Conference at Harvard on "the future of art/creativity and digital technologies"

I just noticed that this single-day conference is happening April 8th.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn/

Looks pretty cool. Being Boston-based, I've attended a few conferences at the Berkman Center in the past and have always found them enjoyable.

Given that everyone here in SL is obviously interested in "digital art and creativity," I thought you might like to hear about it.



I'll pop over and check out the conference, and I'll let you all know if I learn anything.

Hmm! Boston based, huh? I guess LL is going more virtual. Kudos to them!

If Lessig is there, see if you can get a picture with him!

Yes, I've contacted Larry and he assures me I'll get a spot. I'm hoping to submit a paper on my seminal conceptual art work displayed recently in Portage, called "Club Lagg".

Club Lagg explores the explosive interface that emerges between pastoral domicile expectationists of non-hedonist "virtual-as-me" players and the high-impact/low-FPS ratio of white-cubist-induced "box-in-itself" script-animated "dancer" entities.

With its playful interplay of black and...more black (and shiny turned on) and the in-depth study of the effect of "rotation script," Club Lagg provides a striking commentary and the limits of "space" concepts and "waterfront access" as an ontological category reified through the so-called "tier" fees and the hierarchical patriarchal structural relationships they produce.

Conference-goers will have a chance to log-in to SL and sit in Clubb Lagg in various manifestations on various sims, and contrast/compare FPS rates/CPU draw and visitor response.

"It's all a big grab from Washington to Moscow"--Neal Cassady, On The Road, Jack Kerouac.

I'd love to go to this. I should investigate whats happening at the universities around here.

Prok, this is hands-down the funniest thing you have ever written. Bravo!

Were you an art critic in a past life?

Thanks for the heads-up on the conference Path. Let us know if anything interesting emerges from it.

Yeah I burst out laughing reading that.

OK, you owe me a monitor cleaning (spewed soda while laughing).

On a more serious side, if anyone has ideas of examples of inworld "artistic expressions" that I should take a look at and maybe bring up at the conference for feedback, please post in this thread.

P.S. Prok, I think your alt is Stephen Colbert.... http://video.lisarein.com/dailyshow/feb2005/feb142005/02-14-05-gates-colbert.mov

path, i need help understanding what you mean by artistic expressions. What in SL *isn't* an artistic expression of one kind or another? I mean it's everywhere!

Are you trying to delineate between functional arts and graphic arts versus traditional fine arts?

Lots of sex and beer.




In the SE and SW quadrants of Aasim are the remnants of an art contest I had a few weeks ago. You may want to snap a few photos and take them to the conference.

Yeah, I was gonna say. Isn't the *whole thing* kind of a Grand Cross-Cultural Human Narrative Experiment or a dynamic, flowing, streaming conceptual art work? Hence the Kerouac quotes.

I mean, take Brownlee Telehub (yes, take it, puleeze, I can hear lagged-out cloudy saying LOL). It represents extraordinary experiments in art-as-art and commerce-as-art and art-as-commerce -- you could have a day-long conference just on the cultural implications of Brownlee telehub and all its works, just for starters.

Or do you mean discrete, functional or arty art thingies that somebody made, like a sculpture? Well, what does it mean when actual-art appears in the virtual-art soup which is the whole game? I would invite you to study the Pahoa Jade/King Kong thread.

You should google all the art exhibits done by those two women who made first a TSO art gallery then a RL-art gallery hook up at three art galleries in California, Canada, and Connecticut. Probably someone will mention this effort at the Harvard conference. They looked at that wacky process whereby some people are making RL type art in some old concept of art, but then the entire thing is an "art".

Except some people don't think these games are art, they think they are a RL representation, which makes it even more hilarious and arty. Honestly, you never lack for art and entertainment in this game.

STILL? I thought things there would have changed after I left.

I've seen pictures from "Burning Life" floating around. Since that Linden-sponsored event was as pure "artistic expression" as you're going to find in SL, it might be something to pursue.

secondlife is what you believe it is, it is what you make it, it represents whatever you want it to represent

just like art

what is good and bad really lies in the eye of the beholder. SL has reached a size and a diversity in its user base that it defies explicit definition.

is there going to be another Burning Life? i joined right at the end of it.

FYI, I'm going to be bringing my laptop to the conference. I know they have WiFi in the law school, so hopefully I'll have a chance to show SL to anyone interested. It's going to be totally informal, but maybe I can start a viral interest.

That said, if anyone has any neat PICTURES of things they'd like me to try and show people, please either post the URLs in here or drop me a Photo inworld.

Thankya.

Pathfinder,

You have to show them SL in general for a few minutes, and only then go to the BACKSTAGE Sim.

Fly from there. Go under the couch. Go under the Armchair. DIE under the armchair, and meet good at the end of the tunnel -- maybe.

Spend time under the tree - there's one in the sim, it's one of the most beautiful I've seen in SL.


That Sim is art, any way you take it.

Path I'm also Boston related but I won't be able to attend. Being an artist in SL and RL, I'd really appreciate any news of the conference. Thanks

Update on the conference happening tomorrow.

The conference website has posted some briefing materials, a collection of readings to give some background for the core legal and ethical questions raised at the conference.

