SIGGRAPH SpaceTime Exhibition on BGSU Virtual Campus

I’ve been working hard all weekend to get the Animations loaded into our new dynamic media players on the BGSU Virtual Campus for the SIGGRAPH SpaceTime Exhibition. You can watch over 32 animation and videos of interactive works at the gallery.  I just put up a post about it on the BGSU Virtual Campus blog. Read on here…

Here’s the SLURL to get right to the gallery: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BGSU%20Creation/164/180/28

Art 101: Critique in Second Life

Over the last week my students have been working on an assignment in which they were to find an inspirational work of art and create a work in repsonse to it (read assignment here). The first meeting class of this week, we held in-progress critiques of the work. The set-up for this included teaching students to upload images into Second Life (my tutorial here), build a primitive or object to put them on (tutorial), and then how to put the image on the prim (tutorial).

Here are some image of both critiques. View more here.

The most exciting thing was the amount of feedback each students received from other students. In a studio classroom the comments usually come from only a handful of students. An Instructor often times has to play a significant moderator role to coax quiet students into speaking. I’m not sure if it was because this is NOT a studio art class with non-art majors OR if the text chat mode of communications allowed students to speak more freely, but the amount of feedback per image was really wonderful!

Art101: Artist Roleplay Assignment

This summer I am teaching Art 101: Intro to Art online in Second Life. It took about a week to get the students up to speed on how to use Second Life. I am using some of the info at the main SL wiki, but mostly my own tutorials at the BGSU SL Help Wiki. My students are keeping blogs to reflect on what they see/do in class, document what they discover on the web and in Second Life, and also as a place to display what they create. Our second week, most of them blogged about our trip to the Sistine Chapel re-creation on Vassar Island (SLURL).

Last week the students were given an assignment to research an artist from a list I had presented them with. Then, they were asked to modify their avatar to look like that artist or one of the artworks that person had created. Finally, the students roleplayed those artists in a conversation in front of the class to present their findings. Click here to read the assignment. Watch two example videos below or see more examples here.

Jackson Pollock & M.C. Escher

Sol LeWitt & Henry Moore

Overall, I would say that the assignment was a success! Some students were able to modify their avatars better than others but the creative choices was easy to spot. Some students were unable to use voice chat and therefore held conversation in voice chat. This made the exchange between the two avatars move much slower and the immersion felt by the audience less present. However, students were still able to present their information in a timely manner.

2D student work in SL

My 2D Foundations students did a one week exercise looking at signs in SL. We used this as a catalyst for students’ investigation of symbolism, communication, and context in the meaning of signs, posters, advertisements, and other tools of visual culture utilized in the virtual world.

I can’t seem to get Picasa embedded slideshows to work on WP yet… So here’s a link to the images.

Second Life Sign Exercise