Artists Unite Island
Artists Unite Island is a proposed virtual studio enabling artists from throughout the world to collaborate, share, and learn together in virtual space.
Following on the heels of the successful Now Here This Project AU Island is a logical progression in Artist Unites mission helping artists of all genres collaborate on projects. Members are welcomed in to the virtual environment, provided with training, tools, and most importantly communication with other artists throughout the world. In the virtual environment artists can collaborate on flat art, installation, text based projects, and social interaction mediums. AU Island is the common ground for artists from Washington Heights to meet, learn, teach, and collaborate with artists from around the world.
Copyright 2008, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Arts in Second Life
A Rich Creative Medium, an International Audience
Second Life is the future right now, offering endless possibilities
for artists.Close Quote
— Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran
Creative People
Artists of all kinds have found a powerful new medium for creative expression in the Second Life® world. Musicians, designers, directors, photographers and architects use the Second Life platform to develop exciting new work and expand their audience.
Musicians
Real-world musicians and DJs are migrating to Second Life as the ideal platform for sharing their music and expanding their audience. Big name acts like Ben Folds, Chamillionaire, Suzanne Vega and Jay-Z have used Second Life for both intimate performances and arena-style concerts. Homegrown heroes have launched their careers from Second Life stages. Welsh singer-songwriter Melanie Fudge plays in-world as Mel Cheeky and has sold more CDs through Second Life than any other method. Folk singer Frogg Marlowe, who got his start in Second Life, has since appeared on MTV. Live music events take place in-world every day, in all genres and time zones, and on the weekends there are upwards of 50 events to choose from.
Machinima Directors
Second Life is a machinima-maker’s mecca where directors can film whatever they can imagine — with set pieces of Mars or Milan, costumes from the 1st century or the 21st century — and agile camera tools allow for dynamic cinematography. Plus the Second Life world is an ideal screening environment, where videos can be played before a live audience or set up for on-demand viewings by individual visitors.
Designers
Second Life designers create a booming trade in fashion and decor. Looking to add style and personality to their avatars, residents flock to in-world stores and buy clothes, hair, avatar skins and all the accessories to suit any tastes – from casual to couture. Designers get unique effects by uploading their own textures and manipulating hundreds of appearance settings built in to the Second Life creative tools set. Creating virtual goods has turned amateurs into professionals and resulted in real income for some designers. Their stories and more are reported with panache in Second Life fashion blogs and magazines like Second Style http://www.secondstyle.com/.
Artists
The virtual world offers artists an extraordinary creative medium. The embedded building and scripting tools allow artists to add multi-dimensionality to their work — light, sound, 3-D sculpting and motion. And, Second Life is an ideal format for sharing that work. On any given day, hundreds of in-world galleries and museums are host to shows by artists from around the world, displaying everything from photography to paintings, the real to surreal.
Architects
Second Life is an ever-expanding world filled with diverse environments, from cityscapes to fantasy lands, all created by the residents. It’s an architect’s paradise. There are no limits to what they can create — scale models of real-world houses or fantastical structures unbounded by physics. Builders can work simultaneously on the same project, and all members of a team can see the work as it develops then tweak it on the fly. Real-world clients can walk through a virtual model of their home.
Creative Tools
Built-in, easy to use creative tools give every resident the power to change the world. Professionals and beginners alike can quickly learn to make anything from hairstyles to houses, personal photo galleries to interactive art installations. Second Life offers an environment unlike any other, merging many of the best qualities of the Web, online games, social networking, user-generated content, creativity applications and telecommunications technologies. Residents also benefit from these unparalleled tools and features:
Build & Script
Residents use simple 3-D modeling tools embedded in the Second Life platform to create clothes, buildings, landscapes, sculptures and whatever else they can imagine, and they can animate objects and avatars using the built-in scripting language. Because everything happens in real time, creative work can be highly collaborative.
