Tateru Nino's weekly take on mixed reality...
Art and music are central to the human psyche. They soothe, challenge, provoke, calm, embrace, excite, explain and confront. This week, we'll be looking at both visual art and music crossing the boundaries between the physical and non-physical worlds in different ways.
Filthy Fluno is an artist from Boston, Massachusetts, whose physical media are charcoal, pastel and paper. There's a special kind of magic to his work. They're abstract narratives like the unrolled synaptic recordings of the artist's impressions of people and places. The more you look into them, the more there is to see and to connect to. Through Second Life, Fluno and his art are connecting to others, including a certain very large corporation. Fluno's art spreads out into Second Life, even as Second Life expands into his art.
MattChigago Cleanslate is a music promoter specializing in Disk Jockeys and Indy artists, growing the reach and clients of his business both in the physical world and in Second Life. Magnatune is another online music business, deeply rooted in the Creative Commons and starting up in Second Life at the same time.
Two artistic mediums, two different backgrounds, two different approaches, two worlds. All of that, plus mixed reality metrics and assorted mixed reality shorts from penguins to podcasting after the break.
Filthy Fluno started out like other artists coming to Second Life. He began by selling Second Life versions of his physical works. Then things started to change. Fluno created a work dedicated to his friend Ren Meiji, who then wanted to buy the physical original. Fluno began approaching others, and chanced onto Doug Mandelbrot from IBM.
Fluno's art and his use of Second Life to make connections intrigued IBM significantly. "IBM flew me across the US to come make some art and give a lecture about SL and how an artist like me is connecting with the world," Fluno said, "I met a few other people at IBM, and they wanted some artwork too, because it's all personalized."
Now, Fluno's artwork and Second Life networking is starting to take off. A Second Life Resident who resides physically in Portugal showed Fluno's Second Life inspired artwork to a local gallery, who were very excited about displaying it.
Fluno produced a number of pieces for the exhibition, whose sales have already paid for his trip to Portugal before the exhibit has even begun. The exhibition opens on the 26th of April at Gallery 555 in Porto Portugal. After the exhibit closes on the second of May, the new owners will be presented with their artwork.
Second Life has created more opportunities for Fluno than the Portgual exhibition. "I hooked up with an art collector in [SL]," Fluno explains, referring to Artworld Market, "who purchased quite a few drawings of mine and got me into an article in artnet.com. A gallery owner saw that article, came here into SL, found me and now I'll have an exhibition there [in Indianapolis]!"
Second Life is more to Fluno than just sales and networking though. "Artists throughout history have travelled far and wide to find inspiration. I happen to find it in virtual reality."
Many examples of Fluno's work can be seen in his gallery in Artropolis.
Mixed Reality Music
Cleanslate's CMP promotes and markets Disk Jockeys and Independent music artists. Cleanslate says the latest attempt to build a independent music-themed sim in Second Life by his company is purely for promotional purposes. "We're not looking to actually earn directly from Second Life, but rather, to give Residents a chance to listen to music from our artists and (hopefully) get hooked enough to buy the music that we promote."
CMP has opened an in-world store where Residents can sample some of the music his company offers in familiar surroundings and purchase legal copies of MP3s from its library on the spot.
The shop is relatively simple, consisting of several listening booths with chairs and "players", each linked into a separate stream from the company's servers. At one end of the shop, a wall of virtual albums is placed, each purchasable with L$.
The cost of the mixes is a nominal fee, apparently to cover the cost of bandwidth for the downloads themselves. Prices ranged from L$150 - 250 at the time this report was filed, and some of the mixes last for over an hour.
Cleanslate is proud of his company's Second Life efforts, "I'd asked around and while nightclubs are a dime a dozen in Second Life, a shop that sells 100% legal DJ mixes isn't a thing that has been done before. Until now, that is."
Chicago Music Promotions plans on opening more CMP Music Centers in Second Life to promote and distribute other genres of music in the coming months.
Legal music downloads? Now there's an almost novel idea these days. You might find some of the notecards and notices at the CMP store a tad ungrammatical (I personally found that rather jarring), but the prices certainly don't seem to amount to a large out-of-pocket expense. It will be interesting to see if Second Life DJ's and artists come to CMP - and if customers do.
