Join the Virtual Learning Community Initiative at the Undergraduate Conference in Second Life on Thursday, June 17, 2010. The event is scheduled to begin at 9:30am with a series of presentations through 4:15pm (CST). The conference will begin with panels led by UT System instructors and undergraduates currently working in the virtual world of Second Life, and by Linden Lab Educational director Claudia Linden. After the scheduled lunch break and keynote speech (12:30pm-1:15pm) the conference will speak more directly to undergraduates with a series of panels on preparing for work or graduate studies after college.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum Falls

The Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum (FLWVM slurl) reopened on November 20, 2009 with a successful three-day event. The celebration included live music, a silent auction, discussion, a members only ball and fireworks. The museum itself, inspired by Wright’s design of the Unity Temple in Chicago, includes two floors of exhibits with detailed notecards and a theater on the third floor. Farther back on the sim features five homes designed directly, and with braggable accuracy, after some of Wright’s work.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum Help Desk

FLWVM offers a variety of scheduled lectures, guided tours, live music events and competitions to its members. The museum holds four timed “build-off” competitions a year, the next coming up in February. The contests have thus far featured Wright’s own style and the Craftsman style. FLWVM Assistant Director Rosalie Oldrich updated me on the upcoming contest. “We provided a couple of classes ahead of the build-offs [before], and will do the same in February, when we will have building in the Usonian style – an invention of Mr. Wright’s. Typically American, meant for middle-income folks.” (All are invited to the classes, but entry fees apply to the contest itself.)

The Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum logo

2010 is shaping up to be a busy year for this museum. In addition to FLWVM’s exciting agenda, a Museum Hop is in the works for February 2010. Oldrich reveals, “We will join with 5-6 other SL museums/galleries for an afternoon when we will all be offering special tours, a small gift for each visitor, a big sign at each site with the LMs for all the participants, and we’ll end up with a dance at FLWVM at the end of the day. A good way to introduce people to the variety of museums in SL!”

ProjectImagine@UTSA team member Cogito Ultsch greeting at the event.

The University of Texas San Antonio celebrated the opening of a virtual art gallery on October 9 as part of the Imagine Peace festival – an annual, worldwide event in SL and RL in honor of John Lennon. The sim itself is a new addition to the metaverse purchased with nearly 50 other sims as part of a UT System Initiative. The Imagine team at UTSA had only three weeks to create an art gallery on a blank sheet of a sim.

Luckily, the UTSA team is no stranger to SL’s art community! Previous to the UT System’s mass land purchase, Dr. Carmen Fies, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching, founded UTSA’s Tejano Tech sim. Her work here placed an emphasis on STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) that is reflected through the sim’s art galleries. “Art and STEM do mutually constitute each other,” Fies explains. “It all is really just different expressions of the same. All we know (and even don’t know) is one…and there are different sparkles to it.”

UTSA signed on for the festival last minute. Fies and three of the Tejano artists (Sapphoria Shilova, Gary Kohime, and Cogito Ultsch) comprised the Imagine Team that brought it all together. Kohime organized the featured artists and managed impressive contributions from some big names in SL art. Featured artists Bryn Oh, Sasun Steinbeck, and Spiral Walcher are interviewed below about their involvement with the art community.

A hidden element of Bryn Oh's "Willow".

Bryn Oh

Self-proclaimed hermit Bryn Oh was persuaded to leave her home at Immersiva, contributing Willow for the big event. She confesses that her excuse for interaction was driven by curiosity about Yoko Ono’s avatar, “I never did see…but I heard she looked like herself. I kind of hoped she would be something very creative.” Bryn Oh is the pixelated concept of a real life oil painter using SL as a medium for ideas that mistranslate onto canvas. After her first week on SL, she says, “I realized that this was the medium I had been looking for. A medium where I could create a painting that you could enter and explore rather than passively look at.” (Hint: Keep the explorative aspect in mind when you visit her work!)

Cogito Ultsch showing her favorite piece - Sasun's Morphing Sculpture.

Sasun Steinbeck

A must see at the new gallery is Sasun’s Morphing Sculpture. Sasun Steinbeck began working on the sculpture in 2005. The menu-driven sculpture provides infinite options thanks to four years of intensive scripting that began with simple “prim torture” sample scripts that twist prims. The sculpture truly displays the exactitude Second Life is capable of, and all with regular tubes and toruses. As the sculpture developed she sought other artists for feedback and became inspired to create the Art Galleries of Second Life list. She is excited to see the evolution of the “artist” on SL and notes that, “there’s a real blur between ‘scripter, ‘artist’, ‘designer’, and ‘builder’. The penultimate SL artist is some combo of these things.“

inside Spiral Walcher's forest

Spiral Walcher

Spiral Walcher shares two versions of a sort of digitalized forest with the new UTSA gallery – one a spring version with butterflies, and an autumn version. “Cool” is the word – and several fun snapshots a must! After spending a couple of months in SL, Walcher casually decided, “I wanted to see what this whole ‘building’ thing was about. As it turned out, it all came pretty naturally to me.“ Walcher hopes to someday transfer this newfound talent into RL and create light sculptures, but in the meantime appreciates the frugality and creative leverage SL has to offer.

Story and images by Teresa Shoffner