SpeedLimits: a centenary

In 1909, Italian poet Filippo Marinetti published “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in Le Figaro. In 2009 the Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) and our partners will inaugurate a critical and speculative examination of this movement, in the form of an exhibition named Speedlimits.

Speedlimits is a mixed-reality exhibition focused on the pivotal role played by speed in modern life. The exhibit will mark the centenary of the foundation of the Italian Futurist movement, whose inaugural manifesto proclaimed “the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

We’ll begin teaming with the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), with an installation in their museum in Montréal. In a reversal of normal procedure, this real life exhibit will serve as secondary source support for the primary show, a virtual-world, extended version of the real-world exhibition spaces. Following the CCA show, we’ll move on to the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami, to be followed by other venues in North America.

The images here are of a model of the Montréal CCA space I’ve set up on Hotgates, SHL’s island in Second Life. I’ve populated it with imagery relating to some of the themes we’ll be examining within the broad context of the modernity/speed equation. When it’s complete, in addition to the replicated RL galleries, we’ll present a number of virtual galleries with no physical equivalent, some curated by critics and scholars, and others reserved for visitor-generated content and curatorial concepts. We’ll be conducting international design competitions for this part, and we’ll have some kind of “press kit” with guidelines for content development (tech specs, genres, curatorial aims…). I think this is going to be a lot of fun, expect to hear more on the subject in the coming months.

MotoSL Season 3 awards party

Saturday morning: everything in place, waiting for the crowd.

The MotoSL awards party finally got taken care of this weekend, after a couple of delays. The first season’s event happened the same day as the last race, down by Les White’s bait shack on Misp. That was a logistical nightmare, getting trophies and plaques engraved with names of riders whose ranking in the championship wasn’t decided until that day!

Season two was a bit more organized, with a week between the last race and party time. I hosted the event on Hotgates, Vince did some nice trophies, lots of people showed up to collect their gold, and a lot of us stuck around afterwards to soak in the hot tub and schmooze.

This year, planning was a bit more “relaxed”. The last race of the season was at PSU, on March 8th, and management took an extra week to get all the loose ends tucked in. Worth the wait: we had nearly 30 avs on hand at Hotgates this time, celebrating the new champions. I’ve put up a few more pictures here, hope you enjoy them. See you all next season!

A bringing up to date

[To my dear friends in and out of SL: thanks, for all your love and kindness. 😉 ]

Over 3 months without a post, and it feels like longer. It’s been a busy time, but for one reason and another it’s been hard to sit down and do an entry here. The biggest news, I suppose, is that health issues in RL have had a significant impact on my SL self. My racing season went downhill in a big way starting in January, when I lost a good deal of hand dexterity and sensation and also quite a lot of time, in hospital and unable to practice. Not the way I wanted to end my MotoSL season, certainly. And I never imagined it would actually mean bowing out of RaceSL competition completely, but that’s been the upshot. So for now I’m an ex-racer, but I’ll continue to be involved in the racing scene, with some sort of series management duties to be determined. And maybe by the time MotoSL4 comes around, I’ll be back in the saddle again.

In the meantime, I’ve found that all those hours I’m not spending at the track looking for a tenth of a second to shave off my lap times are actually pretty useful for getting other things done. I’ve got some interesting new building projects to talk about, so stick around, and I promise the next post won’t take 3 months to appear here.