About the Global Underscore Satellite @ Second Life / Senses Places

The Global Underscore virtual Satellite @ Second Life, MUVE, enables participants and audience members from remote places, including Global Underscore sites, to gather and expand the possibilities for embodied connections.

Towards a greater consciousness through listening, sharing, and improvising through the practice, the Satellite @ Second life expands our encounters and interactions through virtualization in images and as avatars.

Senses Places project will host this virtual Global Underscore Satellite at its virtual site at Koru Island

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koru/233/233/3005.

Senses Places’ team will organize the activity and participate on June 23, 2:30–6:30pm (GMT/WET) 6:30–10:30am (SLT/PST).

The Second Life 3d platform is owned by Linden Labs company (2003) and its inhabitants, the avatars, have multiple interests, ranging from business and shopping, dating, explorations, education and artistic practice, to name but a few. At this multi-user 3d application participants animate an avatar and interact with others and the environment in multiple ways. The modalities of human-avatar interaction include chat, appearance, gesture, voice, and movement of the body, in space, and in relation to other avatars and objects.

Within SL, it is possible to simultaneously display a number of browser windows, like multiple video broadcasts. In this way we will gather the different Global Underscore streams in a shared virtual site. If this includes your site, you would be able to see and interact with/through the image of yourself in that environment, with the people in your site, and with virtual figures and images of people at other sites.

The SL Satellite will also have a GU channel and will stream also in SL during the practice: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/gus2012-secondlife.

The idea is to truly expand (rather than substitute) our bodies taking advantage of the possibilities of dance somatics and digitally enabled embodied mediation and virtualization.

Adapting interfaces to our bodies, instead of the other way around, will contribute to amplify our sensory-perceptive capacities to connect in multiple combined ways with the many Global Underscore sites, satellites, for the first time including avatar participants and audience members.

The Underscore’s approach is rooted on group and contact improvisation, integrating related somatic practices, such as, Tai Chi, release and alignment, BMC, and Alexander, among others.

These practices enable us to be grounded and follow our bodies’ sensory perceptions while also expanding through our images and avatars to connect with others via remotely connected improvisation.

SL opens amazing interactive possibilities for creative communities of practice such as CI.

Trough an encompassing connection, including an emphasis on somatic and technological mediations multiple physical-virtual vessels of communication will open among the participants and the shared environments, contributing to generating a novel integrated globality.

In order to visit and participate in the Global Underscore Satellite @ Second Life you, or someone at your Underscore site, needs to take some time to familiarize yourself with the Second Life interface. Here are our recommended steps:

1. Have a computer with reasonable graphics and high-speed internet connection. 2. Create an account and choose an avatar (free)

@ https://join.secondlife.com/?lang=en-­‐US

3. Download and install Second Life (free)

@ https://join.secondlife.com/download.php

4. Open the Second Life application and Go to the SL Underscore Satellite site

@ Senses Places: SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koru/233/233/3005 You can also go to any other location of your choice, or simply login without

choosing a place.

You will be teleported to a welcome site where avatar hosts

wait to help you 

5. Get accustomed to the interface: the avatar and the 3d environment. It is

not difficult, but it will require some practice depending on your computer interface and videogame skills and literacy. This will enable you to observe, interact, and improvise with other avatars and video stream images of other GU sites projected on to screens/browser windows.

a) learn to use the arrow keys to move the avatar in space
b) learn to use the chat window, voice, and animations to communicate c) learn about the menus and Inventory
d) learn how to edit the avatar appearance
e) learn to operate the camera view point
f) learn to interact with objects in the environment
g) learn how to teleport

6. At the GU site at Senses Places/Koru Island we will share animations for your avatar to improvise with. You can play animating your avatar with them, including changing, accumulating, looping, and moving in space.

The ideal is that you make your avatar dance without stopping your dancing. 7. If you are at a GU site streaming a channel, you will be able to see your

channel in SL along with the other streams. Simply copy and paste your site’s channel URL link onto one of the screens available at the site as server windows.

8. Watch, experiment, improvise!

Global Underscore related Links:

• Blog: http://globalunderscore.blogspot.de/

• Group dance-tech.net: http://www.dance-

  tech.net/groups/group/show?groupUrl=global-underscore-2012#

• Somatics and Technology conference: http://somaticstechnologyconference2012.com/about/

• Global Underscore Satellite @ Senses Places, Koru Island SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Koru/233/233/3005

• Second Life GU Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/gus2012- secondlife

   

   

  You can also download this guidelines a a pdf here