This blog is finished, please visit my website instead.

My website is at http://yamanakanash.net
I keep it fairly up to date.

This blog here was supposed to be for my research notes, but I never really used it that much, and now I've finished my MA I doubt I'll ever use it again, as I'm not really the blogging type :) I do keep my website updated as much as possible though.

I have submitted my exegesis and project work to satisfy a Master of Arts (Animation and Interactive Media). The projects have always been available via my website, and as soon as it is approved, I'll post my exegesis there too. It's called "Multi-User Virtual Environments as a Post-Convergent Medium".

Please visit my website at http://yamanakanash.net and forget this useless blog :)

Adam

Desktop Magazine and Australian Creative Magazine

The Dec07/Jan08 edition of Australian Creative Magazine has a feature on BabelSwarm. Details at the BabelSwarm Blog.

The December 07 edition of Desktop Magazine has BabelSwarm as the cover story. Details at the BabelSwarm Blog.

networked_music_review interview

networked_music_review has a long interview with me. Its mainly a discussion of my ideas of post-convergent media art within realtime 3D environments, trying to clarify some of the issues I've raised in posts in this blog, such as Realtime 3D and Alberti's window? and The Ears of an Avatar. The turbulence people, who run the networked_music_review have also commissioned a work from me to illustrate/sonify some of these notions. It will premiere at a conference they are organising in 2008. Details later.

KQED Gallery Crawl

The Oct/Nov edition of the KQED channel Gallery Crawl is about Odyssey, heavily featuring the work of myself and the wonderful Gazira Babeli.

NPIRL Article

Not Possible In Real Life has a lovely article about my work Seventeen Unsung Songs.

Dorkbot SL Presentation

On June 17, 2007, I gave a presentation of my piece A Rose Heard At Dusk at Dorkbot SL, the Second Life chapter of Dorkbot. They have adopted the Dorkbot motto of "People doing strange things with electricity" to "People doing strange things with SL". An excellent turnout to hear a great presentation by Miulew Takahe (Björn Eriksson in RL) and Bingo Onomatopoeia presenting the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM) followed by yours truly. Here is a report, more screenshots, and a chat transcript from Evo Szuyuan who organised the event.

It went very well, and it was gratifying to see so many people accessing my work, even though Rose is designed to be a fairly intimate work for 2 or 3 people. This session saw more like 20 people in there, so there were lots of sounds happening all the time - an interesting version. Miulew recorded it, and posted a podcast.












Lots of avatars in A Rose Heard At Dusk

Vision "less embodied" than audio?

When reading much of the academic literature on virtual space, I often feel confused, as if I was missing some fundamental fact (or assumption). I think I've finally found out why.

In Mark B. N. Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media, the author refers to vision as "the most disembodied register of aesthetic experience" (p. 12), and cites touch and hearing as examples of "the more embodied registers". The author offers no explanation nor proof of any sort, scientific or otherwise, to back up this claim. It is treated as a given, as self-evident physical fact.

But for me, vision is neither more nor less of an embodied process than audio. It is, like audio, one of the five physical senses. It doesn't help that Hansen refers to them as "registers" rather than senses (on the next page he uses "register" with a different meaning - it is this kind of elastic use of vocabulary that makes much new media theory so difficult to follow), but as far as I can see he simply means senses as in the five senses. Since they are physical senses, how could one be more or less embodied than another?

I have yet to read the entire book, but it does appear to be an attempt to show that vision is actually an embodied process. He says this agrees with the interests of contemporary artists, whose work is aimed at "dismantling the supposed purity of vision and exposing its dirty, embodied underside". (It is interesting that he considers bodies to be dirty).

When I read this, I realised that a lot of new media theory adopts this assumption that vision is less embodied than audio. Since I don't share this assumption, and had never heard it explicitly stated, I didn't know it was happening, which explains why I find so much of the theory confusing.

I understand that the assumption is there now, but I still don't understand why.

Is it a question of framing? That the framed image (and this might explain why so much new media theory relates it to cinema - a relation I've always found tenuous) is viewed differently from 'realworld' vision. In other words, when viewing a picture or a video, do theorists discard the physical visual information surrounding the frame, seeing the framed image as existing separately from its physical context (ie, the room it's in)?

If so, my audio and performance background would explain why I don't share this attitude, since I think audio is always perceived within the sonic environment. While concert halls aim (but fail) to isolate the audio experience, most contemporary music either simply accepts it (rock music in a pub) or actively embraces it (ambient music).

Flux Worlds announced

Media Machines, the company of Tony Parisi (co-creator of VRML), have announced their new open virtual worlds web server, Flux Worlds. The server "combines X3D, the ISO standard for 3D graphics on the Web, with Simple Wide Area Multi-User Protocol (SWMP), a new protocol that delivers messages over the Web in real time, for use in avatar-based virtual worlds and other collaborative applications." SWMP was developed by Media Machines and will be released open source.

In a post to the X3D list, Parisi said "at its core SWMP is good at moving around 3D scene graph data, including not only position/orientation, as is typical of MMO's, but the full functionality of X3D. What this means is that client/servers can have total flexibility over how they architect their applications. Some might incorporate prediction by sending vectors instead of just positions; others might add avatar semantics based on PROTO definitions. SWMP is just the glue that binds. Beyond the simple messaging system, we intend to add area of interest management and other advanced techniques for keeping the message traffic down over a WAN."

This is potentially very exciting news, and a step towards the vision of an open, interoperable 3d metaverse without the extreme restrictions of (for example) Second Life. For me, the thought of being able to work in X3D and have persistent multi-user worlds is incredibly exciting and a very very long time coming. As Parisi says, "the Metaverse needs open protocols. Without them... everything else is Just a World."

Links:
Flux, X3D