Images & Textures
It’s easy to convert digital photos and designs from popular graphics applications into an Second Life-compatible format and import them to the Second Life servers. All images can be applied as “textures” to objects and avatars for an infinite variety of creative results.
Audio & Video
The Second Life platform supports streaming media, and enabling it is as easy as copying and pasting the artist’s media server URL into a control panel. DJs, musicians and spoken word acts can put on live or prerecorded performances in-world.
Intellectual Property Rights
Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, decided in 2003 to break away from industry standards and allow users to have intellectual property rights over what they create in-world. Built-in features allow creators to label work as their own and flag it with the level of copy permissions they want to assert over their work, e.g., all-rightsreserved or freely modifiable and transferable.
Micropayment System
Since they own the rights to their work, Residents can sell and trade their objects, scripts, and animations for pleasure or profit. The in-world micropayment system allows Residents to easily pay other avatars for products, services and entertainment. Similarly, the audience at a concert or film screening can pay a “tip jar,” or event organizers can charge for admission. Some talented residents have been able to quit their day job and live off what they make selling their goods and services in Second Life.
Second Life offers professionals and amateurs alike a vast canvas for imaginative expression. Artists, musicians and creative people from around the globe have already made their mark on the virtual world, and the wonders have only just begun.
Resources
* Second Life Music
* Second Life Fashion
* Second Life Machinima
* Second Life Media
* Machnima.com Second Life sampler
* YouTube Second Life machinima group
* Second Style magazine
* Now, Virtual Fashion: Second Life Designers Make Real Money Creating Clothes For Simulation Game’s Players
* List of 100s of in-world galleries and museums available at Towers Gallery Artists Village
* Architecture in the metaverse blog
What is Second Life?
It’s just like real life, but you can fly….”80% of Active Internet Users will have a ‘Second Life’ in the Virtual World by 2011.
— Gartner Research Press Release, April 24th 2007
Second Life may be more important, longterm, than even this much publicity would suggest. That’s because what it really may represent is an alternative vision for how to interact with information and communicate over the Internet.
— David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine, November 10th 2006
The Basics
Second Life® is an online 3D virtual world imagined, created, and owned by its Residents that offers a platform for communication, business, education, and organizational development to anyone who wants to try it. Developed by Linden Lab, Second Life was launched to the public in June of 2003. Since then, the Second Life world has grown dramatically with Residents joining from all over the globe and a virtual land area of over 4X the size of New York City. A tool for innovation, Second Life attracts not only individuals but non-profits, universities, big brands and government agencies, who see the potential for collaboration, education and communication.
The Three Key Elements of Second Life are:
Residents create avatars, form groups and establish a persistent presence in the world.
Residents create and own everything in the world. Using easy-to-master building and scripting tools, Residents create anything from houses and animations to clothing and vehicles.
A vibrant economy results in the buying and selling of Resident created content.
Second Life is not a game, instead it’s the next evolutionary stage of the Internet. It merges many qualities of the Web, online games, social networking, user-generated content, creativity applications, and telecommunications technologies. Second Life is whatever you want it to be — a social hangout, a business opportunity, a creative outlet or classroom. While there are no dragons to slay or levels to attain, there are plenty of games INSIDE of Second Life created by enterprising Residents.
First things first
* Getting In: Your first Basic account is free. Additional Basic accounts cost a onetime flat fee of $9.95. If you choose to own land, you’ll pay a monthly lease fee based on the amount of land you own.
* Avatar Customization: Creating your avatar is simple. Using sliders, you can customize your appearance endlessly. Buy a custom skin and hair to create an even more detailed look.
* The Linden Dollar: Second Life has a built-in micropayment system. The in-world currency is the Linden Dollar (or L$) and the exchange rate is about L$270/US$1. You can buy and sell your L$ at the LindeX — the Linden Lab affiliated currency exchange.
* Land: Buy islands from Linden Lab at the Land Store (or from other Residents via auctions). Owning land gives individuals and organizations the opportunity to customize the Second Life experience for their particular audience.
