red ass sock monkey

I ran this first in my Penn State blog. Is this the fifty-fifth anniversary? Maybe I should just bring it forward every year? Anyway, I thought it deserved a retread.

A student committee asked if I’d host the art room discussions about ecology. I was in the room practically all day anyway; it was my senior year and I spent all of my free periods working on art projects. I figured I could wing any discussion since discussion was easy. A mountain of trash, industrial air pollution and chemical run-off- Pottstown had it all: It was rich material. But when the day came, Earth Day 1970, no one talked. None of my fellow students had an opinion. At least, not early in the morning. I stuttered and stammered through the first period class, just filling the silence with my voice. As the class filed out, the art teacher strolled past and muttered, “Better get your head out of your rear, Stong. Come up with something quick.” Yeah. Got it. Bob Kingsley with sound advice. He was probably the best teacher I ever had. Too bad it was just for an elective my senior year of high school.

As the next class walked in, already bored having spent their last period talking about “ecology,” I was blank. Should I focus on ecologically sound art materials? Probably; but how boring would that be? How likely was it that any of these folks would go in to the Arts? In frustration, I started tossing out opinions, but even I was bored. The second class moved on and the third period started. Good grief did this suck.

“Look,” I said in frustration, “So we pollute. What’s the big deal? There are a lot of people. They’ll pollute until people die and there aren’t enough people to pollute any more.” Bingo. Reaction and discussion. Not much, just a bit; but there was discussion. Some of the students actually took strong issue with what I said.

“If we change nature’s balance won’t nature just adjust? re-balance on its own? So some weak species disappear and some sick people die, won’t we be stronger for it?” Could I call it performance art? Not really; performance, certainly, but art? Nah. It’s difficult being artistic while you pull your head out of your rear. I did create a moment for myself, though; a point, like a seed crystal, for memories to gather on and clarify. I realize in retrospect that this was probably a first for me. Performances of all sorts, some contrary some exaggerated some as a devil’s advocate, would follow. The most recent, suggesting we publish our salaries and performance reviews, led to my “early retirement.”

This is the first of two posts about the online 3D virtual world known as Second Life. It’s a re-posting of a Penn State blog post from 2010

I’d like to try to recap several years in Second Life. Brett asked how educators were using our environment, and not being an educator I thought I’d do my own wrap up here.

Brett first demonstrated the environment at a small brownbag I attended. It looked interesting, and, I thought, easy enough to try. It didn’t turn out to be exactly easy, but I managed to open an account, create an avatar, and fly around without much trauma. What I noticed first turned out to be important to my feeling the environment had tremendous potential while being important, too, to its seeming out-of-hand rejection. For me, watching Brett’s demo, or any of the videos created in the environment, was like watching a bad cgi film. Effects were crude, modeling was barely believable, and actions were very limited. At the time, there was no speech either; everything said was typed and read.

Once I had an avatar and was at the controls, everything changed. My avatar slipped on a cliff edge and slid downhill into a crevice between a house and cliff wall. The fall made me catch my breath and the entrapment instantly had me panicked. When I, or rather the avatar, was walking in an open wooded area, I had no idea where I was and felt desperately lost. Within a few days, that area seemed familiar and I found myself returning to it when I was overwhelmed by circumstances or about to be forced to chat with a stranger. Like in real life, I avoided others. This woodland spot felt like familiar ground; it had a gazebo with easels set up for a painting class, the sounds of birds and running water, and was far more comfortable than roaming where I might be seen. As other colleagues joined, I found security and comfort in the presence of their avatars. These emotions were real and powerful: They could be controlled and manipulated, but were there subtleties? Expressive artistic techniques? How much farther could emotional engagement be taken? What could we do with it? It was as engaging as a movie, even without a story and without the high quality special effects. At that point, knowing that the environment could be used to peak curiosity and affect emotions, I knew it could be used for games, stories, emotional statements. In fact, it could obviously be used engagingly for education. Without my willing participation, I wouldn’t have seen that; only a very bad, poorly made animated movie with no story.

