February 5 -- second life

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On the 5th, the UM Second Life brown bag group went to Australia for an exhibit of portraits which was commissioned by the Australian National Portrait Gallery.

As I remember the details, there are exhibits in real life, as well as in Second Life....

There were five different artists.

As we were trying to get a taste of all of it, we didn't do any of it for very long, and I have to confess that I don't know ... what their point was ... in depth.....

I believe this one was about the choices people make as to how they look in Second Life. I find this to be an interesting topic. I often think "Since you can look however you'd like to look, why did you make *that* choice?"

Here are three of the UM group, watching a video. The experienced Second-Lifers in the group were impressed that the video was also making marks on the floor.





A different artist's work. I don't know what the point was.

I like all the luminous cubes.





Isn't it excellent that we can fly up and look around from inside the middle of it?





A look at most of our tour group, in yet another artist's area. The wings belong to a person who is mostly person-shaped, but with a cat's head.......

This installation seemed to me to do the best job of integrating real life and second life, and of using different sorts of information.

You could enter a name, and it would go out on the web and run a search engine to see what it could find about the name. Then it would make those floating shapes, one for each reference to that name. The shapes had the name attached, and also made music. Any person there could delete any shape they wanted to delete.....

Our tour organizer had told us that the names we looked up would be in the shapes, so we didn't use our own names. Lots of "Adam Smith" and so on.........

Lots of layers of abstract/concrete, SecondLife/RealLife going on here, as well as interesting things to look at and to hear.......





And again, from up inside part of the work.



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