BBC news keyword installation in the Avon Gallery

This has been around for a while but I haven't got round to mentioning it...

I put together a little SLashup exhibit in the Avon Gallery on Eduserv Island a while back. The piece consists of about 100 random colored balls, each of which carries a word taken from the BBC 'world news' RSS feed.

Each ball updates itself after a short random period, changing both color and word.

The words are selected via a server-side Perl script that grabs the BBC news feed, parses it into individual words, removes stop-words, then chooses a word at random. The feed is cached to reduce load on the BBC site - without this the script is quickly treated as a misbehaving robot and blocked by the BBC Web site.

Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design end of year shows

Kisa Naumova has sent an announcement to the SLED list "invit[ing] yous all to the in-world versions of the end of year shows for our three undergraduate courses".

The SLurl is http://hbuilding.org.

Interesting looking stuff... though I'm not totally convinced by the complex nature of the building housing the work.

There's a neighboring sim with a lot of interesting looking art-related experiments in a more open and accessible environment (not dissimilar in layout to the SLashup space on Eduserv Island).

77 Million Paintings

Just to note the UK academia connection with Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings SL premier (blogged here). Angrybeth Shortbread (Annabeth Robinson, Leeds College of Art and Design), who developed the 77 Million Paintings remix in SL, is being interviewed as part of tonight's events which start at 8.00pm PDT (a tad late for us UK types).

Goldsmiths art show in SL

Art students at Goldsmiths will be showing their degree show in Second Life later this year according to this BBC coverage.

UK exhibition - wherefore art thou?

When I first started working on ArtsPlace I had in mind that I would do a new exhibition every month. Yeah, right! That rapidly slipped to doing a new exhibition every two months. And the reality... well, visitors to ArtsPlace will note that I haven't yet got beyond my first two exhibitions :-(.

I'm not too worried by this. Traffic to the current exhibitions remains reasonably healthy - note that I'm still intending to do some analysis of how many visitors I'm getting on a daily and weekly basis.

So, why is it so hard to do my third exhibition? Well, in part, I'd simply under-estimated the time required to build new exhibitions. I have other interests in SL, and therefore the time available for building my next exhibition isn't as much as it was for the first two.

More importantly though, the trouble lies in finding suitable material. In looking around for my third exhibition I set myself the aim of using a UK collection. I've considered a couple of collections at the AHDS, but made little progress - by and large, a lot of digitised UK content is made available on a 'personal use' basis. Re-using such a collection for an exhibition in SL would fall outside of this, and would therefore require significant negotiation to gain the necessary permissions. As an aside I'm slightly worried that such licencing seems to be the norm in the UK and I don't really understand why.

As far as I can tell, almost everything in the American Memory collection at the Library of Congress is in the public domain. Re-using it is therefore relatively painless. This doesn't seem to be the norm in the UK (though perhaps I'm guilty of extrapolating from a very small sample?).

I'm also tempted by putting up an exhibition of Illegal Art - not that this is UK-centric in any way. But it is an interesting collection of stuff. So far though, I've allowed myself to get cold feet about being sued for hosting this stuff in SL. Shame on me!

The builders have moved out...

I've pretty much finished with all the major building work and now have a rather nice area of 'gallery' space spread over two floors, three entrances, a teleport between floors and an upstairs outside seating area (currently sans seats!).

I originally built a third floor, but hit my parcel prim limit (essentially I'd used all my available building blocks). So I removed the third floor and have decided to stick at two. To be honest, the building looks much better balanced at two floors rather than three.

The prim limit took me slightly by surprise - I hadn't done my homework properly. But I suppose it helps to keep the money rolling in to Linden Labs.

So with the basic space finished, I now need to populate it with exhibits - the lack of prims might be a limiting factor here I guess. My current plan is to use the downstairs area for stuff that I develop - though I'm open to offers - and the upstairs area for exhibitions of other people's work. I'm planning on making each exhibition last three or four weeks. News about the first exhibition will follow in the next post.

Well see how things work out...

Welcome...

Hi, and welcome to the ArtsPlace SL blog. This is primarily where I'll post news and updates about ArtsPlace SL, my home in Second Life (SL), but I'll also use it to share my experiences of SL more generally.

Who am I? My name is Art Fossett and I've been a resident in SL for a couple of weeks. Not long... but long enough that I know I like it. And long enough the begin building stuff. Stuff like ArtsPlace SL, a space in SL intended to allow libraries, museums, archives and galleries to come together with artists and like-minded people in building innovative digital creations.

I've no idea how or whether this is going to work out... it may all come to nothing. But it seems to me that there is a potential in this pace for interesting things to happen.

In RL my name is Andy Powell. I work for Eduserv, a UK not-for-profit charity that works to support the effective use of ICT in education. I'm Head of Development for the Eduserv Foundation, a role that is largely about providing advice to the education community about the use of ICT and about providing some funding to support that where we can. In RL, I blog at eFoundations. To be honest, I'm not yet sure how my RL role and my ArtsPlace SL role are going to intersect.

Anyway, that's enough for now... I'll try and keep posting here regularly, as my experience of second life grows.