I knew that as visual design support I would need to know how to produce quality images and understand how they’re used. Formats. Color depth. Resolution. I’d need to know how to construct anything that might contribute to an environment, or otherwise support a faculty members visual needs.

Initially, the only place to experiment was in a public sandbox. There, I learned how to build and manipulate objects and how to cover them with convincing textures. Then every night, the sandbox was wiped clean and the next day I started again. I managed to come up with two videos captured in the environment and started looking for something more valid as a demo. I remembered the straw bale project and visited their website. They used VRML models and plan projections to demonstrate what goes in to a straw bale house. I saw potential for a demo and created a short video to present the potential I saw and the ease with which assets could be created and situations filmed. The video isn’t especially polished, or of finished quality, but still seem to show, at least to me, some of the lost potential we had with Second Life. It’s embedded in the next post..

Shortly after making this video, ETS rented some land in the environment. Finally I could work on something that took more than one day to produce. Initially I used the assets that I already had to explore what a static display might be like. I set up straw bales, created signs, and gradually realized that with a bit of time I could create a fairly large, complex display. I sent a series of emails trying to find people who would support a large display- a virtual museum based on Penn State’s Palmer Museum.

Though I could shoot photos, I wasn’t comfortable using their images in my display without approval …or at least some interest.

Interest wasn’t forthcoming. I shot reference photos and started building pieces on my own. Since I didn’t have buy-in to use Palmer paintings, I created a Virtual Zoller Gallery to exhibit other work. The gallery space was underwater, in the bay in front of my empty museum. It had a distinct light quality and a peaceful ambience. I asked friends and colleagues and they all agreed to let me exhibit their work in a Virtual Staff Show. It was fun: I learned a lot about image formats and resolution, I loved seeing everyone’s work, but the show didn’t set any attendance records.

There were conferences in the environment, and interesting destinations outside of Penn State space. The New Media Consortium had land and hired someone to build displays and a museum. They hosted conference sessions by streaming media into their amphitheater. One conference in the environment had a poster session that put an interesting spin on the usual rows of cork board. I tried sharing the unique quality of the show by capturing several shots and combining them into an anaglyphic 3D image. It works, if you have glasses.

Penn State expanded their holdings and I was given my own little corner. I used my warehoused Palmer pieces to construct a display area for some of my project illustrations. I thought that since we had neighbors from other campuses, it might be useful to promote some of my illustration capabilities. About that same time I was contacted by several students in the IST school who were building a virtual Palmer Museum. I shared what I had—textures and objects based on my shots of the Palmer—and the IST built Palmer Art Museum really turned out nicely.

Actually creating pieces, rather than orchestrating large scale builds, was much more of the role I saw myself in. I managed to create pieces for an educational area that featured Spanish architecture. This involved authentic Moorish fencing and indigenous plants; that research, not just in object creation but in botany and Moorish architecture, was exciting and finally- of some use.

Coming up with something useful seems to be where I failed the SL project. The pieces for the Palmer were relatively worthwhile. My limited contribution to the hacienda, too, proved useful. But there was little else. I didn’t get Straw Bale buy-in, couldn’t sell a Palmer Museum, couldn’t build interest in replicating my Flash BiSci timeline activity in the environment even though it seemed like the perfect medium. I was able to test game images though.

So the SL project didn’t fail me. When I did graphics for the EcoRacer game, there was no way that I could assess my Photoshop images before I handed them off as game assets. That meant they’d need to become part of the game and involve effort on the part of others before I could see there were lines or a fringe that I should’ve erased or a semi-transparency that wasn’t displaying correctly. I was able to upload and attach these 32 bit targa files to prims in the SL environment and see exactly how they’d get rendered by a gaming engine without troubling the game developers or waiting for results. That’s what I saw initially, too; SL wasn’t an end. It’s a low-impact, pre-fab environment set up so folks like me could start mastering techniques for later. There was no other way I could have experimented with images in an immersive environment and learned what I did.