It was such a busy autumn, and so many things slipped by. I got to the opening of Non-Perishable, an exhibition of artworks in containers by Marina Münter, at Berg at Nordan Art in Second Life, and made a mental note to go back to look inside all the containers. With fewer avatars, it should […]
This term I have been teaching for the first time, and there were two things that I wanted to get across. One is the immense power of the behemoths of the internet (including Google and its right arm, YouTube), and the historically contested nature of the internet. It was never quite the place of harmony […]
Mixed realism in a future city. Archive footage and virtual world meet across time in urban space. In this machinima, I recorded some of Cica Ghost’s latest installation in Second Life, Future, and overlaid it with The City, a film from the FDR Presidential Archive on the future of the American city made in 1939. […]
Retelling a popular story is never a waste of time. It is in the rereading and retelling that stories are kept alive, and the reinterpretations revitalise the original. In The Digital Pilgrims, I set out to portray Chaucer’s Canterbury travellers in another, very different, setting. The type on the pages of a book may be […]
Linden Lab has long granted licenses to Second Life residents for the taking of snapshots and machinima, reflecting how Second Life was established as a user created space that encouraged creativity and content reuse. In many other games, where they were created by teams of developers, the making of machinima was contested as a breach […]
Making the video Artistic ideas always have inspiration from somewhere, but sometimes the inspiration is more simple and direct than others. In this case, it was a visit to an exhibition put together by a friend, Indigo Claire. I arrived thinking I was too late for the opening, but I’d misread and I was a […]
‘Be yourself in VR’: but you’re never alone in the new Facebook Spaces Facebook clearly would not want you to be anything else, as their real name policy well demonstrates. A singular identity means they can easily track you and collect your data, and sell advertising on the back of it. I remember friends ranting […]
This post about Falling Between Worlds has been long in the making. I have been doing a full write-up of my thought processes and the connections and influences and it is about 6,500 words. Way too long for a blog post! It is a simple storyline on the surface, but it very definitely takes place […]
‘A good interpretation of anything – a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society – takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads instead leads us somewhere else – into an admiration of its own elegance, of its […]
When a prominent film director takes an interest in a minor film form, he’s going to be noticed. And so it was when Peter Greenaway said machinima is ‘the visual cultural phenomenon of the 21st century’ in 2010, and when he said ‘we must dump the idea of THE FRAME – the frame – like […]
