Speading a jolly virus…

Just found this as I was wandering around the web. It shows Liverpool Street Station in London (my old railway station, I used it for years).

I know, I know I am helping to spread viral video!

Stand-by for more Bryn Oh images…

As promised in my earlier post (‘Immersed in the imagination and smog of Bryn Oh’) here are some more photographs of Bryn Oh’s abandoned robot theme park on Immersiva.   

Music deer bot by Bryn Oh on Immersiva

 

Bryn Oh's Tower

 

Top of the Immersiva Tower (walls temporarily removed by rezzing quirk)

 

Window in white

 

Stand-by

 

A poem from the sky... Just one of the many Bryn Oh poems to be found on (or above) Immersiva

 

And last (but not least) look deep beneath the sea for translucent jellyfish

Immersiva is full of mysteries and puzzles, and I don’t want to spoil the surprise for others by saying too much here.  I hope these pictures encourage you to visit  Immersiva in Second Life™. 

Bryn Oh’s own machinima are the best guides to the island! Take a look at: The Jellyfish Room on Blip TV (http://blip.tv/file/1650715) and Ferrisquito at Immersiva (http://blip.tv/file/1592894)

Bryn Oh’s blog is to be found at: http://brynoh.blogspot.com/

Best wishes to Dusan Writer,  patron (saint) to high calibre virtual artists and Bryn Oh!

∞

Immersed in the imagination and smog of Bryn Oh

cyberloom joins the mob (of Bryn Oh admirers)

I had the opportunity to visit NPIRL artist Bryn Oh’s island Immersiva recently. What a strange haunting place it was! It reminded me of the North of England when the coal mines were still working, with their ugly/beautiful slag heaps and devastated landscapes. Immersiva rises out of a cold, gray sea and strange tracks criss cross the island’s foggy, damp landscape. The fog was so dense I could almost feel it prickling my avatar’s delicate lungs. Figures emerged from the gloom here and there, sometimes these were other avatars, and sometimes they turned out to be eerie statues.

When I initially landed at Immersiva I was met by a child figure with an old 50s pram

The child seemed to be pointing at the light bulb man

Bryn Oh requests that visitors follow instructions to set their environmental settings so that they can achieve what could be called Bryn Oh smog-light. I followed these instructions, but then I strayed into playing with the settings in an attempt to render a cold winter’s day with watery sunlight. Immersiva represents a post-apocalyptic world, and the fog helps conjure up an atmosphere of lost hope and ruined dreams. Still, I justify my modified lighting with the thought of how brief spells of sunshine can give additional poignancy to emotional and physical devastation!

Bryn Oh's ferrisquito

The uninhabited island is haunted by the Ghost in the Machine, and poems lie carefully scattered about the mournful land. They are written on the curled pages of school exercise books, each poem tells a fragmented story of ill fated love. Is it a tragic tale of the doomed love of two runaway robots? Or, is it a story about a human who falls in love with a robot? Perhaps the poems tell of two humans and one becomes ill, the other thinks she can save her sickly friend by carrying out some ghastly experiment. The poems convey deep longing yet are tainted by an agonized regret that generates more questions than answers…

'Irrevocably', a statue dedicated to the memory of two runaway robots

The artist goes to great lengths to provide extremely precise lighting instructions before abandoning us in the dense fog. (Did you hear that muffled Bryn Oh laugh or was it just my imagination?) I warn you, Bryn Oh smog-light plays tricks on your mind. It is intriguing to be given such specific guidelines, as  Bryn Oh has mastered the art of understatement, these initial directions are merely her introduction.  She knows how to give just enough poetic information to captivate her visitors. The sculptures do the same, they conceal hidden chambers where secret surprises lurk out of sight. The art of imagination lies in always leaving room for others to bring their own references and questions. Too much guidance and control shuts imagination down, kills it dead. Immersiva is like a strange aquarium where we are held  like translucent jelly fish manipulated by an unseen power!

More on Immersiva in my next post. In the meantime, take a look for yourself!

Please also see: Not Possible IRL for a post on Immersiva and Bryn Oh by Bettina Tizzy, and Bryn Oh’s own blog Bryn Oh

Traveling on a beam of light

There are many levels to how we can interact with the virtual world of Second Life. We can completely immerse ourselves in the virtual space, and as some people say ‘live Second Life’. I understand this to mean that we integrate the virtual life into our real/physical lives, moving smoothly between the two environments almost as we move between work and living spaces. (Others may interpret this quite differently, feel free to send in your own definitions!) Our minds see, and remember images and activities, and save them to the same filing cabinets in our brains; and our brains do this whether what we see or experience is virtual or ‘real’. Does this mean that we cannot tell the difference between the virtual and the real? Are we on the brink of madness?

Zwagoth Klaar creation at Quadropop Tree Isle

I suspect we have a slew of safety valves protecting us from becoming unhinged! After all, if venturing into virtual worlds really knocked us off our ‘reality’ pedestals so easily, we would have similar trouble with books, plays, movies and video games. Humans would achieve little as a race if we were so susceptible to becoming lost in imagination, ultimately imagination itself would suffer and so would we. The secret of creativity must lie largely within the ability we have to walk in and out of imagined scenarios and ideas, and make sense of the experience. For instance, Albert Einstein imagined how the universe might look if he was traveling through space and time sitting upon a beam of light, Einstein’s imagination actually altered how we perceive reality.

Chasm by Nebulosus Severine (Quadropop Tree Isle)

One safety valve is the fact that we step into virtual spaces carrying with us all the knowledge and conditioning of our physical world. What is more, if we are open to the experience, wandering through virtual spaces gives many insights into our first life and our self perception. I recently came across a video posted on NPR’s Bryant Project blog back in 2007, this shows NPR’s reporter Win Rosenfeld meeting with the psychologist Nick Yee when he was at Stanford University. Nick Yee was examining how human nature remains the same when we enter virtual worlds. As Yee says in the video, he is interested in studying ‘how much our virtual lives, and virtual interactions are bound to a certain extent by our real life stereotypes, and how we are not as free in virtual worlds as we think we are’.

He demonstrates this through a simple exploration of how much space we like to maintain around our avatars in Second Life, and how we feel about too much eye contact in our virtual worlds. What Yee has found is that we follow the same rules in both worlds, and he suggests the reason is because we have a ‘hard wired innate component as well as a social component, and we are so used to these norms as we are growing up that when someone violates them we find it uncomfortable‘.

Above: Win Rosenfeld and Nick Yee explore ‘The Elevator Effect’ in Second Life

This theory known as ‘The Elevator Effect’ illustrates how little difference there is between real and virtual worlds. In turn, we bring much more of the ‘real’ world to our virtual world than we think we do, and much less of the virtual world influences us in the real world. The really fun part of virtual worlds lies in consciously transcending the confines of our programming, the pre-ordained ‘preferences’ we carry over from our ‘real’ world. Groups like Bettina Tizzy’s NPIRL artists are doing exactly this with their Not Possible in Real Life creations. The challenge lies in developing the virtual skills necessary to experiment with imagination itself.

Lucky Tree Friends by artoo Magneto (Hotel Dare)

Locations in Second Life:

Hotel Dare Go and visit Hotel dare soon, it is closing on January 15th, 2009

Quadropop Tree Isle