New World Notes

Breakthrough Performance? Virtual Pop Star Skye Galaxy Wows Ze Frank and 1000s During Star-Filled Online Fundraiser

Skye Galaxy has been known and loved by Second Life live music fans for over a year, and for good reason: We've said he's "destined to become Second Life's first breakout popstar" and a "popstar in waiting". The waiting may be over. During an online, live music fundraiser for Pakistan disaster relief earlier this month, UK star Imogen Heap was unable to perform at the last minute (on account of hurricane), so a call went up for people watching the feed to sing in Ms. Heap's stead. From somewhere in the heart of Texas, Skye replied through his real world name, Sean Ryan. Which is how he wound up doing this spectacular Imogen Heap cover, which clearly surprised and dazzled the fundraiser host, Internet celebrity Ze Frank:

Which is how Skye Galaxy wound up sharing a performance bill with Ben Folds, Zoe Keating, and other top stars who also performed.

"[I] shook like a leaf through the entirety of the few moments I had there," he tells me by email, "plastered on the screen of hundreds of strangers all here for music and the hope of bettering lives left in shackles by natural disaster." It was, he says, "One of the most memorable days in my life."

Unsurprisingly, the performance inundated him with Twitter followers and other instant fans -- and given the quality of the folks involved in the fundraiser, perhaps interest from people who might catapult him to the next level of his career. And if this is the moment for Sean Ryan's star to shine for the rest of the world, we'll remember his early days as an avatar popstar who gained a following by the thousands, with original tracks, and head-turning covers that strongly compete with the original. Seriously, watch this cover of Bjork's "Joga" he performs in SL:

Sexy Scarface: The Story Behind "Broken Hearts Bleed", the Latest in Stylishly Brutalized Female Avatar Skins

Mochi Milena in her Broken Hearts skin, and in real life

Have a look at the latest in customized Second Life skins: Broken Hearts Bleed, which depicts a woman with a bloody heart carved into her face. [SLurl to buy it here] Created by Mochi Milena, it's the latest example of what might be called "brutalized avatar chic", which subverts Second Life's popular fashionista scene with style that suggests abuse, even torture. (Iris Ophelia covered last year's big fashion craze for bruised female avatar skins.)

As you might expect, it's provoked some controversy among SL fashionistas. After all, you look at a woman with a heart gashed into her face, and you wonder how it got there, maybe imagining a man hovering over her with a razor.

However, Mochi tells me her motive for making it had nothing to do with that. The popular SL designer created it for a Second Life fashion contest, which asked for submissions that expressed "What I love". Mochi decided to enhance one of her skins with a heart, and at first, the design was sentimental.

"I started drawing a normal heart on the skin, but it felt... very tacky," she tells me. "I sat there for awhile and then experimented with different effects until I decided to do a cut heart on the face." 

For her, much of the inspiration was artistic:

European Fashion Designer Brings Her Line Into Second Life

Martina Karapetrić & Morana Saračević (Vitabela Dubrovna & Precious Restless in SL)

Martina Karapetrić is a renowned fashion designer in Croatia, and owns a Zagreb boutique called Boudoir (founded in 2001), which she runs with her twin sister Morana Saračević. Along with creating haute couture fashion for Eastern Europe, the sisters have worked on campaigns for Dove and Coca Cola Light (Martina designed a new bottle for the Croatian market.) Two years ago, Martina tells me, "[a] friend told me about Second Life... and I decided to look, and try to 'play' it."

She spent a year roleplaying in Second Life, as an avatar she dubbed Vitabela Dubrovna. Which is yet another example to counter the cliche that glamorous female avatars in Second Life are really fat naked guys in a basement -- sometimes, they're actually glamorous European women in a high-end fashion salon. (I say "women", because her sister Morana is also in Second Life, where she's known as Precious Restless.)

After a year exploring Second Life, Martina decided to try her hand at creating Second Life fashion, and the end result can be seen in her Second Life blog, called Vitabela, which features designs that only exist in SL, as well as fashions she and her sister made, that were first seen on the runways of Europe. Take this one:

"This dress was part of my 10. collection, called 'Victorian Dolls'," Vitabela tells me. "It's a silk plisse dress, decorated with a big blue flower... Some real life designs are very hard to interpret in SL, but some are easy." To create the Second Life versions of her work, she uses high resolution runway photos, and translates them to dress templates and textures for Second Life avatars.

