Second Life

Daniel Durning explores the Immersive Virtual Metaverse with 3 long-time residents of Linden Lab's Second Life. Today's show discusses the social networking phenomena and the various creative experiences with the artists behind the avatars, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Katherine Milton, Michael Wright. This program was recorded live at the Guerrilla Studios at SIGGRAPH 2007 the computer graphics conference held in San Diego, California.



Jacquelyn Ford Morie is known in the computer graphics community as the "grandmother" of Virtual Reality, having worked in interactive media and immersive environments for many years. She has worked in both animation and visual effects entertainment (Disney, Rhythm & Hues Studios) as well as with developing virtual environments in government-sponsored research laboratories. Her current project, The Memory Stairs Project, is an artistic virtual environment installation embodying the tools and techniques developed to create extremely compelling virtual worlds. She is currently Associate Director of Creative Development for the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California.



Katherine Milton is Director of the Aesthetic Technologies Lab at Ohio State University.
She has worked in digital technologies producing interactive media and web design since 1989. She specializes in online learning communities and developing educational media with multi-disciplinary artists.



Michael Wright is a painter working in both traditional and electronic mediums. He has exhibited digital and traditional works on a national level. His work appears currently in a new book, The Computer in the Visual Arts by Anne Morgan Spalter of Brown University, published by Addison Wesley. His digital works are also published in Linda Jacobs' book Cyberarts: Exploring Art & Technology, Wired, Micro Publishing News and Computer Graphics & Applications. He and his work have been featured on Agent X, Television Tokyo. Wright is currently an associate professor in the Digital Media and Liberal Studies Programs at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

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