Where: Node Zero Gallery, Second Life Date: Thursday, March 13 Time: 6-9 pm SLT Live Q & A w/Spot at 7pm Teleport to the Sheep Vortex Vortex SLURL Teleport to the Main Node Zero Gallery Main Gallery SLURL

Join us this Thursday evening from 6-9pm as the Node Zero Gallery takes the Second Life art experience to a new level with its latest collection of interactive exhibits from 8 emerging new artists.
(Sponsored by The Wishfarmers.)

Spot Draves (SL-Sp0t Schism), creator of the Electric Sheep Screensaver, will be there in person for a live Q and A session at 7pm.

"Sheep Vortex" is digital artist Spot Draves' first Second Life art experience (3D Art & Design by Somatika Xiao - a.k.a. David Stumbaugh). Note: You will have to have version 1.19.0.0 or later running.

(Remember to click your "play" button, and have video enabled in your "Preferences" under the "Audio & Video" tab.)

In addition to Spot's creation, this Node Zero Collection features the work of no less than seven emerging new talents: Georg Janick, Feathers Boa, Bryn Oh, Adam Ramona, Aiyas Aya, Ub Yifu, and Crash Perfect. (Keep an eye on the Node Zero Gallery category for more interviews with the artists.)

I can't tell you how to interact with these ones yet, or I'd be giving it all away. I'll let the art pieces explain it to you themselves...

Sp0t Schism (Spot Draves) in the Sheep Vortex
Cory Doctorow says: "This is a distributed rendering application that grabs its users' computers' idle cycles to create computationally expensive, vivid and beautiful animated fractals...The result is a breathtaking, psychedelic form of artificial life whose fitness factor is the ability to tickle the aesthetics of computer geeks." (and about Spot's DVD): "This isn't just trippy wallpaper -- it's not even just art. This is garage-band artificial life. Draves is cooking up a new species made of code, decision and cooperation, and this disc is a petri dish swimming with the organisms that deserve to succeed us here on Earth. I for one welcome our new a-life masters."

Spot's work is currently featured on the MOMA website and was also featured on the cover of this month's Leonardo. Here's the first part of a multipart interview with Spot, where he explains some of the background and technology behind the making of these artistic marvels. I'll also be interviewing a few of the other featured artists over these next few days leading up to the opening -- and taking you on tours through some of their interactive pieces.

BTW: Note that Spot and the Electric Sheep Screensaver are not affiliated in any way with the Electric Sheep Second Life development company.-- Just FYI. Everybody asks :-)

This post and all the art in it is under the same Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license, as is all of Spot's art.