Earlier this year, The Tech Museum of Innovation invited Second Life residents to collaborate around the design of exhibits for their real life museum in San Jose for an upcoming exhibition, ‘Art, Film & Music’.
They had already built a replica of their physical building, and set up an exhibition hall where participants from around the world were given space to develop virtual simulations of their ideas for exhibits, and initiate collaborative efforts with others.
The Tech’s virtual exhibit collaboration hall was a veritable creative incubator of ideas, with a tireless staff hosting a steady stream of workshops and events to help designers build the skills necessary to describe their ideas in Second Life.
Given the extraordinary potential for collaboration in Second Life, I didnt’ want to miss out, and developed a variation of the ‘Wikisonic’ concept to submit, since it seems to walk a fine line between Art and Music. I rezzed the concept inside the hall, and put out a Help Wanted sign for anyone who wanted to join the team (and solicited YOUR help here!). Annie Obscure (Annie Ogden in real-life) found my call for help and jumped in almost immediately with a flurry of brilliant ideas for executing the idea in real-life. Together we worked together to develop the concept into a proposal that ended up being chosen for construction at the real-life museum! I also need to thank John Street (Dirty McLean in Second Life), who found a way to realize the crazy collaborative music idea last year – when almost a dozen other scripters told me it couldn’t be done!
Ahead of the exhibit opening, I built a new Wikisonic installation (teleport link), and created a new machinima here:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=i9WI6QkTgms]
So, I’m off to San Jose next week to attend the Art, Film & Music exhibition! The Tech is also hosting a Summit on Digital Democracy in Exhibit Design on June 4, 2008, the day of the opening. The event will take place at The Tech in San Jose, and will also be streamed live to The Tech Virtual Museum in Second Life. Keynote speakers will be Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab founder and Chairman, and Peter Friess, Ph.D., President of The Tech.
Agenda
1:00 – opening remarks from Peter Friess, President of The Tech Museum of Innovation
1:15 – Keynote by Philip Rosedale, Linden Labs Chairman and former CEO
1:45 – Q&A with Philip Rosedale 2:00 – visit exhibit and talk to people in second life
3:00 -breakout sessions on: -creative commons and open source (Rob Stephenson, moderator) -future of museum collaboration (Peter Friess, moderator) -community exhibit development (Nina Simon, moderator) -building real versions of virtual exhibits (Rich Turner, moderator) -marketing impact for museums of working with second life (Lisa Croel, moderator) -experience of volunteer curators (Second Life, facilitated by ?, moderator)
4:30-concluding remarks
All images in this post taken from The Tech Virtual website unless otherwise noted.
