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.

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.

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.

Bendix Freutel (Eifachfilm Vacirca in Second Life) has posted a documentary video (below) about the event, 44 Hours of Cornucopia Momentum (image above), my performance I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL) was part of on the 28th of May at Odyssey Art and Performance Simu in Second Life.

Bendix makes a few very good points about quite a few art events (SL or otherwise) these days taking advantage of artists in a number of ways, often simply as a profile raising mechanism for the curator, and how the intention here was to promote the artists doing what they do best with no imposed interpretations etc. The event places these art forms generated by a ‘virtual’ community of artists from all over the world within a ‘real’ community in Switzerland which would have limited knowledge or exposure to it previously. Highly commendable objectives, which remind me of some of the idealism of early net.art. Congratulations to Bendix on a very successful event which was a joy to be a part of.