The project, when it brought to me, initially intended to place a work in SL. The RL (physical exhibition) was not part of it. When the possibility of physical exhibitions were brought to our table, the organiser and mususem had no financial means to provide me with what I actually wanted to do in a physical room, which was to build a mirror room in RL of the work I have don in SL. That was largely compromised, to say the least.

Bedste hilsner

anette

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.