Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Commerce Sim, Olivia’s Art Garden Opening
I’m continually impressed by what I see in the SL artistic community. Sure, we can recreate venues and modes of expression possible in the world of matter, but in SL we can do even more.

Feathers Boa, for instance, creates “fully immersive pieces, interactive digital ‘paintings,‘ giant robots, aesthetically innovative avatars, and full architectural builds.“  It is amusing to have a painting of a clockwork robot reach out for you as your stroll by.

I’ll be back to see more; the exhibit grabbed me in many ways. There’s also a feature piece on Boa’s artwork in ROLE Magazine.

Kalle Contepomi’s “World Downfall 4in frame” and “World downfall 10in frame” impressed me, because I consider post-apocalyptic art one of the most vital forms of expression for our times.

Conempomi juxtaposes images of wreckage with, in “10in frame,“ an avatar dressed in a festive dress with glowing white go-go boots, It’s as if she’s just come from a party to find herself at the world’s ending.

We need doomsday rubbed in our party-goer faces, because every day our tailpipes, power-plants, car-based civilization, and outsized consumption make the day of reckoning that much closer. But it’s hard to wallow in such musings.  Maybe such art will spur action, not despair.

This artist’s work is not all about the end-times; his “The House” looks like something Wyeth might do on acid…I was actually chilled by the clever composition of this piece.

After Conempomi, I needed a bit of respite, and Olivia’s own photographs of natural settings, as well as Lolly Dovgal’s black and white photographs brought me back to a modicum of comfort.

Olivia has an eye for old cars, too. I also take junkyard photos, so I had to see her work “Rusty,“ that captures an old Buick-in-ruins, and “Old Blue,“ of the sort of old truck I’m always longing to save from perdition.

List of artists showing:

Atomic Gaffer - Sculpture
Balthasar Constantine - Fractal Art
Catriana Ninetails - Original oil and water color
Feathers Boa - with *NEW* reactive art pieces
Friday Karu - Real World painting, photography, and printmaking
Kalle Contepomi - *FEATURED ARTIST* with his dark interpretation of the Apocalypse
Lolly Dovgal - Real World Photography
Lou Laa - Gazebo Build
Olivia Hotshot - Real World Photography (oceans & vehicles)
Zizi Rabeni - Digital Art “Seven Deadly Sins”

Archive note: Starting in 2009, archives of this and other posts not published here can be found at my Blogspot site

Blogs for 2007 and 2008 can be found Archived here.

Location: MetaPlace, in My Living Room

Well, I’ve always been a Toon.

MetaPlace is a virtual world that enables content creation and is Web-based. It was frightfully easy to get started.

Now little bobble-head IggyO is in his virtual living room.  He watched a video about the potential of MetaPlace.

I’m liking the fakeness of this virtual world.  And unlike OpenLife, I’m not a friggin’ cloud. I cannot be bald or in dreads, yet…but so far, this looks entertaining. I had the avatar do a little dance in all his pixelated glory.

Archive note: Starting in 2009, archives of this and other posts not published here can be found at my Blogspot site

Blogs for 2007 and 2008 can be found Archived here.

Location: Daden Prime

With Richmond considering an interactive literary simulation for the 2010-2011 academic year, I went bot-shopping. Beeble Baxter’s and my idea involves programming SL bots to act as non-player characters (NPCs) inside our simulation.  This post may run a bit long, because it’s as much a report to RL peers and potential funders as it is a blog-post on a fascinating SL technology.

Daden’s Robotars:

A UR team of four began our investigations of A.I. technology at Daden Prime, where Corro Moseley introduced us to Halo, a bot programmed by his company, Daden Limited.  Halo can do many different things, including:

• Respond to verbal cues in chat

• Recognize and respond to objects (such as the snake shown) by their object-names. Corro told us that shape-recognition is under development
• Move about in a set of prescribed bounds.  One problem here is that Halo and her peers are confused if an area gets modified. Like the robotic cop who malfunctions in THX-1139, Halo would walk repeatedly into a wall. For that reason, we’d want to have the shape of our simulation nearly done before we embedded our bots
• Rez objects, change appearance or clothing, and do other “avatar-like” things in response to verbal cues
• Interact with scripted objects such as doors and other items in our simulation
• Respond to other bots, without the “infinite loop” phenomenon that anyone programming a chatterbot in a MOO understands. In SL, such chat-spam can make an entire region crash.
• Recognize key words in a query and search the Web for answers. Wikipedia and Amazon.com are frequent locales for this action by a bot
• Engage in simple recognition of objects or people, as in this part of our test:

Corro Moseley: what objects can you see
Halo Rossini: I can see Garden Bench about 45m away to the west
Halo’s Swing about 10m away to the east
Twitter Fountain 02c 10m away to the north east
Haro House 1 about 40m away to the east
*Simply Sierra’s Koi* - Orange Ogon* (Random CW speed) 10m away to the north east
Halo’s Picture Frame about 45m away to the east

Corro Moseley: whereabouts is avatar beeble baxter
Halo Rossini: beeble baxter is at

<202,91,25>

Daden can host the bot’s code on their servers or supply it to a user. They charge for annual updates, on-site visits, and by the bot.  We’d code Halo (and her brother) for our simulation. Bottom Line: Daden’s Robotars are not cheap but they are powerful. Even so, we were nutty enough with out questions to get this response:

Halo Rossini: Sorry, my brain doesn’t appear to be working properly at the moment. Please try again.

That happens to me every day, at least once. Halo also took a while to rez (shown above) but once she did, she was ready to work with us.

Really want to have fun perplexing a Robotar? Check out what that wag, Hamlet Au, did on his visit to Daden Prime.

We are awaiting a quote from Daden.

Archive note: Starting in 2009, archives of this and other posts not published here can be found at my Blogspot site

Blogs for 2007 and 2008 can be found Archived here.