Martina likes the challenge of bringing her designs to the Second Life market, which "is huge and worldwide, so I have the oportunity to present my RL/SL designs to many people." Other advantages: "Once I create a dress, I'm able to sell it countless times... there is nothing you can't make in Second Life, almost every idea is feasible." However, the veteran fashion designer does find marketing more difficult in SL, than real life: "It's much more hard to reach target costumers, but not impossible."

One more spectacular mash-up of real and virtual fashion after the break:

Will the Art World Recognize Second Life Artistry? Spanish Curator Hopes World Expo Machinima Will Help That Happen

Cristina García-Lasuén, the Spanish art scholar who brought Second Life machinima to Shanghai's World Expo

One day a Spanish art scholar was hurrying down the stairs (as she often does), when she took a tumble, and broke her leg. That painful mishap more or less led to Second Life machinima being featured at the Madrid pavilion of the World Expo going on in Shanghai now. (See the full introductory program of SL machinima on the official site here.) That's because the curator, Cristina García-Lasuén, is a highly-regarded figure in Spain's art community, and while she was recovering from her injury, she wound up assisting a fellow academic who was using Second Life as an education tool. So Ms. García-Lasuén created an SL avatar of her own, dubbed Aino Baar, and began exploring the metaverse.

At first she mainly kept to education sites in Second Life (even teaching an art class in-world), but eventually discovered art native to Second Life, such as the works of Bryn Oh. "And fell in love," she says. "And I thought, how can it be possible?" She also wondered why the real life art world didn't know much about it.

Mixed Reality Profile: SL Machinima Maker BobE Schism

Here's why the avatar called BobE Schism likes making machinima in Second Life -- or for that matter, why he likes SL in general: "You can wake up in the morning and say 'I'm gonna build a 2000 meter moving chrome statue of a three-legged, fire-particle breathing Jesus balancing on the top of the Eiffel Tower who sings a bossa nova version of 'Purple Haze' when you sit on his head', and with a bit of perseverance, you can possibly have it constructed by midnight." Which notwithstanding the length and the strangeness, would make for an accurate advertising tagline.

"Alternatively," Mr. Schism continues, "you could perhaps make a film about loss, isolation, hopelessness and being f***ed no matter which way you turn. Or something." He did the latter with a great machinima inspired by a passage from Paul Auster's The Locked Room, which you can watch right here. Then he sent me this mixed reality photo, matching his SL avatar, who usually wears a gas mask, with the human owner. You really need to click it and get a closer look, because he's recreated his real life office and desktop environment near perfectly in SL.

Linden Suburban Home Owners More Likely To Treat Their Place As Extension of the Real Life Self, Academic Suggests

Wiviott and Soup

Who would buy a new prefab virtual house in Second Life, and why? That's a question longtime Second Life users have been wondering, and presumably the Lindens thoroughly researched that topic before they launched their Linden Homes product. A Resident named Remington Soup is also interested, but for a more particular reason: that's the avatar of Matthew Wiviott, an academic in Cultural Mediation and Technology studies with Canada's world-ranked McGill University.

"Essentially I'm conducting research that will document a community of Linden Homes," he tells me. "I hope to provide an analysis that offers insight into the kind of relationships that Residents have with spaces they claim as 'theirs'. Linden Homes is fascinating, I think, precisely because of the severe restrictions imposed on modifications. Ideally, I would like to see people discover ways to subvert these restrictions, but any kind of personal expression is potentially interesting."

Wiviott believes there will be pronounced differences in who purchases which kind of Linden Home (pictured), two of which are contemporary and realistic, the other two historical/fantastic.

"My hunch was that people who inhabit SL in a similar way that they inhabit Facebook, i.e., as a virtual projection of their social identity, would prefer the California Modernism of Meadowbrook -- or perhaps the quaint rusticity of Tahoe. The two others -- Tolkien-esque Elderglen and Medieval Japanese Shareta Osumai - would attract those in SL as immersionists." It may seem obvious that people interested in online roleplay would prefer the fantastic or exotic choice, but for Wiviott, this exposes an interesting assumption:

Before Linden Can Walk, Linden Must Learn to Crawl: Compelling Video By Two Veteran Second Life Developers

Since last year, a lot of people in Second Life have been thinking about Linden -- how Linden is developing, what Linden is doing now, and what Linden should do in the future. There's been a lot of discussion on these topics, but for my money, they're best addressed by the compelling video after the break, featuring a project co-created by two of Second Life's top content developers.

