Smarthistory: The Blog

Max Newbold and Sez Zabelin, Second Life correspondents for smARThistory, visited the Sistine Chapel there, and created this video about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. They discuss Michelangelo, the commission from Pope Julius II, and the structure and meaning of the ceiling.

Thanks to Steve Taylor (aka Stan Frangible) and Vassar College.

Part 2 on Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall coming soon…

 smARThistory at the Sistine Chapel in Second Life [22:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’ve been spending an increasing amount of time in the virtual world of Second Life, and have become more and more interested in the art that is being made there.

And while there are several valuable blogs, and online journals looking at art in Second Life (perhaps the best known being SLART Magazine, edited by the tireless Richard Minsky – aka Artworld Market), it seemed to us that bringing the eye of the art historian to what’s being created there could have real value.

One major source of inspiration over the last few months has certainly been Bettina Tizzy’s NPIRL (Not Possible in Real Life). After the Technology Day conference at FIT in late April, W. James Au (our keynote speaker), Raymond Yee, and other friends and colleagues were out having a drink, when the conversation turned to how silly it is how we walk around Second Life building and wearing very much the same things we do in real life. I had recently discovered Bettina’s blog — and James graciously introduced us. It was just at the time that Bettina’s project (together with Rezzable Productions), the Garden of NPIRL (inspired by Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights), was happening.

Here’s the bottom line: the art that we saw there really moved us.

This one is by Sabine Stonebender (whose work we have also long admired). Click the thumbnail to see. Amazing, no?

Last month, Bettina announced on a Metanomics show, that NPIRL and the Fashion Institute of Technology were hoping to plan a project where RL and SL fashion designers collaborated.

So, this summer, we’d like to begin a new podast/blog series — on art and artists in Second Life, beginning with an artist whose work I discovered just last April, Alizarin Goldflake.

But before we begin to talk about her work in more detail (in our next post), a few comments about what we’ve discovered about the power of the virtual world, specifically Second Life, is in order.

As I have written elsewhere, and as many have noted before me, it is remarkably easy to feel very real and powerful emotions in Second Life. I am deeply fond of my avatar, Max Newbold, who, it seems represents the best of me and also some deep truths about me. She has, to my mind, the best clothes. She is brave. She is beautiful. I created her. She is, and is not, me — both, simultaneously. When Max is slighted, I am slighted. When Max looks at art, I am looking at art. How does this happen? In his book, I, Avatar, Mark Stephen Meadows, explains this in terms of our biology, the way we are hard-wired with “mirror neurons,”

It’s the actions and appearances of avatars that allow us to identify with them and gets the mirror neurons hot. They may be just pixels, but your brain responds as if they were human. Our wiring quickly bridges the gap between the real and fictional. (90)

Even as I write this, I am aware that this is patently obvious to anyone who has spent any time in Second Life (or any other virtual world). But there are all those others, who are skeptical…

When Max is transported into and through works of art in Second Life, I am too. Is it strange that I have been as deeply moved while looking at art in Second Life as I have been looking at some of my favorite things in the “real” world, Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses for example — sculptures that very directly engage the body? It seems that art in Second Life can have the visceral, bodily power of Baroque art (think: Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa). But there’s more. Even when I am in Second Life looking at art that IS possible in real life, I am looking at it in the context of an entire virtual — unreal — environment, that enhances it, just as it enhances and transforms everything inside it. So perhaps one of the big questions we will tackle in our new series is the question of precisely how the context of the virtual environment changes our experience of looking at art.

The great power of art in Second Life derives precisely, it seems to me, from its Not-Possible-In-Real-Life aspects, from the way it can — quite literally — move your body for you, lift you, drop you, move around you, move you around, immerse you (literally) — and as I am writing this, I realize that what it often does is PUSH you into unexpected positions and movements that can, in turn, have an affect of your body — your REAL body. And more — in Second Life your “camera” is not fixed. You can look at yourself inside a work of art. I find myself doing this all the time (as in the photo above — that’s Max there on the right edge). Somehow looking at myself while immersed in a work of art, or inside an installation of sorts, becomes very important. Clearly, I am not the only one who snaps pics like this (witness the NPIRL Garden photo pool in Flickr). And this is certainly NPIRL (Not Possible in Real Life).

And perhaps that explains why I feel so moved by Alizarin Goldflake’s work in Second Life. She creates completely immersive environments that one can inhabit and that move around you, stimulating the eyes, the ears — creating, as Steven Zucker (aka Sez Zabelin) noted, a true gesamtkustwerk.

But more on Alizarin and our time with her in her studio in our next post.

Here’s a taste of her work — this is a new piece called Night Light (TP from here).

Oh! And in the pic on the front of the video I am wearing gorgeous dress by 3Star Tyne (more on 3Star soon) and in the video itself I am wearing a dress by Raven Pennyfeather, inspired by Minoan Snake Goddess figures.

 Podcast Video [1:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

ok — I am blown away by photo-synth. Maybe I’m just an image-whore? Read my post on the tdt blog about all of the above.

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod