Gary Zabel on Behance. Music and China. Through the Virtual Looking Glass. In April 2010, the Virtual Art Initiative and the Caerleon Sims in Second Life and OpenSim hosted an exhibition of the art of virtual worlds in the real world Harbor Gallery of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The Boston exhibition was part of an unprecedented international collaboration that exhibited the work of artists from more than twenty nations in real world galleries in six countries: France, Holland, Germany, Brazil, Australia, and the USA.
Virtual Worlds are computer generated, immersive, three-dimensional environments that allow people from around the globe to interact with one another through “avatars” (digital bodies) and to shape their environments, both individually and collectively, by using graphical and programming tools. In process of development since the 1980s, virtual worlds now have more than 12 million participants, and include such venues as Second Life, OpenSim, VastPark, Blue Mars, and World of Warcraft. Contact us. Ernst Bloch and the Utopian Dimension in Music. All Things Connected. Wagner and Nietzsche. Adorno on Music. The Problem of Political Music in Eisler and Weill. Virtual art initiative augmented reality project.
I’ve created this website to support the work of the Virtual Art Initiative in developing augmented reality methods for exhibiting virtual art in real world environments. In general, while virtual reality seeks to present a fully immersive alternative to the “real world” - i.e. the world of ordinary experience - augmented reality introduces virtual objects into the world of ordinary experience by linking those objects to real world spatial coordinates. Augmented reality is therefore especially well-suited to act as a bridge between virtual worlds and the real world. VAI’s Augmented Realitty Project is a natural sequel to the April 2010 Through the Virtual Looking Glass exhibition at the Harbor Gallery at UMass Boston, which was a mixed reality exhibition of virtual art employing digital projection, digital frames, dvd players, a cinematic monitor, and “real” art based on virtual models.
If you would like to add anything to the website, please let me know. Notes for Through the Virtual Looking Glass. Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria Introduction In 1348 the Black Death reached the European mainland in the form of a bacillus carried by fleas living in the fur of rats. It seems to have originated in China about fifteen years earlier, made its way slowly to Constantinople, from there to Sicily and the Italian peninsula, and from Italy to Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Poland, and Russia. Wherever the bacillus appeared it unleashed bubonic plague and associated outbreaks of pneumonia. The result was agonizing death, economic devastation, and social hysteria, a level of misery unprecedented even by the sanguinary standards of the Fall of Rome or the ensuing Dark Ages. In Paris, over eight hundred people gave up the ghost every day. Whole villages emptied and farms were abandoned as rural inhabitants fled the advance of the epidemic.
The three hundred years spanning 1000 to 1300 were a period of growth for feudal Europe. Precipitously. Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria Part One: Primitive Accumulation Chapter One Civilization and Barbarism in the New World Nowhere is the connection between the understanding of indigenous artworks, on the one hand, and the plunder and subjugation of their creators, on the other, more evident than in the event that most dramatically inaugurates capitalism as a global system: the discovery and conquest of the Americas.
Columbus conducted his first voyage of discovery the same year the Spaniards wrested Granada from the Moors and drove them and the unconverted Jews from their country. This avarice was not a simple matter of greed for material possessions. For their part, the Spanish monarchs also recognized that gold was the privileged path to the realization of all temporal and spiritual goals. In capitalism, at least in its core countries, the extraction of surplus value is masked by the apparently equitable exchange of labor for a wage. Gods volunteered to leap into the blaze. Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria Part One: Primitive Accumulation Chapter Two Kongo and the Iconoclastic Controversy The Portuguese arrived on the west coast of Africa a half-century before the discovery of the New World, but they brought with them the same combination of lust for gold and militant Catholicism that the Spaniards were to carry all the way across the Atlantic.
The Portuguese eventually found the East African kingdom of Ethiopia, which had been ruled by Coptic Christians since the 3rd century A.D. In the second half of 1482, an expeditionary fleet of three caravels under the command of Diogo Cao set sail from the Portuguese fortress of Elmina on the Gold Coast. In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and potent prince, King John II did order this land to be discovered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Cao, an esquire in his household. capital city of Mbanza Kongo.
Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria Part One: Primitive Accumulation Chapter Three Enlightenment in the South Pacific European expansion into Africa and the Americas in the sixteenth century lies at the origins of global capitalism. It also constitutes a radical break between the mediaeval and modern periods. Before that break, the ruling classes of Europe acted in a world in which their will to power was constrained by Islamic empires to be sure, but also by the rudimentary state of navigation and cartography, and by a consequent ignorance of global geography.
To begin with, certain scientific advances made the great voyages of discovery possible. Lands and waterways in such a fashion that long distance voyages could be undertaken and, even more importantly, repeated. At first, the ruling classes of Europe and their priests and other ideological functionaries were not able to grasp the epochal significance of this situation.
Hegemony. The jibe is perfectly understandable. His fear, no doubt, was justified. Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagoria Part One: Primitive Accumulation Chapter Four Curiosity Cabinets, World's Fairs, and Ethnographic Museums The material culture of indigenous peoples lies at the center of the three situations of first contact with Europeans that we have discussed so far in this book: the Spanish in the New World, the Portuguese in Africa, and the English in the South Pacific. It occupies that central position for two reasons. As expressions of communal freedom and potential rallying points of resistance, indigenous objects, especially those with religious significance, were dangerous to the Europeans who were carried to the four corners of the earth by the expansion of the capitalist system. The primitive accumulation of capital that lay at the origins of the modern world system in the sixteenth century involved the transference of material resources from Africa and the Americas to Europe.
The passion for collecting was also an innovation of the Renaissance. The magical revival. Phantasmagoria Part Two. PhantasmagoriaPart Two: Marx and the Fetish Chapter Five At the British Museum In June of 1850 Karl Marx obtained a ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum. He had arrived in London the previous year as a political exile, a refugee from a revolution that failed but that shook the world nonetheless.
In 1848 the Parisian masses detonated an international explosion when they overthrew the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe. Marx fought on the socialist left wing of the revolution in a number of capacities and in more than one country, but nowhere more brilliantly than in his native land as editor of the radical Rhineland newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the "organ of democracy," as its masthead proclaimed. Unbeknownst to Marx, the Museum had played a small and rather comic role in the tumultuous events of 1848.
And that the members of their Western Division would first gather in Russell Square, near the Museum. At least have the outlines clear. THESES ON THE ART OF VIRTUAL WORLDS. The Radical Aesthetics of William Morris. Escaping the Dark Time. Watch Through the Virtual Looking Glass Episodes. Advancing the art of virtual worlds. Virtual Art Initiative (an associate member organization of the nonprofit company, Media Working Group, Inc.) is an organization of artists, writers, musicians, and scholars who are using the immersive and interactive digital media of such virtual worlds as Second Life to develop new forms of artistic content. Virtual worlds are computer generated three-dimensional environments that allow people from around the globe to interact with one another through “avatars” (digital bodies) and shape their environments, both individually and collectively, by using graphical and programming tools.
Those involved in the Initiative believe that virtual worlds are like photography, cinema, video, electronic music, and so on in that they provide the opportunity, in the form of a new technology, for radically innovative forms of aesthetic expression. Member artists, writers, and scholars (Second Life avatar name first, real life name second, if revealed): Phil 281. 1. Instructor Information 2, Introduction 3. Caerleon Sims 4. 5. 6. 7. Art. My interest in art, especially new media art, is probably a legacy from my father. For ten years after World War 2, he worked as a professional photographer, and then learned electronics as part of a new job installing automatic-return bowling alley machines. He taught me both photography - especially darkroom work - and basic electronics when I was growing up.
In many ways, photography is the oldest form of "new media art," a term that also includes cinema, video art, electronic music, and the currently proliferating forms of digital, or computerized, art. While I have been a photographer since I was an adolescent, I more recently became involved in creating art and working with artists in such virtual worlds as Second Life and OpenSim. The slide show above includes some of my photographs, still images of my virtual art, and some of the work I've been doing with the i-Pad. Below you can find links to my machinimas. Occupy Gifs.