If you only watch one Second Life-related video this weekend, watch this one:

Play as Being: Can 9 Seconds of Communal Focus in Second Life Change Your Real Life?

Today I'm at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research center which once counted Einstein himself as a faculty member, to give a brief lecture on Second Life. My talk was put together by Piet Hut, an IAS astrophysicist who has an asteroid named after him, and also has a Second Life avatar: Pema Pera. (As I've written before, Piet conducts some of his work in SL, simulating Newtonian physics in Second Life, and running MICA, a scientific and educational non-profit based in SL.) Yesterday he told me about another Second Life-based project he initiated, which has already developed a fairly large and diverse community around it:

Play as Being, a meditation/communal focus group that meets several times a day to share their practice. The practice itself is very novel: Nine seconds of meditation or focus, every 15 minutes. In those nine seconds, the idea is to pause all your daily activity, focus on your breathing, and write down anything that comes up during this mental pause. "Instead of spending half an hour a day on tai chi or yoga or something, you can spend nine seconds every 15 minutes," Piet tells me. "Even if you do it throughout the whole day it'll be less than 10 minutes [total]. The idea is to give a very persistent and penetrating way of dropping everything you do and... letting more air into your life, so to speak." (Personally I like it. I joked to Piet that whenever I do go to yoga, I end up rushing to the gym, fighting through traffic while screaming I HAVE GOT TO GET TO FRICKING YOGA!)

A Chinese Teacher on Second Life: Fears SL Will Go the Way of Google & Advice for Effectively Engaging Students in SL

Somewhere near Shanghai, aston Leisen sends a farewell to Google from Second Life... and a greeting to New World Notes readers from China

Last Friday I briefly noted the beautiful new China simulator in Second Life, which its creator, Aston Leisen, has fashioned to resemble a 3D watercolor painting. Were you to visit this China of Second Life, you might have noticed Mr. Leisen's farewell message to Google placed within it, thanking the search engine company for "for making the invisible visible". His virtual shrine was a virtual version of the tributes young Chinese placed outside Google's Beijing headquarters, after Google announced it was withdrawing from their country. For as it happens, Aston Leisen is a new media professor living near Shanghai, who fears that Second Life may one day go the way of Google.

"Given the latest news of Google's leaving and the intensive hit on the Internet/free communication from government of China in last free months," he told me recently, "[I'm worried] how Second Life, as a wonderful open platform, will continue to survive. To be honest, I kinda like how SL stayed at the edge of the mainstream culture. [Because] SL might not be accessible from China when it gets popular."

Aston has taught two classes on Second Life at his college, which for obvious reasons, I won't name. (Concern over his safety is the same reason I asked him to send that greeting photo above, with his face obscured.) Censorship aside, Aston has some thoughts on teaching SL that I suspect educators who share the platform will relate to, and learn from. How do you engage students with Second Life? Based on his two classes, the best way is by doing:

My Five Favorite Profiles of Second Life Users from 2009

"Second Life is for people without a first life," is an immensely silly assertion you often hear. And while it might have some truth in particular cases, I frequently find something very different. About as often, it seems, this is more accurate:

Second Life is for people who have too many interests for just one reality.

And consequently, I consistently encounter Residents from various real world backgrounds and identities, who are very much unlike the stereotypes of Second Life users many would have you believe -- unique individuals who came into SL to express the fullness of themselves in the digital realm, in many forms:

Such as Fanny Starr, an 87 year old Polish-American who regularly shares her experiences surviving the Holocaust through her daughters' avatar, Explorer Dastardly, to all in Second Life who will listen, for the good of all who must remember.

Such as Charles Bristol, another octogenarian, in his case a grandson of slaves, who shares a lifetime of blues guitar music to several generations who experience his live performances through his avatar, CharlesEBristol Xi. (And though he's 88, does not qualify as Second Life's oldest active resident: that title probably belongs to LS Back, who is now 97.)

Such as Beth Noveck, who joined Second Life as a New York Law School professor, via her avatar Lawlita Fassbinder, founding one of the first SL-based education initiatives back in 2004. And when Barack Obama was elected President, became the new Administration's Deputy Chief Technology Officer. (And made personally sure that government broadcasts would be streamed into SL.)