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.

The 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival ran officially from the 31/07/10 until last Tuesday the 10/08/10. This has however been extended with a few more events today (12/08/10) including Ceci n est pas une voiture by Ze Moo at 2 PM SLT (10pm GMT), the performance takes place here, and on Saturday (14/08/10) at 3 PM SLT (11pm GMT) with Flesh Meat - With Coastal Avatars by Alan Dojoji/Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin (exact location on Odyssey to be announced).

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.

Very sad news, I just saw on Networked Performance that David Crawford has passed away. David was probably most known for his work Stop Motion Studies (image above).