Once again Ars Virtua plays host to the Streaming Museum. The Streaming Museum 2 is the second show featuring exhibitions opening on all seven contents and the 8th continent Second Life. You can read the full press release at ArsVirtua.com. We are located in world on the roof of our gallery in Butler. To teleport there in game you can follow this slurl.
For this iteration they asked all hosts to do 20 second promo bumpers for their location. This is ours. Enjoy.

Yes! You can haz!

After Talking to Steve Cooley at the last Works opening he decided to consider my leading questions about another Sidescroller event as “popular demand”. I am hoping to pull in some sort of collaboration with the game developers club at San Jose State. We shall see. I’ll keep you posted. Come down to Works/San Jose Saturday November 8th for a night of art Gallery Gaming! This is the kind of thing that needs to be happening in San Jose.

Read More about SIDESCROLLER3 : SHMUP LOVE

I don’t know what this means yet but Ill tell you what it is becoming. My 10th year High school reunion is coming up, the Friday after thanksgiving. After some debate have decided that I will be going but the more I think about it the more I realize that I can not attend any such event without it becoming some sort of performance art. If its going to become performance art, I might as well revel in it. Fist I was just going to go really drunk but I, honestly that will probably happen anyway and I am sure a good number of the other attendances have that idea as well. So then I was thinking I would go as an astronaut. I figured if kid nutirno can be a space man so can I. Id get a space suit and if everybody asked me what I do now, which is what these types of events always seem to be about. I’d say, “Oh, I work for NASA.” “Its no biggie, I just got back from space. What do you do?” Id even make some business cards, ‘cus everybody will want to give me theirs. But then Human Giant totally stole my idea. So I decided I don’t need to make anything up Ill just go as an extreme stereotype of myself. High school was all about pidgonholing everyone into a category for easy labeling and persecuting. So I find it incredibly fitting. I figure I can play a poindexter pretty well because I kida am one. So I am working one becoming an amalgamation of personas in pop culture. (pop culture makes the best personas) So far inspirations I am thinking of are, Project Mayhem and Myth Busters with some Michael Bolton and Dwight Shroot. To put together this ensemble. I will need a shaved head. Done! I am already awesome. Next a goatee, working on it. Shouldn’t be a problem. Next glasses, all good geeks have glasses, I know my eyesight isn’t perfect so it may be time to see the optometrist. Ive got a month to get a prescription. Should be doable. I’ll try to schedule an appointment on Monday. I need a collard shirt. I should have one somewhere. It would be cool to get an   logo either silk-screened or as a badge on the shirt. Sport my eccentricity. And finally the icing on the cake would be a think geek lo-rez digital tie. I have always wanted one anyway and this will be a good excuse. I just hope they are in stock. Now if I had the money Id also roll up in a segway, a stretch segway with ladies and bubbly in the back. That would rock. (Woz, if your listening this is something YOU need to do!) Any other bright ideas that would really make this getup rule?

Yesterday Tim, Rosa, me, Sabrina, Max, Mariam, Frank, James and the Dave’s were hanging around this old Moon Patrol arcade game after omelets. …And now there gone.

I haven’t made a self-portrait in a long time. I was sick for my birthday and having my friends around helped me keep my spirits up, but now I am back at home in bed. My cold has caught up with me and there is not much you can do when you’re sick except think. It’s lonely, especially when coming down off the high you feel when you get to spend time with old friends you rarely see. Lying here, I begin to ruminate on the fact that I am 3 decades old. …And at this point it’s gotten hard to write. This kind of isolation / uncertainty in my head is easier to express with pixels than words I guess.

Top photo by Andrew Ho
All others by John Bruneau.

Works / San Jose celebrated its grand reopening with re:group, the members exhibition. My most recent work to date “Bombs ¬ ROMs” made its debut. ‘¬’ is scientific negation, pronounced ‘not’. “Bombs ¬ ROMs” is based on my conflicting feelings toward the 80s. My art is influenced heavily by video game nostalgia. Yet the 80s were a time of extreme patriotism and nationalism in the US. The 80s cold war, Regan era mindset of USA #1! now days seams laughable if not embarrassing. This mindset however is often carried on by those heroes of the 80s, the classic arcade world record holders. For many of them it still is about keeping USA on top of the high score list. Thus this piece has become my war on terror era critique on myself. In it I am trying to reconcile my own feelings of love and nostalgia for 80s video game culture and the political era in which it blossomed.

