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 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.

The last ten days have seen some really interesting performances including the following.

Night Gardening (images above) by lizsolo Mathilde/Liz Solo and Fau Ferdinand/Yael Gilks was a mixed reality performance happening in Second Life (first image) and at Liz’s east coast backyard (second image) where several other artists joined her to contribute. I quite liked the two windowed online approach to this which required spectators to use the Second Life viewer and have livestream.com open at the same time to see the ‘real’ garden. Lots to be explored in this type of combination but I left wanting to ask the artists about it.

Piano Drop (image above) by Man Michinaga/Patrick Lichty was without a doubt the conceptual performance of the festival. Stripped right down to just the essential, pianos, the thumping noise and the resulting chaos amount the in world audience, the performance consisted of numerous pianos falling from the sky over Odyssey.

Leap of Doom! (image above) by DanCoyote Antonelli was hilariously enjoyable. The audience arrived to an Evil Knievel style event, a bus jump on motorbikes, but rather than simply watch the artist do it were themselves invited to jump in a provided motorbike or any vehicle of their choice. This of course played irreverently with the idea of a daredevil stunt and it emptyness when you risk no physical harm in a virtual space.

A Space to Chat (images above) by Selavy Oh was the work (so far) which I was the most impressed by. The work was interactive in a very clever way which took advantage of how audiences talk at performance events in Second Life. The artist introduced the event explaining it lasted as long as we, the audience, participated, started the performance and then watched it unfold. As the audience chatted wondering what was going to happen we noticed that constructed letters were being created overhead in a series of archs. Zooming out from this the letters were clearly legible as parts of the discussion that was taking place so this was a performance which only occurred a) if there was an audience and b) if the audience participated - risky but spectacularly rewarding. At the end of the performance the letters floated away and this allowed the audience the possibility to hop on and fly above Odyssey.

There is a good video of this work online here.

There, Now, a mixed reality installation about space/place by Garrett Lynch opens tomorrow the 11th of August at 1pm SLT (9pm GMT) and runs until the 23rd of August at Push in Second Life. To attend, point your browser to the Push sim here (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Push/197/58/24) click on the link to launch the Second Life viewer and you will arrive at the installation.

This is the last work to be shown at Push so come and show your support for all the fantastic work that has happened at this sim.

Over the next month I’ll be involved in quite a few things Second Life related. The first of these is happening next Wednesday (04/08/10) at 9:30pm GMT (1:30pm Second Life Time) as part of the 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival running from today (31/07/10) until the 10/08/10.

The performance (image above) will take place at Odyssey Art and Performance Simu. Documentation of previous performances are online here.

For full details of the schedule for the complete festival, see the Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance weblog.

I Am Sitting in a Video Room (images above) by Patrick Liddell is by way of reference to Alvin Luciers work I Am Sitting in a Room an exploration of the form and space of YouTube as a means, site and context for the creation of performance work (and of course it’s video documentation). The work investigates:

the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying.

The performance of was stretched out over the exact period of a year from May 27th, 2009 to May 27th, 2010 and each upload and download was performed manually. The videos embedded below are the first, the original, and the 1000th version. All 1000 videos can be viewed on Patricks YouTube page although disappointingly the account is not dedicated to this project alone.

Netrooms: The Long Feedback (image above) is an participative network audio performance by Pedro Rebelo and distant global collaborators contributing to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet.

The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

Always a sucker for a diagram, the image below details the technical set up for Netrooms: The Long Feedback.

Infinite Stream Loop (image below), part of the Laps series by Art of Failure (I’ve previously posted on AV Permutations) is a very recent work which explores the effects of an audio stream traveling through the world wide web since the 1st of July 2010.

A sound is streamed by a server and goes through several locations on the web. Captured at the end of a loop, the sound is played and then resent out through the web with no additional modification. We have modified the streaming tools to keep all the distortions of the original material that occurred during the process (artefacts, transmission errors, missing data…). To emphasize the changes caused by the network, the sound used at startup is deliberately very simple - a digital silence. Then it evolves endlessly.

The above works (particularly the sound works) bear some similarity to the research of Chris Chafe from Stanford University concerning sound, distance and delay. Chris presented his research in progress at Subtle Technologies in 2009 and subsequently published a paper in Contemporary Music Review, Volume 28 Issue 4 & 5 (the same issue as a paper by Pedro Rebelo) entitled Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical/Musical Medium.

Why do I group these works together? Each is different in form and presentation, i.e. one video work, two audio; one documentation of an extended performance, one a live performance and the last a generative work etc. yet the three works use what would normally be considered negative effects of the network in creative ways. Delay and degradation of quality as a result of coping becomes an exploitable feature of the network. Copied forms can be combined, sequenced, superimposed, layered to create a new composition yet the coping process, what should in a digital environment be flawless often contains “artefacts, transmission errors, missing data….”. The technically undesirable becomes desirable to the artist enabling a unique aesthetic.

Copying, originality and reproduction, layering and what is ‘real’ have been something I’ve been working on for the last few months within Second Life. My premise is somewhat different from the above works i.e. reproductive degradation as an aesthetic, instead I’ve been thinking and working on how digital forms simulate ‘real’ forms (and the issues therein i.e. levels of precision), how copies relate back to originals, what the differences are and how to collapse and merge these. These are still on going thoughts…

I Am Sitting in a Video Room originally seen on Mashable.com, Netrooms: The Long Feedback originally seen on Pedro Rebelo’s weblog and Infinite Stream Loop originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.

I wrote a post in May about the TOTem (Tales Of Things and Electronic Memory) project RememberMe which was taking place as part of Future Everything in Manchester. Coincidentally they came to our faculty last week and gave a seminar about their research to date and some hints at its future direction.

There websites seem to have grown and come together well over the last month. This was the site I initially linked to which seems to be about the research in general while these two, Tales of the City and Tales of Things are two ongoing projects being developed. It was the second of these which was part of Future Everything and which was mainly used at the seminar.

Angelina Karpovich from Brunel University outlined the research while we got to interact with some of the ‘Things’ tagged as part of the Tales of Things project, notably the teddy bear in the image above.

Using an iPhone app (images above) we were able to scan the bears tag and read a text/tale about it. Angelina was keen to point out that the tagging technology involved was not new, the purpose was to explore it in ways that had really not been explored in great depth. What was a little disappointing was the inability for me to feed into the tale we were reading in the iPhone app but the project makes no such claim to do this and within the context it’s presented, as a method of story telling, works well.

It should be noted that the seminar was presented as part of a series at The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling and I have been told a video of the seminar will be posted to the website soon.