"The Song Remains... the Same? Three Case Studies of Issues of Digital Preservation in Second Life Performance Practices"

Transcription

1 University of Alaska, Fairbanks From the SelectedWorks of Dennis Moser Fall September, 2010 "The Song Remains... the Same? Three Case Studies of Issues of Digital Preservation in Second Life Performance Practices" Dennis Moser, University of Wyoming Available at:

2 The Song Remains... the Same? Three Case Studies of Issues of Digital Preservation in Second Life Performance Practices cc Dennis Moser, 2010

3 A VERY Brief Overview of Performance Documentation History: ~ Thoinot Arbeau or Jehan Tabourot; French cleric whose treatise Orchésographie on both and public behavior is one of the earliest Western sources of what we might call performance documentation. First published, 1589.

4 A VERY Brief Overview of Performance Documentation History, cont d: ~ Thoinot Arbeau or Jehan Tabourot; French cleric whose treatise Orchésographie on both and public behavior is one of the earliest Western sources of what we might call performance documentation. First published, ~ Rudolf von Laban, Hungarian founder of the Choreographic Institute in Zürich, 1915, and publisher of the 1928 Kinetographie Laban and its dance notation system called Labanotation.

5 Visual Representations: Two from Arbeau, one from Laban...

6 Visual Representations, cont d: The recent past: Pauline Oliveros, 1987, The Roots of the Moment...

7 The Question then, among others, remains, What do we document and how do we preserve it for the future? Consider the following: ~ Visual art can be thought of being about Space ~ Music can be thought of as about Time ~ Performance, Dance, and Theater are about Time AND Space...so the tools we use must accommodate these aspects and preserve those essential elements.

8 ~ AldoManutio Abruzzo ~ q Musical performer q Minimal visual effects used q Technical specifications not germane to performance documentation q Performances documented by audio recordings, freely available q Adequate documentation through the music video -style machinima q Essential performance experience available outside of virtual environment

9 ~ Gallery of Musical Sculptures ~ q Intensely personal experience, but essentially artist-guided & public q Experienced in a structured, non-dynamic virtual environment q Machinima captures the greatest part of the experience, including both the dynamic and audio aspects q The artist s authorial intent is as explicit or implicit as they wish it to be.

10 ~ Avatar Orchestra Metaverse AOM ~ q Multi-modal, multi-participant, multi-reality highly interactive performance q May or may not be fully public q Highly constrained by artist s authorial intent or vision q Choreographed to utilize 3 dimensional spaces q Machinima and real world video needed to provide performance documentation

11 n Selected Resources and Acknowledgements x Tim Risher, Claus Gahrn, Flivelwitz Alsop, and Nicolaus Skytower of the Gallery of Musical Sculptures x Tina Pearson and all the members of the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse x The image of Pauline Oliveros s Roots of the Moment, accessed September 2010, via 777&id= x The Council on Library and Information Resources, Report #84, Securing our Dance Heritage: Issues in the Documentation and Preservation of Dance, Catherine J. Johnson and Allegra Fuller Snyder, July x The Linden Lab Official: Snapshot and Machinima Policy and_machinima_policy (accessed September, 2010) x Columbia University Libraries Policy for Preservation of Digital Re sources accessed September, 2010 via x Johns Hopkins University Jscholarship Digita Preservation Policy accessed, September 2010 via