Info Session with JC Fremont and Smokie Mountain in "Kamloops"

Hello Second Front members and fans!

Today, 3 of us (myself, Tran Spire and Man Michinaga) were invited by JC Fremont and Smokie Mountain to their shared studio space high up in the upper atmosphere where we could learn more about JC's installation plans for Ars Virtua on January 05, 2007 that we are also taking part in.

Here are some pix below with some brief captions...

From Left to Right: Smokie Mountain, JC Fremont, Wirxli Flimflam (myself) and Tran Spire.

So, after much difficulty figuring out how to land smoothly, we detached our wings in order to land on this otherworldly pad. I guess flying is hard in near-zero gravity ;-) Anyways, you can see that JC has been working on quite a few image-orbs...it seems to be his trademark as an avatar artist. In one of the orbs here we can see what looks like a Minuteman-style border guard.

As mentioned in the posting below, JC's theme is "borders" or "imaging Place" but I am glad to see that his concept at least visually, seems quite open to performative and collaborative interpretation..I am glad we as a group have a few weeks to prepare :-)

So, after a few minutes, Man Michinaga joined us in the Kamloops section of JC's world for a movie-infomercial for JC's border project, "Imaging Place". The seats were all ready for us and all we needed to do was sit down and render the movie-screen itself! How about "Imaging Cinema"? Heh heh... ;-) Those hovering icon symbols with the "i" represent clickable information about the various psychogeographical nodes being referenced within the confines of JC's world...In this way, we can imagine also the content and context behind the space and not just having to "image" it visually. See those thin red lines? Those are tightropes where one can walk up and down them (for all you non-pedestrians in Second Life, note the traffic signs that have the "Walk" pictogram....hint hint).

Ok, the movie is about to start! Have we all scored ourselves a seat? It certainly appears that we are ready (for the movie to render and...) to roll!


Here is what a segment of the movie looks like...I should have recorded a video-clip of it, oh well! Besides, JC offered to bring me in here again to check it all out...I was in a bit of a rush as my 1st life was catching up with me today...sigh! I initially thought that the guy in this movie was in fact JC's RL self but it turns out that this guy is someone else who has an avvie in Second Life.

Here is another segment of this movie...I think the whole thing ran for about 5 minutes(?) It looks like JC likes to use images from Google Earth for reference. Hmmmm...is it me or is that a frozen water faucet?

You can see that Man Michinaga was the first to figure out how to climb the red-tightropes up to a higher plane of existence...I guess this must have been the magnetic North Pole as there are plenty of reindeers on this higher altitude! I was probably the slowest to figure out how to walk up these ropes..I did not notice the walk sign and tried clicking on them with my mouse....duh! Well, we managed to join him up there for a better view...

..and here we are getting a better sense of the variety of image content that JC embodies in his floating orbs.

So, stay tuned for more info-session postings and I highly suggest that the Second Front members who were not able to attend to have a closer look at some of the hyperlinks in this posting..especially, the one that links to JC's Imaging Place musings...I think we are on the right-track in terms of what we have been discussing with our collaborative and top-secret bulk-mail transmissions.

For all you Second Front fans out there...there are more postings to read!