Month: October 2006

A colleague of mine, Peter Giles, Head of Digital Media at AFTRS, has written an interesting post on how animation lends itself to cross-media strategies.

On Friday night/Friday morning I presented my first inworld lecture inside the virtual world Second Life. Drawing from my articles in Slate Night Magazine, I spoke about the ‘Remediation of the Art Space in SL’. This lecture was part of a special session Anya Ixchel, the editor of Slate Night arranged for the New Media Consortium’s Impact of Digital Media Symposium. CDB Barkley has already podcast my session. Anya’s presentation was fabulous, so was the ‘Fashioning the Avatar’ show where we discussed unusual choices of avatars, and the SL musicians panel was great. Anya/Angela has posted all the links to all the sessions here. But then I had to leave (it was 2am in Australia by this point) so I could get some sleep for a radio interview. I was interviewed on Saturday morning by Alan Saunders of Radio National on the By Design show. I spoke about “Alternate Reality” design aesthetics and, you guessed it, Second Life. This is already podcast too!

But I want to mention too, the closing keynote of NMC’s Symposium was Howard Rheingold! You can listen to the podcast here.

Apologies for the late notice, but there has been an amazing week of events happening in Second Life. The New Media Consortium has been holding a 12 day Impact of Digital Media Symposium. The pic you see is an event I attended last night for the MacArthur Foundation press conference in to announce their $50 million investments to support programs in digital media (Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning). What was great is that they televised us in SL to the screens in the press conference as well, and took questions from us. Here is a post at NMC on the event. There are lots of pics of the event here, including many of Anya (the blonde) and a few with me in them (the black-haired chick with pink bows). hehe. Anyway, on Oct 20th at 7am (US time) Slate Night Magazine (the SL arts and entertainment magazine I write for) is having a special session. Here is the run-down from i-Anya’s blog:

* The Avatar as Communication – Dr Angela Thomas, Sydney University (Anya Ixchel, editor of Slatenight)

* Fashion parade: Fashioning the Avatar (showcasing the range of unique identities in SL)

* Remediation of the Art Space in SL – Christy Dena, Sydney University (Lythe Witte, writer for Slatenight)

* Music in Second Life: Panel Discussion and Live Music – with Silas Scarborough, ZeroOne Paz, Mel Cheeky, Cybster Curtis and Billy Thunders (Cletis Carr)

* Future Perfect: Projections forward to an even better world – Dell Wilberg (creative designer of Slatenight)

* Engaging the Disengaged: Using SL to Revitalize the Undergraduate Classroom – Danielle Mirliss and Heidi Trotta, Seton Hall University, NY (Danielle Damone and Heidi TeeCee, writers for Slatenight)

If you have Second Life downloaded already, and are a member of the NMC guests group (to access the NMC sim you need to be a guest of the group), here is the SLURL.

For a list of ongoing posts about the many other symposium events (including a talk with Howard Rheingold!), check the NMC Observer.  

The full schedule of the events is here. Oct 21st has Howard Rheingold!! Hope to ‘see’ you inworld! IM me if you’re having trouble figuring out how to get there. 🙂