoping will prove interesting. More details on that here – The Art of Networks and Networks as Art. I’ll also be posting interesting things here throughout.

If your in the area come along, make sure you say hi to me, but if it’s too far for you or out of your budget then do come along in mind if not body to the ‘broadcast’ at OCAD Island in Second Life.

So I finally did some work with Second Life of my own, a performance called Between Saying and Doing. This was the result of some ideas I’ve been thinking about for over a year but was also to a large extent an experiment with something I didn’t quite understand (why exactly are artists using this?), something I distrust (the linden dollar economy and it’s similarity to a Ogliarchy) and something I feel is far too over hyped.

In this latter respect the work is a huge success (in other respects that is not up to me to decide). I do now understand why artists have become so fascinated with Second Life, there is a lot to play with in terms of identity, the body and space, very traditional themes for artists. Discussing the work and in general creating work with Second Life, with artists who are much more invested in this than I am has been enlightening.

I still remain skeptical about it all but feel that criticism from within (in this instance) can be very useful so with this in mind I am planning some more work, definitely some performances but also some work that will take other forms. I’m quite interested in collaborating due to the immediacy of the ‘space’ and see it as an opportunity for a large investment of ideas but little investment in time and (ideally) no investment in Linden Dollars. If your interested post a comment here…