The Reality of Virtual Art.

I've been stewing and brewing on the topic of Art in VW's.

It started a while back after Man Michinaga posted a long but insightful comment on my piece about Sponsorship and Exploitation.

It would be worthwhile reading the whole comment, but, amongst other things he says...

"The issue is that artists who wish that Linden Labs would act as an advocate for them are looking in the wrong direction, not only because of LL’s mindset that the Residents are assets for free marketing, but that Linden Labs itself has lost a great deal of its ability to leverage credible PR for its content in the past years. "

"It’s not that we’re against Linden Labs; far from it. It’s that we understand that they don’t understand the art and festival world because they’re a software company, and high artists are a) not amateur assets, and b) don’t really care if they’re famous in Second Life."

Now, I hope I'm not taking this out of context, but it very closely resembled a conversation I had the day before with White Lebed where she said, as does Man, that to really promote the SL Arts there would have to be a concerted effort to connect to RL arts groups (Man's point) or do some seriously good PR (both Man and White pointed to this).

Now, add to this the obvious but necessary point that SL is a software company, (maybe not even that, they rent server space) not an arts organisation and it is rather obvious that it just isn't going to happen..... and so.... is the LEA as insignificant as passing wind in a thunderstorm?

But there is something that holds me back from fully endorsing the idea that the Arts in VWs need to align themselves to RL Arts (organisations), apart from the fact that there aren't mature or functioning groups that back Digital Art.

For, while everything that both White and Man pointed out is 100% true, I feel that there is another dimension.

Alpha Auer wrote a post back in 2009 (in NPIRL's great blog) about Art ... The Work of Art in the Age of Computational (re) Production, which I consider to be a very important piece.
In it she points to the way that RL Art has lost it's way and how Virtual Art has, to a far greater degree than RL Art, the ability to transform through play. Art in VW's has the possibility of instigating Behavioural Change, she relates how artist friends of her bemoan the fact that wearable art doesn't get worn ..... unlike Nekko tails in Virtual Worlds....

[is our fascination with Lady Gaga, Aladdin Sane, Mick Jagger etc. a desire to see this transformation around us?...(Johnny Depp as pirate could stay at my place permanently) ... of course, unlike these part-time transformations, avatars don't have to 'dress down' ... ever.]

In her piece Alpha mentions Brian Sutton-Smith, a man who believes that evolution itself is dependent on play.... not just a thing we should grow out of....but the instigator of change.

Now, I consider myself to be fairly bright, and I have been trying for two years now to envisage how someone in RL can walk in a soror Nishi forest. I have not found a solution that is possible with todays technology. Assuming therefor that I am not stoopid ... the following logical conclusions are that we are technologically pushing the limits of what is possible and this is New Art

So, if my experience of the Art World (business) in RL and Alpha's theory of the loss of meaning/direction (usefulness) of Art is a partial or complete analysis of RL Art ..... would I want to ally myself to Art (organisations) lost in this mess?? Does New Art need to align itself with the Old Fine Arts in order to promote it's own credibility? ... or is it just a question of time...

Are we just being impatient? This is a new medium.... and a body of work takes a long while to develop.

It may be Alpha. or some other commentator, who pointed out that it will be years before Digital Art is accepted into the RL Art community in the same way as, for example, photography has recently been accepted. I say recently ... photography was invented and used for decades before it became seen as an artform.

Then, today, I read this post by Botgirl and I also had a sort of waking up experience.

My waking up was to realise that, as music fills the air, not a segment of it... so does Art in VWs. There is nothing that isn't art. Very similar to my objection to the use of the word "Immersive" to describe a sim (i.e. show me one part of SL/VWs that isn't immersive) .... show me one prim of SL/VW that isn't Art.

As I wrote last year "Art in SL is different. There is no difference between Artist and Artisan in SL.
That means.... there is no difference between a great pair of shoes and some twirly rotating anim smooth sculpture...both are High Art."

So...the semantically inclined might say..."well, that depends on your classification of art..." Mine has, hitherto, been the "long, immense and deliberate derangement of the senses" [Rimbaud]...I haven't found a better one yet... and every prim fills that definition.

So, the question still remains, can we get some better PR? Do we need it?.... hmmm ... well, I know someone said that if you make a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door ..... and while I'm not planning a JFK "ask not what LL can do for you..." solution, I do wonder if we need to organise ourselves better, content creators and artists alike...

.... and do that thing we do so well....i.e. international, multi disciplined, collaboration.... on PR, not another piece of art.


:)))

Afrodita

Art is often confined to the art gallery and a distinction is made between Fine Art, on the one hand, and Crafts on the other.

There are some more craft based products that do manage to make the leap from shop front to gallery, and obviously, some galleries that specialise in showing crafts or industrial design.

I have argued before in these pages that the distinction is far less in VWs as everything is made of prims (more or less) and that a good hairstyle is just as worthy of a place in a gallery as a traditional sculpture of, say, a horse.

So, things got turned a little upside down last night at the KyrArt Gallery where I went to have a look round with Aliz and Juanita, along with the gallery owner, GeeJAnn Blackadder.... the gallery can be visited...here.

Juanita’s sharp eyes noted a sculpture on the top floor, and knowing my weakness for unusual hairstyles she drew my attention to it. It was called Afrodita and, like all the work showing was a piece by the fairly new artist Kyra Roxan.

I bought it and, when I saw it was no mod. I thought maybe I would talk to the artist about turning it into a hairstyle. The gallery owner was very quick to help me out...and pictured below is the result of my fiddling slightly with the scale etc. to provide myself with a striking new ‘do’ and liberate Afrodita from the gallery.




I hope I have done justice to the artist's original intentions. The prims are all colour change scripted so change constantly.





Skin (Blueberry for Maeve), eyes (blackstripe), clothes(C21 jacket and shirt, with Wizzy Skirt) by me, shoes by Dirty Lynx, and hair sculpture with collar by Kyra Roxan.

Excellent.

Now, it's no wonder I don't follow many fashionista blogs, so few of them explore what could be possible and tend to stick with the RL norm. Alpha's posts on NPIRL were a notable exception as is 100 Billion Needles.

When so much more is possible in VWs than in RL, I am always surprised how little revolutionary Architecture and Fashion is actually produced.

Luckily there are a few notable exceptions...

Keep funky!!

:))

A blog moves on....NPIRL

There are a few blogs that I read regularly, I started when my own ideas about blogging began to mature beyond a very brief diary of my entry into the world of Second Life.
As my poor ramblings developed I looked to NPIRL blog as really the pinnacle of blogging, well informed, researched, thoughtful.

That it has become a time-consuming beast of a project is no surprise to me, I know from my time with Koinup and here that life is not long enough. That sort of quality, which it was a joy to read, does not come without the research. So it's a shame, but Bettina has become a victim of her own talent in one way, and we all have to make decisions about how we want to spend our time.

I personally think that Bettina has made the right decision, NPIRL as a group will grow, nurtured by her insight and commitment and we will have to look elsewhere for quality coverage of SL arts and crafts. Nothing springs to mind at the moment.

I'm sure that as change happens and we shed old skins to grow new we meet Anxiety, but with increasing experience we learn that new life grows on what has been composted in the past..:)) sounds like Gardener's Question Time....hehehehe....

Bettina is great, we all love her and look forward to her new ventures.... ... "What Bettina Did Next..."

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