“Bombs ¬ ROMs” was created using Atari 2600 ROMs. The “USA” Bombs and the exploding city background were each created in Batari Basic. Batari Basic is coding language based on Basic which all enables one to write and compile their own Atari 2600 ROMs. These two ROMs we then loaded in jit.atari2600 a library for Max/MSP/Jitter that functions as an Atari 2600 emulator. jit.atari2600 allows for emulation of hardware circuit bending. I was thus able to manipulate the ROMs had I programmed in order to create the skewed results. There is something to be said about warping your own creations.

The ‘¬’  in the title is a reference to the notorious Pac-Man port for the Atari 2600. This version of Pac-Man, programmed by Tod Frye is partially blamed for the video game crash of 1983. The story goes, someone at Atari wrote “Why Frye?” on the side of the company’s Pac-Man arcade machine. Tod Frye then used scientific notation by putting a line over “Why”, making it read “Why NOT Fry?”

re:group will run through September 12th 2008

So I meant to blog during Zero1. With all that goes on its nearly impossible so I applaud those who did. So here is my Zero1 wrap up based on the awesome documentation done by others. I had two projects in SJ01 this year, which was admittedly less than I had in ZeroOne / ISEA 2006 but still quite a lot to try to stay on top of.

The bigger of the two projects was Tool Shed Days. It was collaborative piece with Red76, and Ars Virtua. It was one of the FUSE residencies sponsored by Cadre and the Montalvo Arts Center. This project was one aspect of several loosely associated pieces. Such as Befriend a Recruiter, Second Home, Revolutionary Dinner, as well as the Tool Shed Days installation that was part of the Superlight exhibit in the San Jose Museum of Art. A full documentation page is coming soon. The picture to the right is of me hanging the pirate radio transmitter so we could broadcast our dinner conversation. Interestingly enough this image of my ass climbing a tree was printed in the San Jose Mercury News as part of their Zero1 special coverage. Kuniko Vroman of Montalvo published an article in the Switch Journal highlighting this work as well as the other FUSE residences.
ZERO1SJ/FUSE, Tool Shed Days

I also did my own smaller project. Buildup Sub-SoFA which was part of SubZero, the First Friday street festival in San Jose’s SoFA district. Buildup was originally Shown as part of Art Along the Avenue in Emeryville. It worked very well as a public art piece and so I decided to submit it to Bruce Labadie who was organizing the street installations for SubZero. Buildup is a fun interactive video installation that plays with ideas of crowds and time with undertones of surveillance and performance. My Buildup page will soon be updated with videos captured at the event. Julia Bradshaw from ARTSHIFT San Jose published and article about the SubZero street fair installations which highlighted Buildup Sub-Sofa as well as Thomas Azmuth and James Stone’s FontanaBot.
SoFA Presents a 01SJ/First Friday Bash

Finally Id like to give some cred to Cookie Evans who ran around all week, camera in hand, shooting everything. Check out his pictures of the events on his flickr account.
Portal
Ice Age
Urban Observatory
FontanaBot
More 01SJ Festival 08

It was late at night and memories of my family and my Atari 800 just kept coming. This post was in response to a question poised on the gamer blog, gaygamer.net.

What Was Your First Console?

Atari 800, probably about ‘85, the NES was just hitting big. My uncle gave it to us. He had a few Ataris and this one was extra I guess. He also gave us a slew of games. Most of which were utter nonsense. I never figured out how to take off in “jumbo jet pilot” or what the point of “squish ‘em” was. But “Joust”, “Star Raiders 2″, and “Journey to the Planets” we played on end. My little brother even locked the whole family out of the house once so he could get more Joust time. The games didn’t really have music other than an intro tune so we would make our own on my mom’s Casio-esque keyboard. That was player 2’s prerogative in 1 player games.

My dad invited a homeless man over for dinner once and he saw us playing and wanted to play Pac-Man. Luckily we had it but the joystick didn’t feel right to him. It wasn’t like how he remembered in the arcade and he wanted a surface to leverage. So for the next hour my brother and I set out to assemble him a reasonable facsimile of an arcade tabletop for the controller out of plywood scraps and old shelves. He was pumped and man did he rule at Pac-Man. He knew the patterns and had his timing down pat. He tried to explain to my brother and I that there were safe zones where the ghosts would never get us. We watched in awe but could never recreate the wizardry.

