23/03/2011, Quebec, Canada.
A brand new eco-friendly Flash Mob by Teste sur des humains.
Saturday 2 April 2011
Saturday 13 November 2010
Sunday 4 July 2010
Monday 10 May 2010
Potlatch - "Plant Her" by Arbit Delacroix
Potlatch - "Plant Her" (Music video) from Arbit Delacroix on Vimeo.
If not anything else, Second Life can offer the proper scenery for a music video shooting.
Sunday 9 May 2010
Augmented Reality fun mob!
After a couple flash mob cancellations and some misunderstandings I suppose – nobody gave the signal for the Edinburgh’s Big Freeze – there’s something new in the area: the first augmented reality flashmob! Simply by downloading an application for the iPhones and Android devices, anybody could turn up in Dam Square, Amsterdam, on Saturday the 24th of April with his virtual statue (or, is it, his imaginary friend?).
Simple (well, as long as one possesses the proper device), fun and unique, this flash mob attracted indeed a large turnout. Throughout their mobile devices, participants and viewers had a completely new view of the well-known square: Spiderman, Batman and Darth Vader were also there! Sander Veenhof is the person who conceived and realized this fantastic idea, after teaming up with TAB Worldmedia , a company that specialises in GPS based virtual outdoor media applications.
So, to sum up, if flash mob is the digital community that becomes real (since a forwarded email activates a digital community to perform a fun action in the city), what is the Augmented Reality flash mobbing all about? The digital community turns up in Dam Square and thus becomes physical and real. But the fun is, once again, through digitization: the viewer/participant has to look through his mobile device to realize that we are not alone after all.
Does this form of urban play indicate that we are experiencing too much connectivity and too much information at the moment? Do we really need all these digital aids in order to have fun in the city? Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. But it looks like our eyes are currently trained to accept this new reality.
Simple (well, as long as one possesses the proper device), fun and unique, this flash mob attracted indeed a large turnout. Throughout their mobile devices, participants and viewers had a completely new view of the well-known square: Spiderman, Batman and Darth Vader were also there! Sander Veenhof is the person who conceived and realized this fantastic idea, after teaming up with TAB Worldmedia , a company that specialises in GPS based virtual outdoor media applications.
So, to sum up, if flash mob is the digital community that becomes real (since a forwarded email activates a digital community to perform a fun action in the city), what is the Augmented Reality flash mobbing all about? The digital community turns up in Dam Square and thus becomes physical and real. But the fun is, once again, through digitization: the viewer/participant has to look through his mobile device to realize that we are not alone after all.
Does this form of urban play indicate that we are experiencing too much connectivity and too much information at the moment? Do we really need all these digital aids in order to have fun in the city? Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. But it looks like our eyes are currently trained to accept this new reality.
Sunday 2 May 2010
the carnivalesque body versus the avatar body
“the carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the base of laughter”
[Bakhtin, 8]
[Bakhtin, 8]
Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis on “Rabelais and his world” was the starting point for the parallel study of the appearance, the aesthetics and the symbolism of the carnival during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with those of the digital world of Second Life. This study attempted to identify common traits and differences, and raise questions concerning the way that we deal with the identity, the body and the ideal today.
The aim was to initially approach the experience of being “behind the mask” in both cases, then, to juxtapose the grotesque body of the carnival to the aesthetics of the avatars and finally to raise questions on their utopian perspectives.
In the Middle Ages, people participated in two lives: the official and the carnival life. The latter is the former, only turned “upside down” and “inside out”. The coexistence of these two worlds shaped their attitude towards life and the existence in the world. Second Life is definitely not the physical world turned “upside down”. In fact, it seems to project more of a reflection than a negation of the contemporary environment, nevertheless, it allows us to explore our current fears, hopes and needs and throughout digital individuals to study issues of multiple identities and fragmented selves.
But is this all about cyberspace and its promising digital worlds? Although very critical on the consumerism models of the virtual worlds, Gregory Little believes that the internet has the potential to become a site of resistance and that avatars may offer an “alternative, post-biological discourse of the body”. Throughout his “Manifesto for Avatars” project, he suggests ways of combining visual codes, signifying signs and social images in order to create avatars that celebrate fragmentation, dissolution and hybridity, in order to resist the forces of the capital. The images that Little creates are far from the pop idols and the generic representations described above. By playing with races, genders and age and by combining animal, human and machine characteristics, Little’s avatars could be seen as projections of the contemporary “digital grotesque”.
Images from the Manifesto for Avatars, by Gregory Little, source: http://www.gregorylittle.org/avatars/manifesto.html
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich. Rabelais and his world. Indiana University Press, 1984. Print.
Little, Gregory . “A Manifesto for Avatars .” (1999): http://www.gregorylittle.org/avatars/manifesto.html Web. 8 Oct 2009.
The aim was to initially approach the experience of being “behind the mask” in both cases, then, to juxtapose the grotesque body of the carnival to the aesthetics of the avatars and finally to raise questions on their utopian perspectives.
In the Middle Ages, people participated in two lives: the official and the carnival life. The latter is the former, only turned “upside down” and “inside out”. The coexistence of these two worlds shaped their attitude towards life and the existence in the world. Second Life is definitely not the physical world turned “upside down”. In fact, it seems to project more of a reflection than a negation of the contemporary environment, nevertheless, it allows us to explore our current fears, hopes and needs and throughout digital individuals to study issues of multiple identities and fragmented selves.
But is this all about cyberspace and its promising digital worlds? Although very critical on the consumerism models of the virtual worlds, Gregory Little believes that the internet has the potential to become a site of resistance and that avatars may offer an “alternative, post-biological discourse of the body”. Throughout his “Manifesto for Avatars” project, he suggests ways of combining visual codes, signifying signs and social images in order to create avatars that celebrate fragmentation, dissolution and hybridity, in order to resist the forces of the capital. The images that Little creates are far from the pop idols and the generic representations described above. By playing with races, genders and age and by combining animal, human and machine characteristics, Little’s avatars could be seen as projections of the contemporary “digital grotesque”.
Images from the Manifesto for Avatars, by Gregory Little, source: http://www.gregorylittle.org/avatars/manifesto.html
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich. Rabelais and his world. Indiana University Press, 1984. Print.
Little, Gregory . “A Manifesto for Avatars .” (1999): http://www.gregorylittle.org/avatars/manifesto.html Web. 8 Oct 2009.
Sunday 24 January 2010
wicked!
Does storytelling have a place in digital worlds? Frigg Ragu, a storytelling researcher at the University College of Oslo, Norway creates a magic, snow-covered (of course) place in Second Life to narrate ‘The Companion’, an old Norwegian folktale. The story is about love and, at the same time, about the discovery of the self and the realization of friendship and loyalty. A boy starts a journey in order to find a girl and in the meanwhile he meets witches, he fights trolls and he makes real friends.
The Second Life location is seducing and fascinating, but what is most important here is that it makes a proper environment to house the storytelling. And even in the digital world, it is all about genuine storytelling. The visitor has to make a journey himself, to discover and follow a not-so-obvious route in order to listen to the parts of the story. Instead of limiting the imagination as one would have thought, the site offers a framework for the narration of the tale. Besides, the visitor does not live in the story, nor does he meets the protagonists, he is invited though to interact with the environment and explore it , while looking for the succession of the story parts.
In an interview, Frigg Ragu hopes that the Second Life Residents that experience The Companion will take off with impulses to retell the story and in that way keep it alive. That is what motivates him to experience with the medium, and he does it well.
To read more about The Companion see this, or simply visit the Second Life location here.
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