Programs for Nonprofits to Use Virtual Worlds
Nonprofit organizations use Second Life Grid’s virtual world technology to construct inworld facilities, reach out to new audiences, build communities, and conduct campaigns in support of their causes. Residents can interact with inworld demonstrations, multimedia-rich presentations, and topical discussions.
Linden Lab’s program for nonprofits makes it easy for organizations to establish a virtual world presence. This program provides discounted land rates and access to group mailing lists for reaching out to inworld Residents.
Universal Benefits: Why Real-world Organizations Use Virtual Worlds
Large enterprises and educational institutions continue to invest in their presences on Second Life Grid. They recognize that the largest virtual world provides verifiable real-world benefits:
* Increased Productivity
* Effective Collaboration
* Improved Communication
* Enhanced Engagement with your Customers or Audiences
* Reduced Business Costs
Increased Productivity
Corporations, universities, governments, and nonprofits use the Second Life Grid today to enhance their productivity. Some organizations focus on internal uses, such as training, education, and simulation. Others engage with their customers or students through interviews, recruiting, and product research. Some create prototypes of equipment or business processes quickly and inexpensively. All of them can reduce travel costs and downtime by substituting interaction on the Second Life Grid for real world events and meetings.
Effective Collaboration
The Second Life Grid enables participants in different environments and locations to collaborate in real time in a 3D space. For example, you can walk through a new piece of equipment, engage in a scripted training simulation, or cooperatively design a new workspace.
Improved Communication
The Second Life Grid provides multiple channels of communication, including images, audio, video, voice, public and private text, with both groups and individuals. The platform supports multiple languages and real-time text chat translators are available. For example, the private chat feature lets participants cover ‘lets go over that topic right after the meeting’ in real time. Too often the meeting ends, people leave, days or weeks of emails occur until participants catch up and address that topic. University educators use the Second Life Grid as a platform of choice for a range of distance learning options from entire virtual campuses, to classes, office hours, meetings and presentations. A visible indicator of speech and spatial 3D-voice makes it easy to identify the speaker from among those present.
Enhanced Engagement with your Customers or Audiences
Second Life Grid enables a unique, two-way opportunity for direct engagement with your customers or audiences. Unlike most traditional Web sites, this virtual world platform encourages extended engagement with participants. Many organizations have taken advantage of this 3D interaction space and long engagement times for focus groups, customer research and feedback, recruiting and interviews, and other practices.
Reduced Business Costs
Save expensive travel and business costs through the use of the Second Life Grid. Your organization can establish a private or public centralized 3D meeting space where participants can communicate, collaborate, and present using voice and text in real-time. Meet with global partners at your own branded virtual headquarters. Walk a product team through a prototype to find design problems before committing to real-world construction. Participants from around the world can connect together daily for a fraction the cost of video conferencing solutions or airline tickets.
How Other Organizations Use the Second Life Grid
The Second Life Grid platform provides a powerful platform for interactive experiences. Over 200 educators from nearly as many universities and colleges use it for classes, research, learning and projects with their students, bringing a new dimension to learning.
A large, active education community is engaged in the Grid. Harvard University, Texas State University, and Stanford University have set up virtual campuses where students can meet, attend classes, and create content together. Below are just some examples of various organizations that have incorporated the Second Life Grid in their educational programs. The links below take you to the in-world campuses of these universities. You’ll need a free Second Life account to visit and see what they are doing.
Some of the universities and colleges inworld today:
* Harvard University
* Princeton University (Web site is here)
* New York University
* San Diego State University
* Stanford University
* Texas State University
Island Set Up Fee (Educational/Non-Profit Discount) Price: $700.00
A private island is approximately 65k square meters.
Your status as an educator or non-profit will require verification prior to island delivery.
NOTE:
Monthly maintenance, at a rate of $147.50/month, will be added to this order based on the Payment Cycle chosen. You will be prompted to select either a 6 or 12 month billing period during the order process. Please note that Island Maintenance fees are to be paid in advance and will be included on the first invoice.
