Metaverse Creativity (new title: Virtual Creativity) - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014

A long history of technologies and techniques in media art seek to make the body strange through its mediated self-perception. Traditionally, scholars have viewed these works as enframing or narcissistic gestures, however, it does not necessarily follow that this bodily strangeness is inherently negative, or even new. By viewing the body’s phenomenology as inextricably tied to technological supports, the extent to which technological forms of self-perception are necessarily enframing can be constructively critiqued. This suggestion is explored through an analysis of Takehito Etani’s The Third Eye Project (2002), a performance prosthetic that presents its users with a live video feed of their own back from a third-person avatar perspective. The mediation of self-perception in this piece, both internally and technologically, suggests an alternative outlook to this genre of media art: one that takes the strangeness of the self as inherent to self-perception both in and outside of technology.

This article wishes to present three virtual art ecologies that were created in 2013 in the metaverse of Second Life, involving a reinterpretation of the folk tale Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH). The tale of LRRH has many layers of complexity that are open to many varied interpretations, some of which were tackled by the participating artists and will be discussed in this text. Beyond presenting the work itself, this article also wishes to discuss a theoretical framework regarding storytelling, especially as it relates to today’s information society and its offshoots, online virtual worlds.

Our common interaction with media based on motion, time and screen, such as cinema, television, video and animation, is built on the depiction of visual images one after another: the same visual space is rewritten continuously. Throughout history there have been alternative methods for interacting with a sequence of frames. Pioneering techniques like chronophotography and cyclography shared the same interests of recent artworks and scientific visualizations in capturing, tracing and representing movement in space. In this article, we introduce an experimental approach to represent video artworks as 3D models in virtual environments. Our aim is to contribute to the possibilities offered by contemporary computing techniques to explore alternative ways of interacting with motion media.

Since contemporary culture is increasingly becoming the navigation culture, replacing the narrative culture, artists explore existing content and relate to its overproduction. An artist, as a semionaut, always relates to an external framework (conceptual, cultural or technological). In this article, I approach two theoretical frameworks – one by Benjamin Buchloh and another by Nicolas Bourriaud – and confront each with the latest examples of artistic re-practices in the online and the offline world. What was already present in the notion of allegorical procedure may be relevant again within the practice of postproduction. The whole range of artistic re-practices (e.g. remixes, remediations, and re-enactments) leads to a non-linear idea of time. Since the information is of greater importance than the visual representation, there is no centralized knowledge, but rather fragments to navigate between and a constant tension between the updated and the outdated.

This article focuses on changes concerning the ways of creating poetry and what I will treat as the body – the form – of poems, which occur alongside a democratization of web-based poetry writing. Studying poetry and poets by means of what is shown on the Internet allows us to reach unusual realities, very different from those accessed through printed poetry, based on original elements, with a new nature, so to speak – as well as to access data about poetry that is being created right now. I would like to point out some ways in which poets and non-poets interact on the Internet, evaluating practices linked to poetry. I would also like to present some of the new configurations that poems have been appearing in, especially the ones concerning significant modifications on their body, and, as a consequence, on their image – their outline, colour, texture and visual ambience.

Our dependence on digital data, be it for knowledge, images or for records of personal history, is growing increasingly due to almost indefinite storage space and global availability. However, this dependence shifts our being and our life successively into the virtual: the memories of childhood are no longer fading pictures in an old photographic album, but jpegs on an old data disk. Here we show, using a virtual world, that digitization and virtualization of our world has its drawbacks. We propose a time machine that allows visiting the past and, under certain circumstances, even changing the present. This time machine can be realized in a virtual world: digital data can be recorded and stored continuously for revisiting at will. Our virtual time machine has unsettling implications, which have parallels in contemporary surveillance and data collection programmes: not only would the complete past be open for investigation, the time machine would, under certain restrictions such as avoiding inconsistencies in the time stream, allow changing the past as normative intervention in history. Modifying the past would even permit influencing the present. To prevent or at least complicate modifications of our personal history by malevolent access to our digital data, we recommend leaving traces in the world.