Jeffrey Schnapp occupies the Pierotti Chair in Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000 with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary platform for testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world. Stanford Humanities Lab is a hybrid institution, a kind of Media/Tech Lab wedded to a Humanities and Arts research center, devoted to thinking outside of the box, to experimenting with public forms of scholarship and culture and to exploring the interstices between research and art practice. Schnapp’s current research interests lie in the domain of mixed reality approaches to scholarship, curatorship, and cultural programming and in a broad range of challenges placed under the general banner of “animating the archive.” Recent projects for example include a Mixed Reality Performance at the MITO Festival, an experiment in which physical spaces and musicians from different continents encountered one another on-line.
Associate Director Henrik Bennetsen, 14th January 2010, Roskilde University
Henrik Bennetsen is the associate director of the Stanford Humanities Lab. He maintains a strong interest in virtual worlds and open source technology and is currently engaged in the Speed Limits research project (a collaboration with the Danish Bornholm’s Kunstmuseum) that explores artistic expression and archiving inside virtual space. Previously, Henrik led the Life Squared (L2) research project and the construction of a 3D immersive art archive inside the virtual world of Second Life. In 2007 Bennetsen co-founded the Stanford Open Source Lab that has since grown to about 60 members from across the Stanford community. Henrik is Danish and has a MSc. in Media Technology and Games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc. in Medialogy from Aalborg University. Before his return to the world of academia, Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self-expression augmented by technology.
The Danish Museum Lolland-Falster invites everyone to join the new virtual time travel game KLIMATUR. The OpenSim game has been developed in cooperation between the museum and Wonderful Denmark.
On Friday the 9th of October Museum Lolland-Falster opened the exhibition KLIMATUR. The exhibition is a crossover between a traditional exhibition and a virtual game that takes the visitor on time travel through history. The traveler visits different periods which in one way or another has experienced changes to the climate. In the particular period the traveler is introduced to the period and the type of climate change, and the traveler is exposed to different challenges. The KLIMATUR game is designed to make the player more knowledgeable of the climate in different historic periods.
The virtual part of the exhibition has for practical reasons only been available from computers at the museum. But from the 11th of January, everyone with access to the internet will now be able to join the virtual time travel from Museum Lolland-Falster’s website. Here, you will find a link to the game and an instruction for downloading the viewer program. Unfortunately, all of this material currently only available in Danish.
Museum Lolland-Falster wishes everyone a bon voyage back in time. If any problems or questions should arise, feel welcome to get in touch with museum keeper Anne-Lotte Mathiesen. Enjoy!
A quick word: this paper was submitted for the 2010 ICA conference in Singapore. In the paper I discuss recent experiments by media producers in utilizing interactive features of online technologies, particularly websites and virtual worlds, to distribute television content. This discussion focuses on four case studies: CBS’s Social Rooms, NBC’s Viewing Parties, SyFy’s Ghost Hunters Live, and Metanomics from Second Life. In the analysis I discuss what these experiments say about the current relationship between producer-audience, and what the success or failure of these experiments could mean for the future of online television distribution.
The Association of Virtual Worlds invites all members to submit predictions for virtual worlds, not just for this new year of 2010, but for the next decade. Predictions can be based on research, experience, or your personal vision of the future. Send your prediction directly to edita@associationofvirtualworlds.com The AVW will compile predictions and publish them.
You might let yourself inspire by M Linden’s 2010 new years predictions for Second Life. M Linden recently wrote: “When I set my draw distance out 10 years and envision Second Life then, here is what I see:
• Everyone has an avatar. Avatars have the ability to travel across virtual worlds, maintaining their unique identity (and inventory) as they go. Some are stunningly vivid fantasy avatars and others are hyper-real. You express yourselves through your avatar using interfaces we weren’t able to imagine in 2010. Continued…
James Cameron’s return to motion pictures after the success of Titanic appears to be headed into the same distinguished realm of box office history. Released for the holidays, Avatar has already amassed over $1 billion in box office receipts worldwide. The movie has received critical raves for the visual effects and film-making techniques developed specifically to produce this movie. While they also note the simplistic, and at times derivative, script, the positive discourse focuses on the achievements in CGI technology and performance capture film-making, achieving what Robert Zemeckis has not yet been able to with his work in the same field.
For those who have not seen the movie, the story focuses on a military-industrial attempt to obtain from the planet Pandora a mineral named “unobtainium”. As part of this attempt, a group of scientists have been given permission to make contact with the planet’s indigenous life, the Na’vi. The scientists devised a special technology to do this: the avatars. The scientsits genetically combine Na’vi and human DNA to create a Na’vi body that the human can inhabit via a wireless upload/download technology. While the specific details of this cybernetic link are never fully explained, the human goes into a capsule with neural interfaces whenever s/he wants to download his/her consciousness into his/her genetically create Na’vi host body; his/her own DNA was used to insure that this downloading occurs without a problem. A crippled soldier inhabits one of these bodies, and over the course of his interacting with the Na’vi comes to learn about them and, more importantly for the story, himself.
I won’t say anything more about the story. If you are interested, I would recommend seeing it on a large screen in 3-D to fully appreciate the technological achievement of the film-making. The point of this essay is to discuss how Cameron’s Avatar relates to virtual worlds. Continued…
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