These were the graphics I used for my presentation on Virtual Subjectivity at the Boston Is Watching event about Second Life art at the Boston CyberArts Festival. Clicking on slides 4, 6, 7, 11, 13 will take you to video on the web). If you click the last slide, you can see the "trailer" for the screwball comedy about SL relationships that I've been working on, which was not part of the presentation yesterday. The gist is this: people are the important part of a virtual world--they make the art, they make the world, and a project like Brooklyn Is Watching is a nexus for like-minded folks to find each other, collaborate, and create virtual subjectivity, which is ultimately something we do together. William Gibson called cyberspace a "consensual hallucination" (in 1984 in Neuromancer) and that holds up as a great definition.

2. DEFINITION OF A VIRTUAL WORLD “ A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.” Mark Bell, “Toward a Definition of V irtual Worlds”

3. POINT OF VIEW: in cinema, this is chosen for you, but in SL . . . .

4. POINT OF VIEW IN SECOND LIFE L1Aura Loire

7. The various points of view that the participant in a virtual world chooses can be both tools for machinima--for digital storytelling--and are also one of the ways through which a virtual world is experienced. In a way, Second Life is all immersive, interactive art installation space and we are all performance artists within it. BIW is a particularly liminal and tricksterish virtual space, part of a mixed reality project.

8. Virtual Subjectivity a mode of first-person experience in a virtual world that is founded on a fusion of visual and metaphoric point of view, shaped through "self-design" of the avatar and environment, reinforced and extended through social interaction, and enacted through virtual agency. L1 at Maya Paris’s Sexicality