Anyone can download this PDF document.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn/briefing_materials

I think you'll need Adobe Reader 7.0 to view it properly. I had 6.0 installed and got an error until I upgraded to 7.0. Just grab the upgrade here: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

The briefing materials include papers on interesting subjects (mostly legal-related) such as:
"A Practical Guide to the Fair Use Doctrine in American Copyright Law"
"Borrowing Privileges: How Does (or Should) Copyright Law Define a Derivative Work?"
"For Money or Art: Does it Matter?"
"Creative or Derivative: Old Techniques, New Technologies"

If anyone has any issues or questions specifically related to Second Life that they'd like me to raise at the conference, please either post them here or send me a PM. As I said before, I'll report back in this thread to share whatever I learn.

Path: Check out the Crescent Moon Museum on the island sim of Montmartre. Both the island and the museum collect art and Artistes (like me from all walks of Second Life, and Montmartre is our hangout.

The SL Herald did a peice on the museum a couple weeks back.

If you're too busy to go yourself and you ask real nicely (and maybe give me a Pathfinder bear), I can take pictures and send them and the article link to you instead.

Oh, wonderful! Please send me pictures and a URL to the article. Thank you very much.

And your bear has been delivered.

Pathfinder - I'm sure if you check you'll find that Harvard already play Second Life and have quite a large group in the game.They have several accounts that are shared for studies.

Please check out my place Path (or anyone else interested). All original textures created with AutoCad and 3dsmax. I also have a nice looking (IMHO) billiards table. Too bad it is not yet scripted. You can check my profile in world and go to my "places". Hope to see ya in Clarksburg! The place does take a little while to load cause of all the textures but once loaded it is worth the wait.

P.S. Don't forget to look up ;]

Thanks Path. *geeks out over the bear*. Got an e-mail I can send the stuff too? I need all this week's remaining L$ for my own upload fees. ^.^;;

[email]pathfinder@lindenlab.com[/email]

My experience at the conference......................

Since it was held by the Law School, the focus was obviously on issues of copyright and fair use. As I mentioned before, there is a publically downloadable PDF "Briefing Book" that has some articles that people who have legal questions about fair use and copyright in SL might find useful. The topic is legally grey and confusing to most people, and this briefing book does a good job of summing it up from the perspective of *artists*:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/SignalNoiseBBFINAL.pdf

Artists have access to new tools for creative expression, and the overall focus of the conference was on technologies affecting music and video. Wayne Marshall had a good talk on the history of sampling in reggae and it's influence on current hip-hop. Key points were on how folk culture has now been replaced by industrial culture, pushing the passive consumption of media. The interesting phenomenon we see now is a rebirth of storytelling based on technological means. Remixing popular sounds and images to create something new. They played the infamous "Grey Video" by DJ Danger Mouse (the one that was banned because of samples from the Beatles). The Grey Video is particularly interesting because it shows very clearly how easy it is for artists today to remix existing audio and images and create a totally new "story."

Lots more presentations showing how artists today are remixing sound and video (e.g. Negativland and the Cyberpunk Educator) into "Mashup Movies." The overall legal implications are still unclear, and copyright holders are inconsistent in either allowing or preventing such things. In summary, the legal waters are muddy, and the best you can do is not get on the radar of any large corporation trying to protect revenue streams. Run silent...run deep.

Great presentation by Paul Marino on the history and future of Machinima. No mention of SL in his presentation as a platform for this, though.

We didn't have much time to interact with each other in an unstructured fashion. I sat with my laptop in the conference hall logged in to SL, hoping that anyone interested sitting behind me would see my screen and come up to me afterwards. That strategy worked great, and during lunch I had several students and artists come up to me asking "what was that crazy stuff on your laptop??" I gave away all my CDs and stickers, and showed them some screenshots and locations of interesting artistic builds in SL. Most of them seemed to grok what SL is about, and since they were all interested in "creating artistic content" they immediately understood the potential of SL in this regard. However, the couple professors I talked to were mostly confused, since none of them had any experience with "those video-game-things my kids are always playing."

Had a dinner meeting with a bunch of musicians and copyright lawyers (now THERE'S a weird mix, eh?). Once I introduced myself and talked about SL, the focus of the dinner was...SL! I explained the streaming audio and media tools, and told them how we have a lot of inworld DJ's that host parties while mixing tunes live. The musicians were fascinated by this (a couple of them were also DJs in RL), and loved the idea of using SL as new way for them to have inworld performances of their music, gain exposure, and potentially get real income from it. I think there's an opportunity here, teaching musicians and DJs about SL as a new way for them to express themselves.

The main things I took home from this conference:

1) Copyright and Fair Use Law is muddy, and open to much interpretation. The legal system has a LONG way to go in terms of catching up with technology. Nothing new there. Move along.

2) Based on the legal history, we appear to have *fewer* rights when dealing with richer media than text, even though the law is supposed to apply broadly across ALL types of media. People who remix video or music are much more apt to be legally confronted than someone quoting or remixing the written word. This has interesting implications for SL, since SL is a medium that encompasses all the current forms of media as well as NEW things like virtual fashion and virtual architecture.

3) The law as it stands is focused on how the "bits flow behind the screen," and NOT on what happens to real people. The general consensus of the legal people at the conference was that the legal system will crash and burn if it keeps focusing on technology and not *functionality.* It was good to hear this and gave me some hope.

That's it. Let me know if you have any specific questions, and thanks to everyone who sent me pictures and locations of artistic builds to show people. The conference organizers are supposed to put up audio recordings of the conference for the public, so check out the site in a few days if you're interested.