Meanwhile, Magnatune (established in the physical world four years ago) launched in Second Life yesterday. Magnatune is a DRM-free digital music download and CD service, the joint brainchild of resident Janford Flax and her husband Bucky Tone (a member of the Creative Commons, Board of Directors). Flax joined Second Life in the last days of September, and loved it. Since then, her goal was to bring her love for music and her passion for Second Life together. "SL is an amazing experience," said Flax, "and we are just touching it - the possibilities. I'm very excited."
Sited in the northwest corner of the Kula islands, you can visit Magnatune and move around their space, listening to and sampling all of the music they have on offer. All of it. Magnatune proudly boast "We are not evil", and work hard to back that claim up. You can visit and grab their stream list to play on your own land. "We created 40 music streams of different music genres that are available to anyone on Second Life who owns land. We think it's a great way to promote our musicians."
When you buy a track or an album from their website, you can listen to it in its entirety first, and even then you get to decide what you want to pay (there's a $5 USD minimum for albums. $8 is recommended). Whatever you choose to pay, half the fee goes to the artist. Say what you like about human nature, Magnatune's been operating successfully on that basis for four years, and is sharing its streams with residents.
Flax has made an elegantly simple and open space for people to come and listen to music, alone or in groups. Despite being on opposite sides of the planet, we sat there and chatted, and listened to and enjoyed the same music. As I sit here listening to Very Large Array's album "Stuff", I find myself thinking, "Damn. This is the future." - I never noticed when it got here.
Listening to the music from CMP and Magnatune also makes me realize just why I stopped listening to the radio and buying CDs. Music got more and more expensive, and I enjoyed what was being played and made less and less. Apparently it took Second Life to remind me that there's good music still being made, and to connect me to it.
Art and culture thrive, finding new outlets through the virtual world.
Mixed Reality Traffic
The "L Word" site
Numbers can be awfully slippery little things at heart, especially those derived by complex and obscure mechanisms. Still, grab your best teleporting shoes while we go for a bit of a zap around the grid and just see how some of our favorite mixed reality ventures did over Saturday.
- The L word: 20,812.
- IBM: 4,188.
- AOL Pointe: 3,709
- Nissan: 3,621.
- Adidas: 2,121.
- Pontiac: 1,985.
- Circuit City: 1,638.
- Reebok: 1,309.
- Magnatune: 1,233.
- Sears: 1,022.
- Thomson training: 1,020.
- Usability Island: 945.
- Sony BMG: 510.
- Cisco: 236.
Sure, these numbers don't tell the whole story. If nothing else there's multiple parcels to contend with, and variations of traffic between them. However charting these over time can give us some valuable insights. We'll also mash together a figure from NCI, The Shelter, YadNI's Junkyard and the Ivory Tower of Prims and use that as a comparison metric for resident content.
Tateru's Overall Mixed Reality Index: 3,167
Tateru's Native Reality Index: 30,585
Suggested modifications to the metric are welcome.
Mixed Reality shorts
- Turbulence.org, Art Interacive and Ars Virtua are holding a juried competition this year called (appropriately enough) Mixed Realities. They are open for submissions from now until March 31. The top five submissions will be granted $5,000 USD and exhibited in... well, in both worlds, really. That's more or less the point. I can immediately think of a work, but it's too racy to even talk about here, let alone exhibit. If you're an artistic virtuoso of reality mixing, look up the competition details and get involved!
- Chill Moksung organized a seminar on podcasting and streaming on Saturday afternoon in Menorca, Slim Warrior's live music sim. Shelter host Dolmere Talamasca covers the event extensively.
- I talked about AOL Pointe last week, and was not alone in giving them the thumbs-up for their new island. That mild-mannered penguin, Nobody Fugazi covered their launch party on Saturday evening.
- Estrelle Fauna of Big Bit, an Australian Metaverse Development company posted to the SL-Oz forums looking for scripters, builders, programmers and salespeople in order to help handle enquiries from Australian companies who are looking to establish a presence or get involved further in Second Life.
- Second Life Machinima at the Superbowl pre-game show (thanks Mark Wallace). I hear this Superbowl is a bit of a big thing in the USA. The machinima was not actually about Second Life, it was about the CBS Show "Two and a Half Men" - it was just made in Second Life.
Got a mixed reality tip for Tateru? E-mail her at [email protected].
nice to see magnatune arrive.
i've been playing one of their classical music streams at my park in blumfield for the last few months, and bought some of their non-classical stuff for myself
Posted by: Patch Lamington | Tuesday, February 06, 2007 at 10:08 AM