Janet Temos
Tuesday, January 22, 4:30 pm
Jimmy Stewart Theater
185 Nassau Street
 Virtually Art: Artistic Creation in Virtual Environments
In his postmodernist novel, Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson described a world in which centralized governments have ceded to powerful, gang-like groups, where exclusive lives are lived within heavily guarded enclaves, and where life for others can be singularly lacking in security, space, and any sense of beauty. Parallel to this reality is a virtual world called The Metaverse, where one’s status is not based on wealth or power, but by technical acumen that allows those with creative powers and scripting knowledge to escape the gritty reality of the actual world in a self-created world of peace, imagination, and expressive creativity.
Snowcrash is acknowledged as having had a pivotal role in the way that the first virtual realities created in this century developed. The closest to Stephenson’s vision is the virtual world Second Life, where every user is responsible for creating --or hiring someone to create--his or her own environment. While the general landscape within Second Life is democratic, visually chaotic, and largely entrepreneurial, there is an elite among residents who create rich works of art that are greatly applauded by both the general and the artistic community within the virtual world.
This talk explores the artistic realm of Second Life, and looks at some of the most impressive artistic creations to date. The works tend to combine sound, scripting, terraforming and graphic skills to create immersive environments that are equally challenging to the senses as they are to the intellect.
Bio: Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.
URLs: Princeton Second Life IT's Academic |
