Virtual Greg

Adam Nash and I devised a show called When Worlds Collide and performed it for the second time in Melbourne last week. The show is based on an installation Adam built on an island in Second Life. He filled the island with geometric sculptures that play sounds when you walk near them. The installation is called Seventeen Unsung Songs and it’s on the island “East of Odyssey”. If you can get into Second Life, go have a look, it’s free and public.

I interviewed Adam for my PhD research last February and discovered we have some things in common. We’re both from Brisbane, both played in bands there in the early 80s, and both drifted into more performance-oriented music after moving to Melbourne. We have new ideas about where, when and how live music can be played. Adam’s Second Life sound-sculptures are intended to be played by passers-by in that virtual world. We came up with the idea of playing the sculptures ourselves, while piping the sound and vision to a real-world audience.

We took this idea to Melbourne venue Horse Bazaar. This city nightspot has a bar, good sound, and a high-tech video projection system. Compared to what these guys can do with video, our needs were simple: we wanted the screens from two laptops to be projected onto two different walls. During the show Adam sat at one laptop and I at the other, and we walked our respective avatars on different routes around the sculptures, so that most of the time the two of us were in different parts of the island. Our two sound-streams were mixed together and played through the venue’s sound system. In that sense we were a band: individuals making separate sounds that added to make a piece of music.

This arrangement is also the reason that you can’t “watch” this show in Second Life. If you go to the island to the island you can’t hear both sound streams at once. You have to be at the “real world” venue to hear them mixed together. Because of the way the real and virtual worlds interact in this show, I came up with the bright idea of calling it “When Worlds Collide”, realizing only after printing the flyers that the same name seems to have occured to everyone who has put on a mixed-reality event. Nevertheless we’ll stick with the WWC name for a while.

Our particular mix of real and virtual is what differentiates our show from most of the live music happening in Second Life. The standard approach to SL music, popularized by Suzanne Vega in 2006, involves making music in some real-world location which is picked up by a microphone and fed into Second Life via an avatar. Other SL users can position themselves nearby in-world to hear the music. However this kind of performance uses SL merely as a broadcast medium - the music isn’t really being made in the virtual world. In our show, by contrast, the instruments only exist in Second Life and can only be played by avatars. In other words we reverse the usual setup: instead of piping real-world music into Second Life, we are piping Second Life music into the real world.

Adam and I test-ran When Worlds Collide at Horse Bazaar in March. Happy with the results, we performed it again at the same venue in May. This time we were part of the Stutter series of experimental performance nights, which run weekly at this venue. This meant we had a good-sized audience of people interested in pushing the envelope of live music performance. The non-SL-devotees in the room may have been baffled as to what was going, on but I hope they found it interesting anyway. Tateru Nino published a review of the show on Massively.com.

As I will be overseas in the second half of 2008, Adam and I going to try to perform our show live from two real-world places on opposite sides of the globe. This is likely to involve three laptops and mouse-look. It’s scheduled for Saturday night, 12th July. Adam will be at the Afterdark Bar, 565 High st Northcote, and I’ll be in Palo Alto.