My uncle also gave us old analogue computing magazines with games. Not on disk but in code, printed. I got my first programming experience typing Atari Basic code in line by line. It took several hours of hunting and pecking and debugging my mistakes. And after all that there was no way to save, we didn’t have the floppy drive. My cousin was using it for college or something.

My mom didn’t game much but when she did she gamed with much zeal and broke our classic joystick and our replacement so finally we got a trackball. I still have my Atari 800 tackball and all. Still works fine aside from the keyboard missing a few letters. I got a new classic joystick for it and a sega controller as well. Every once in a while my cousins try to get it back from me claiming that I was just “borrowing” it. But I luvz it too much to let it go.

Some follow up:
The rest of the conference went well enough.  It continued to feel it a little dry and ditched from the virtual world itself. After the conference sessions I joined a few instance raids, and those to me were far more interesting interactions. My party members and I discussed the implications of virtual worlds and online environments intermixed with warcrys and attack stratagems, all while battling to stay alive. I made good friends, we had become science war buddies.  In my opinion that is how the entire conference should have been designed. Rather than distilling World of Warcraft down to a chatroom, all presenters and participants should have touted their ideas while battling for their lives.  Of course, it is no small feat to truly engage the environment of wow but how else honor points in the world of academia.

Science Magazine’s follow-up article to the conference:
Slaying Monsters for Science

My “photos” from the Warcraft Science conference.

Call me Science Again. I am a member of the Science Guild on Earthen Ring. I flew to Durotar today to attend what has been hailed as the first Science Conference in World of Warcraft. There was a great turn out. I have been grinding with my fellow scienticians all week and they are a great group of people. I was a bit skeptical, however, about how the actual conference would play out. I know from my experiences with Ars Virtua, that organizing conferences in virtual worlds is no easy task, especially in WoW. Audio was a no go, which was expected. It is exactly what we went through in the first day of our Borders Conference last year. All conversation took place on the guild chat channel. The medium itself essentially became a glorified chat room. I soon came to realize virtual location didn’t actually matter and decided to slay some burning blade fanatics as I followed the conversation in the chat window. The conversation quickly turned to more of a social interaction debate than focusing on what I would call the “hard sciences”. guild relations, gender gap, play vs non play, game vs non game, data collection of user stats. While not outside the realm of science, the issues discussed where definitely not unique to Science. In fact, these are the same issues begin examined in virtual worlds, across all disciplines.

The system for moderating the discussion was also only quasi functional. When the issue of sexism, homophobia and player attitude came up, I mentioned John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and I got in a little bit of trouble with Maggiemae, the moderator, for joining the general discussion. The idea, I then learned, is that we were supposed to whisper her first. It was readily apparent that that is not what was going on, however. Chat becomes chat. So I am sure Maggiemae had her work cut out for her. Panelists need precedence. Or at least that’s what we assume from the panel discussion metaphor in RL that we continually try to emulate. Yet it is hard to enforce a hierarchal environment in one that inherently is not. That’s where Audio would have come in handy. If panelists are broadcasting over audio then guildchat can be free to be guildchat.

The discussion got detoured a bit near the end concerning the topic of percentages of male vs female players, and moderation took a back seat. There were stats posted left and right and everyone was expert. It was a bit frustrating because when everyone is an expert no one is. I also think it is somewhat of a mute point because in synthetic environments people are given the chance to escape their gender. I know men who play women and women who play men and if you “become” your roll who do you really identify as? It is an ironic debate, especially on an RP server. I am also curious as to where the stats are coming from who is getting polled and how? If its just user account data, that can be as synthetic as the toon itself.

I am looking forward to day two. Of all the science conferences I’ve been too, this one definitely had the most usage of “lol” as part of standard discourse. I would, however, like to have more discussion of science in practice such as disease research based on the Corrupted Blood Plague incident. I would also like to have the discussion take place in a scenario more true to the WoW experience like a 40 person raid instance. Molten Core anyone? Perhaps tomorrow someone would be so kind as to flag us for PVP so that the alliance can jolt our little chartroom back to “reality”.

For the Horde Science!