It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

In the following, I’ll try to describe the installation I’ve been working for in the last 4 or so months.

Why:

It all started in December 2006, when a good friend of mine and startup mate called me and asked me, if I would like to participate in a art piece that should take place in the ZKM Karlsruhe, and partially in SL. I wasn’t too eager to join in, I had just started business in SL, and it sounded like much work and no money. Carefully I said yes.

Then some weeks later, the now famous Spiegel article emerged, where Peter Weibel talked about his vision of Second Life as a new playground for humanity. I was a resident since July 2006, and I was just getting the grip of SL. I was amazed that somesortof vision would take place.

Nothing. Half a year of no contact. I got my first serious customers in SL, Dread founded the Primforge group, and we built some awesome Sims.

Action: I was invited to the ZKM, artist in rezzidence to work there for 1 month. Seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I’m on my way. I could take my dog into the office.^^

In August, I had my second time in the ZKM (and the infamous Schwesternheim!!1!), after that I worked from Berlin or Dresden, whenever needed.

Who:

We (the slatelliterates) were, and we are a good team. A complete list of players is on the project page and the exhibition list, this is my blog so subjectivly out of my memory: Axel Heide, Bastian Hemminger, Felix Kratzer, Herwig Hoffman, Linus Stolz, Stefan Gebhardt, Philip Pocock and Torrid Luna (that’s me). In no particular order^^

What:

Here comes a description of what is going on right now, SL-wise. (I haven’t partaken in the SNAPSTORY project, but it’s integral part of the whole piece, so I describe what I know about it.)

MobLOG:

• The guests can send images to the installation, either by email or bluetooth.
• The images are processed with openCV, the Open Computer vision Library, to check for faces.
• All found and original images are compared with a imgSeek database, consisting of currently 100.000 images.
• The found images and the inputs are saved in a StackService.
• 4 Projectors in the ZKM exhibition load and blend the images from the StackService.
• A slideshow generator on the website puts the images together, and morph-zooms them nicely.
• The blackbox scrambles the images, and puts them together to frames.
• The frames are encoded into MP4 and displayed in the tunnel vitrine in SL.

The Bots:

• 4 libsecondlife bots, depicting Peter Weibel, Peter Sloterdijk, Beat Wyss and Boris Groys are installed.
• A megaHAL Service is set up, fed with the cites and quotes of the philosophers.
• The bots are programmed to talk to each other, and the guests in Second Life.
• While talking, they fight each other in a boxing ring. (That part was the most fun of all^^)

The snapStory:

• One automatted (this time not a bot, but a real client, operated by key commands) Avatar flys over the island.
• Wherever a converation takes place, he records it with some chatspys.
• He automatically takes screenshots of the participants.
• The typed words and the taken images are put together to a RSS feed.

Where:

• Institute for every’thing, ZKM Island, Second Life
• Youniverse Moblog at ZKM.de (http://youniverse.zkm.de/)
  
• Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, RL

When:

The official opening will be on 2007-10-21.

Wow:

I cannot but say: It creates some sort of magic. The bots speak wisdom, the imgseek is a useful everyday oracle, and the SNAPSTORY enables you to read and watch what happened last night. I think it’s great.

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