The Art Mecho Museum (located in Teaching at 60,40,22) is a museum that holds exhibits related to animation, especially anime and manga. It is also explores how we experience immersive digital art. This is the sort of location I want to bring to the attention of my students, as it is a clear interest of many of them. Sites likes this should draw them in to explore SL more frequently, to see what they can find relating to the course, especially relating to critical studies.
The museum has some special architectural features designed to test or illustrate ideas advanced by anime theorists, and also test some new kinds of SL interfaces for looking at virtual art.
The revolving main tower houses a zootrope. You fly into the center and you rotate in place to view the horse in its run cycle.
There are references here to Muybridge's photographs of human and animal motion--the images that arguably constitute the first motion pictures.
The Art Mecho Museum is sponsored by Williams College and affiliated with _Mechademia_, an annual forum for academic writing about Japanese manga, anime, and fan culture (http://www.mechademia.org).
The main gallery exhibits manga- and anime-related art. You can walk up to each canvass and pass throught it, the next canvass in the series becomes visible. This provides the illusion of turning the pages of a manga comic.
In the lower sections of the museum lies and an exhibit by Eron Rauch. I think many of my students will love this as many of them are WOW fans. I will leave it to the man himself to describe his piece.
EVELING...A Land to Die In
by Eron Rauch
Artist's Statement
This show for the Art Mecho Museum is based on an RL gallery show of photographs that represent my reflections on the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. "Leveling" consists of three different series of photographs, representing three intersecting threads in the game and an equal number of art-historical trail-heads.
The project that gives the show its name is "Leveling 1-70 (A Land to Die In)," which is a large installation of photographs in a grid. As I play the game I am taking a photograph of each player-character corpse I come across. These images preserve the dead bodies of every fellow player that has tried to take on too many brigands, fallen too far, stumbled into an ambush set by high-level monsters, or failed to master the game's tactics. The backdrops in WoW are carefully and often beautifully rendered, but they function mainly as landscapes to die in.
The second set of photos is comprised of large color prints that record actual rendering errors that I have experienced in the game world. The satori moment of the glitch, which shatters the facade of realism, is often more awe-inspiring or humorous to me than the game's most spectacular magic spell or wittiest dialog. Though the images seem abstract, they are also a reminder of the concrete programming and geometry that produce the game's forms.
The third body of work in the show, called "Travels," is a series of landscapes I journeyed through during my adventures in the frontiers of WoW, shot in the style of Timothy O'Sullivan or William Henry Jackson--two photographers who explored the American West in the late1800's. These photographers searched for meaning, both artistic and social, in the dramatic terrain. Their images are also an attempt to explore the conflicting meanings these landscapes hold for society: as a place to preserve and industrialize, as a source of fear and wonder, as a place for paths into the future and the past. In the same way, "Travels" is a personal exploration of my confusion and anxiety about the role of the artist in our increasingly constructed world.
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