joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

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.

See all photos I took of the intervention on Flickr

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.

Jan Northoff & Tobias Neisecke are building a New Berlin in Second Life - a replica of the german capital. If it feels a bit small, it is because it is optimized for avatars who are not more than two meters tall. The average avatar in SL is actually quite a bit taller and the two are having a conspiracy theory: The avatars are tall so people need to buy more land. You ever wondered why 512qm seem so small in SL? After all it’s hard to believe that the Lindens got confused because of using the metric system. I was wondering if they may have gradually increased the size.

Anyway, Jan and Tobias are quite a team: Tobias is a doctor who got bored with hospitals and Jan is an artist who got bored with art (I have much sympathy for that). They met only 5 months ago when Tobias ran into Jan’s tiny Berlin Mitte gallery. They are serious about turning New Berlin into a lucrative business and I think that they do have a chance. Lets put it like that: Their plan is much better than other plans of replicating real places in virtual spaces. They also came up with a very cool tool by combining Google Maps and SL’s map: Map In Map, a service that lets you find virtual representations of real places in SL.