New Media Initiatives Blog

It seems that Second Life is reaching a critical mass. There are more and more rumblings in the museosphere about second life and what museums and non-profits are doing inside it. Most institutions seem to be in the evaluation phase, and that is precisely where we are within the Walker. So far Robin and I are the only people with accounts. I’m Newme Nozaki, Robin is Arty Moody. I hope to post some of the things I find in my other life as I explore it, so I have added a new category to the NMI blog, appropriately titled “Second Life.”

As a roundup, here are some things I’ve found useful or funny while getting my bearings in the metaverse:

• Beth has been blogging quite extensively about Second Life, and her online communities category has a wealth of resources I’m still sifting through.
• Infoisland is a blog discussing Museum and Library topics in Second Life.
• Second Life Art News is a whole blog centered around art created in SL.
• The Sundance Festival even had a film screening in SL, which the NYTimes wrote up. You’ll want to bugmenot. [Thanks Megan]
• The Sundance Channel has an island in SL. They blogged the whole process of setting it up, building, etc. Very useful.
• Museums and the Web is going to have a session, A Second Life for your Museum: The use of 3D collaborative virtual environments by museums, which I am very much looking forward to.

I would post an image of my avatar here, except the grid is down at the moment. This is one of the other things about second life you must get used to. Like real life, sometimes, you need a little maintenance. Maybe I should work on getting a first life.

As has been mentioned here in the past, I have been tinkering with quartz composer for use as dynamic, digital signage. It is a good fit: extremely fast, can talk to the internet, usable on a lot of different systems. There are a growing number of locations within the museum where we’d like to apply dynamic signage, but off the shelf systems to do it are often convoluted and proprietary, not to mention expensive. Currently in the Walker Cinema, we use a DVD that I render in After Effects and update periodically. This affords a lot of control, but also takes a fair amount of labor to update.

It is this kind of an application where Quartz Composer can work well. Any quartz composer movie can be saved as a quicktime movie, but there are some limitations:

• no mouse and keyboard events
• no contents download from Internet (RSS feeds, images…)
• edition of the input parameters of the compositions

Notice that second one? That’s the doozy if you want your quartz comp quicktime movie to use an RSS feed to get the text.

There is a simple workaround, though, and that is to simply download the RSS feed to the local machine before you open the movie in quickitime. You simply build the composition (before saving it as a movie) to look for that file on the local drive. Here’s a quick command to grab our RSS feed and save it:

/usr/bin/curl http://calendar.walkerart.org/news/today.wac > /tmp/today.html

And then your path for the RSS feed inside quartz is:

file://localhost/tmp/today.html

Problem one solved. This lets us manually open up the quicktime movie and export it to any format quicktime can export to. Once you have it in that format, you can transform it, play it or transfer it with much more ease.

I’ll post about how to automate the whole process in the future, and the problems that occur when you try to deal with HD resolution screens. In the meantime, here is a short demo of what I have been able to achieve with quartz composer and our identity system (a work in progress).

WebWalker is back from a little nap. Here’s some things to spruce up your Friday morning.

• Best news so far this year, Stanford University’s Henry Lowood has taken over the IGDA Preservation SIG, which aims to finally work towards preserving the history of video games. For me personally, this is the most important thing happening in the museum realm today. He’s also heading a panel at Game Developer’s Conference entitled “Ten Games You Need to Play”. -Brent
• Speaking of video games, word has come down that musical mastermind Brian Eno will be producing the soundtrack for Spore. Or, rather, he’ll be designing the algorithm that generates the music for Spore. I was excited about this game before, but now I can feel like I’m getting a real cultural experience when I waste away my hours in it. [via CDM]
• If you were at Piotr’s lecture last night, he mentioned a few sites that contain his work. His first site is The Spleen, but you’ll want to head directly to Inward Vessels or Outward Vessels, since the main page doesn’t seem to be working right now. Secondly there is Simple Math at simplemath.mcad.edu. To listen to and download the work of the labor camp, head to laborcamp.mcad.edu. And finally, don’t forget his work in Gallery 9, which is extensive.

Thursday, January 18, 7:00 pm, Walker Cinema

If you've visited the Walker recently, you've likely encountered the captivating animated dolphin, a creature that engages visitors in a dialogue about subjects ranging from the philosophic to the prosaic. The Walker-commissioned Dolphin Oracle II is the work of Minneapolis-based artist/designer Piotr Szyhalski, created in collaboration with Richard Shelton. A professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Szyhalski works in a variety of media -- illustration, photography, typography, drawing, painting, sound -- which are often combined in installations, interactive media, and live performance. What remains central to his production is the insistence on the viewer as a "co-creator" of the artwork. Szyhalski will converse with Steve Dietz, director of ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network and organizer of the recent exhibition Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California. Founding director of the Walker's New Media Initiatives, Dietz has curated digital media exhibitions worldwide and has contributed to numerous publications and the recently published book Else/Where: Mapping -- New Cartographies of Networks and Territories.

This lecture will be webcast and archived on the Walker Channel.