“Stadtplandienst vs. Me” is a video based on a court trial about a copyright violation that “Stadtplandienst“, an online map service, accused me of. On Wednesday, September 17 (20h / 22h) there will be a screening at the YOUin3D.com Headquarters, Hannoverscher Str. 3, 10115 Berlin.
After the premiere on Wednesday I will post the video here.
Last night we organized a screening of “Mein wunderbares Ich”, a documentary about Second Life Residents by Susanne Jäger that initiated and conceived together with the director. The film was aired on Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) at the same time. Parallely there was a screening at Alexanderplatz in New Berlin / Second Life.
For both screenings, the one in RL and the one in SL we came close to the max amount of visitors that the location / server can welcome. In the RL screening we projected the image on the shop window of the galerie space, so it was visible from inside and outside the gallery.
Some of the photos above were taken by Tobias Neisecke of YOUseeMEin3D, the creators of New Berlin.
You can watch / download the whole film in MP4 format here. Unfortunately it is in German and has no English suptitles (yet).
Aram Barthol, architct, media, performance + intervention artist and a friend of mine marked the NewBerlin Sim that YouSeeMeIn3D has set up resently in Real Life. Despite heavy rain the performance went smoothly without the lag one usually expects when particle effects get used excessively. The man with the camera is Arial Schlesinger aka Ariel Chico, frequent contributer to Minor Urban Disasters. I expected he might score for the Flickr group when Aram drew the line across Karl-Liebknecht Straße. Besides Second Life, this scene also referenced the Arcade + C64 game classic Frogger - not intentionally I guess, but perfectly in line with Aram’s body of work.
The Sim limit runs right through a MacDonalds Restaurant, a Church, the train station and Kaufhof, the large retail store at Alexander Platz. So does Aram’s line.
More and probably better images can be found here. If you wonder about the TV tower: I had my camera attached to a guy in a cop’s outfit. While I was taking the snapshot, he got bounced off the SIM and my camera went tried to follow. This was the image I ended up with.
[...] Wie aus sicheren Quellen verlautet formieren sich derzeit zwei feindlich gegenüberstehende Gruppierungen -€“ Polizisten und Autonome -, deren Zusammentreffen auf dem Alexanderplatz in newBERLIN unvermeidbar scheint. Der Höhepunkt der Ausschreitungen wird gegen 17.00 Uhr erwartet.
Apparently there are plans to re-enact the traditional May 1 riots that have haunted Berlin in the last 20 years in Second Life (newBerlin). Having turned into a ritual the May 1 riots in old Berlin are pretty much re-enactments themselves.
Real riots in virtual worlds would of course look quite different. We have seen hacker attacks on Servers, but they are usually not politically motivated. Arguably protests that slowed down the FN headquarters and maybe even the famous penis attack on Anshe Chung are exceptions. Compared to the May 1 riots in old Berlin one can imagine a reverse development in SL: They begin as re-enactments and will become authentic in the next years. The equivalent of hooligans hiding amongst peaceful protesters would in SL be hooligans with coding skills hiding amongst hooligans without.
