poor reality hub huni
today I have had a few negative responses on the exhibition.. after a rather long presentation on several artworks to a college class – the only comment I could get out of them was that my reality hub Huni is very ugly – and that you can’t identify with it.. and then they had a collective laugh on huni’s behalf (buhu) furthermore two groups got disappointed because they thought they could visit all the countries of the world in SL – who ever gave them that idea?
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The idea that RL countries are represented in SL are very common for first time users of SL. I suppose its the thought of SL being a parralel world, a repræsentation of the real world that gives people that idea.
The poor realityHUBs, though, I have a comment on. Not on their looks, but on their engagement. My experience of the exhibition is in all, that the SL part have been managed very poorly. Only once have my visit to an opening in SL been succesfull. It seems as if the SL part of the exhibition has been given up and the koncentration has been at SMK. It never managed me to get in contact with one of the realityHUBs through SL. Sometimes it even seemed as if they did not know what to do with the enquiries. Or if they did not know how to get around in SL. I wonder if maybe people who know about computers and maybe even SL would have been better realityHUBs than graduate students?
The project seems to me, in all, to lack some technical expertice, beside of course Sophie Zhu. There should have been more of his kind.
Another poor thing was, that today I went to the conference announced being the 5th of march at 4-6 pm (RL-time). Tag Sidways told me it has been changed. But the poster stille said there to be a conference. I wonder if anyone showed up at SMK to the conference?
Or has there been no echange at all between the two worlds?
I am then, looking forward to the conference at 15th and 16th of may (Tag sideways said so)? Where will it be announced, then?
Peace
Sofie Marie Høegh Nielsen /Sofie Zehetbauer
the conference will be at 15 th and 16 th of may- doing the next week i think you will be apel to find some information at the website.
The connection to SL could have been managed a lot better. But that would also require the artists and the tags – and the hubs to actually use the media which haven’t really been the case. I have been involved in some other projects evolving from ‘within’ Second Life. The participants have often met each other through Second Life and have taken the initiative from there. They often have not met in reality. These projects of course always use Second Life in a totally different manner.
But still Virtual Moves uses Second Life as a tool to create the art, the use of Second Life as a the media to promote and discuss it has just not followed along very well. Mainly because the participants are generally not regular users and do not have a network inside Second Life. Furthermore the ideas for art in Second Life often also starts at another level when the artists are experienced with the media.
The poor response and lag of understanding is also avoided if its presented to an audience of Second Life users.
Googling the conference in your search gives me this:
VIRTUAL MOVES » 4 exhibitions by Tagging Art
2008 of our third ‘Virtual Moves’ exhibition in Second Life and at Statens Museum …. Our Conference the 5.th of March is postphoned to April 15th or 16th. …
http://www.taggingart.org/
???
Though I cant find the article, only the search result, wich is just a bit of the post.
About the technical problems of the exhibition, I understand the low standards of the artists and the users, wich is why I would have preferred to have realityHUBs with technical expertice. You must have known that the visitors would be new in the field, and therefore would need a lot of guidance. I do not understand purpose of graduate students? In what way should they help the visitors?
When I visited the exhibition at SMK this friday (7th of march), I was met with a large display of articles praising the exhibition. Behind this stand the screen was showing an avatar (away), no visitors, and in the other room the computer was logged of, while a realityHUB was sitting on a chair talking with a friend of her.
Great credits to Johan! You should have had much more of his kinds.
Sofie Marie Høegh Nielsen / Sofie Zehetbauer
I see now that the calender says:
Conference
Our Conference the 5.th of March is postphoned to April 15th or 16th. More Info is coming up
So is it april or may?
Sofie
Dear Sofie,
It is great that you take your time to comment on our blog and that you have followed the launchings in SL. Thank you.
Without undermining the truly great value our RealityHubs have been to us, I can tell you on behalf of Tagging Art, that looking in the back mirror we do agree that the technical lead through during each launch could have been done by someone more experienced in SL. We in Tagging Art should have supported our RealityHubs and visitors by engaging two persons with good skills in SL – someone who would take on the job for free. If someone would do that.
Anyhow I think I better tell you how this project started out in the first place. I hope this will give some understanding for the projects inclusively the faults in the project, which else wise has been quite successful in respect to our original goal: let 8 artists try out SL as a platform for art. And the point here was that many of the artists should never have been in contact with SL before, and they should have very different backgrounds. Further we encouraged them to consider a critical view on SL.
This project is actually a PILOT project for the organization Tagging Art. A project in which we wanted to try out how we could collaborate as a group, and a project in which we could try out our ideas. In this way it is an experiment. Anne’s idea about making this pilot project a virtual exhibition was formed by the group and turned out in an application. Apparently the Danish Art Council liked the idea and gave us full support. Already then the project became more serious.
After some walk abouts in SL we experienced that it might be better to engage an expert in stead of starting out from what ever skills we had – this was our original outset. So we engaged our SL expert Johan Bichel/Sophie Zhu – who has turned out to be a invaluable help. From then the experiment also became more ambitious, because we became aware of what SL could, what codes of behavior we should learn etc. etc.
The following meetings and mail correspondences between Tagging Art and the artists showed that there was a great interest from some artists in making a physical part to the virtual exhibition. We considered it and found that it a good idea since this could help people, who would never go into SL on own initiative, to have some entrance to our art works i the virtual world. At that point the idea was more like: one room somewhere in Copenhagen, where we could also set up two computers.
From then everything just exploded in a positive direction. On initiative of Anne, her and Iben just tried out chance and offered the whole virtual exhibition to the Danish National Gallery as a response to Carsten Orth’s speech when he took over the director’s seat at the National Gallery. None of us had expected that we would actually end up with two great gallery rooms at the National Gallery. But when now chance had proven luck – of course we would use that luck. This just also meant that we were suddenly extremely busy and all artists got more ambitious about their projects. Things just grew. Since it was a positive growth we just had to follow it and do our best.
At this point we were suddenly in January and we became aware that we would need helpers to lead our audience and the audience of the National Gallery into SL. Since our focus always was art, we wanted people with an art background. Four students offered their free help as they could make the exhibition a part of their education.
As it was for us the exhibition also became a learning process for them, very well, because the project was always process orientated and an experiment – so these frames had the capacity to let them and us be on what ever level we were and then develop.
Of course I understand that you have certain expectations when you meet up in SL for our launches and already know SL quite well – but this was what we could offer at the time being. Now we have gained so much more experience on what we must be aware of in SL and what we must be prepared to offer, and – also with thanks to you – we know what exactly to educate our RealityHubs in next time.
The conference is the 16th of May 2008, 3pm-5pm Danish time.
Kind regards
Ida, Tagging Art
When the press has been so curious about our exhibition and has approached it quite positively, I think, that it has to do with the fact that you do not else where in Denmark see such exhibition that connects SL and RL through art on such level. Most of the journalists are, like most of us, not used to SL, so they have an open mind when they approach our exhibition and obviously focus on trying it out and bare over with starters technical faults.