Kiwi ’speaks on ‘  Obama world vision panel

Machinima role recognises

Cockeram’s  SL/RL  standing …

The University of Auckland’s Judy Cockeram (SL: Judy-Arx Scribe) (picture, right)  has been recognised  as a leader in  virtual world architecture  by being selected  as one of  four real world architects – from the US, New Zealand and Egypt -  to “star” in a US State Department  machinima discussing  the Obama vision enunciated in Cairo and how it is already being implemented in  Second Life.

President Obama recently promised in his Cairo speech  an online network, facilitating collaboration across geographic and cultural boundaries, something that Draxtor Despres (RL: Bernard Drax), a real life winner of the international ” Every Human Has Rights” media award in France in 2008 and director/producer of the machinima, “Cross Cultural Collaboration In Second Life”,  argues SL has been  doing for some time.

The quotes by the four architects, along with  excerpts of their Second Life work,  were taken from a recent panel discussion in Second Life on Architectural Design and International Collaboration in a Virtual World (CNN Report).  The event was hosted by the US Department of State on Public Diplomacy Island.  Besides Cockeram, the panelists were:   Amr Attia (SL: Archi Vita) (picture left), architect, Urban Planner and professor of architecture and urban planning at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt; Jon Brouchoud (SL: Keystone Bouchard) (picture, lower right), owner, The ARCH Network and Founder of Studio Wikitecture, based in Madison, Wisconsin; and David Denton (SL: DB Bailey), Architect and Urban Planner located in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, California.

Cockeram, a senior tutor in architecture, with the School of Architecture and Planning, at the University of Auckland, was speaking  from experience when she told the  Second Life audience drawn from more than  12 countries, that working and learning together in a virtual world “generates empathy” across cultures.

Cockeram first entered Second Life after hearing a presentation by The University of Auckland’s Dr Scott Diener in November last year, which “rang true” for her because  of her experience of having students entering university with good modeling  and drawing skills but little hands-on digital experience, even though members of the so-called “digital native” generation.

The first project Cockeram and her students engaged with  involved support from the US-based  virtual community of practice for nonprofits to explore the opportunities and benefits of Second Life, the  NPC  ( Non- Profit Commons) organisation.

“Right from the start the experience of Second life has been about reaching out and getting away from the introspective, ego-driven architect, “  Cockeram explained. “The work done in that first project looked at virtual office space and proposed things that were understandable but were not four walls and a flat ceiling.

“When you are building a wall together, rubbing shoulders with another’s  avatar it changes your decision-making. We tend to realise our similarities but we can observe differences and it generates an empathy for each other.”

“Working with such things as sculpties,” she added, “gives them a  different way of thinking about the surface of architecture.”

Second Life also led to  a big change to Cockeram’s  teaching methods.

“Previously I had always insisted on working with computers in the rich environment of  the studio,” she said. “With Second Life the much richer environment for students to respond to means that anywhere is a studio. Second life has led to them understand design decision-making from contextual information.

Today Cockeram has  more than 120 plus students from her classes participating in Second Life on The University of Auckland Second Life islands of Putahi and Kaiako.

And, although her Second Life student body is already cross-cultural with 45 percent Asian, 40 percent Pakeha (New Zealand-born Europeans) and Europeans,  and five percent Maori and Polynesian, Cockeram intends to continue extending the exchanges her students have to include more students and clients from Pakistan to America.

“I believe we are seeing an improvement in the quality of a students ability to lead with design rather than react because of what is easy in a computer package,” she said. ” The virtual world has not interfered with their design decision-making in the way some of the more complex design packages do for early learners in the field.

“Cutting edge … design”

Problems she has  overcome include  inappropriate student behaviour in-world  – a number “went absolutely nuts, with no idea how their behaviour was impacting on the rest of the class” at an initial  class with a guest lecturer;   identifying that a student’s work is his or hers, and that the student  in Second Life is the authentic student; and the problem of students leaving “unlabeled objects” littering the landscape. The first problem had been solved, she said,  by establishing  a similar ettiquette in-world to that prevailing on a real life campus, the second had been solved through  use of oral testing, and the third, through policing the issue and stressing the need for labeling in all worlds.

The “unlabeled object” problem has also led her to plan the creation of  an “unlabelled object” finder, which she hopes to include in a Toolbox she will be creating over the southern summer vacation.

Cockeram says that she does not think  that virtual worlds such as Second Life  should be seen only as developing early learner skills.

“Part of my summer  will be spent developing a collection of scripts so we can spend time developing some of the cutting edge of architectural design as well, ” she said.

Next year Cockeram plans  to take 10 to 12 fourth year students, 115  first years, and 115  second years  into Second Life.

I was recently approached about an upcoming project that would require our team here at Sand Castle Studios to create some custom content within the virtual world of Second Life. While I can’t talk about the project itself yet, I can share with you a machinima by award winning machinimagrapher and long time Mac lover Bernhard Drax (aka Draxtor Despres in SL) that previews the mockup we put together including virtual Bill Gates who calls out Draxtor for secretly using Windows!

Read more and watch the machinima at the source…

A Second Life Sentence: Going Inside Gitmo with local virtual reporter Bernhard Drax

Monterey County Weekly

831 Section

By Corby Anderson

Draxtor Despres is on the beat. He has a trusty microphone in hand and omnipresent headphones tamp down his shock of pitch black, porcupine hair. He effortlessly moves through an artfully hip, post-modern furniture store called Corn, and stops briefly to ask an interesting looking patron what she thinks of the prices. After a short conversation, the girl wanders off to continue shopping for the perfect, audaciously pink barcalounger to go in her dream space.

Satisfied with his investigations into pre-holiday consumerism, but knowing that there are bigger stories to chase, Despres nonchalantly leaps high into a gorgeous, vast blue sky and then soars up, up and away, not bothering to leave his Clark Kent suit in a phone booth. Then, with a flash of his hands, the reporter promptly teleports himself to the unlikely destination island of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Despres is a new sort of journalist, a freelancing video blogger, known as a “vlogger”, who plies the endless, bizarre Sim world called Second Life in pursuit of interesting angles and scoops. Despres is armed with a natural curiosity and technical proficiency that fires his passion for story telling, a sort of in-world videographical news production which has won him several prestigious awards for his reporting, including a trip to Paris in December to receive the “Every Human Has Rights” media award for a story that he produced for the Second Life Cable Network about the “Virtual Guantanamo” prison that has been built in Second Life. Despers was selected along with thirty other international print, TV and online journalists as a part of the upcoming 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

He is also somewhat unreal. He is a cartoonish character, or more accurately, an avatar. Draxtor Despres, the reporter, is a highly rendered, computerized figment of the fertile imagination of Bernhard Drax, who is a very real human person that lives a quiet first life in Pacific Grove with his wife, young son, and several cats.

A musician and film score composer by trade, Drax is a native German who discovered Second Life when a former band mate of his suggested that they bridge the thousands of miles between them by jamming together virtually.  “We were just nostalgically reminiscing, and then I hung up the phone, and went online to secondlife.com, and was like whoa! This is what I have been missing.” Drax says as he navigates the World with a practiced fluidity, constantly multitasking, drilling into video files and data bases, writing short, cheerful notes to friends and fans (he is somewhat of a celebrity and a media pioneer in this other World) while simultaneously navigating his avatar through the stark chain link and barbed wire maze of Virtual Gitmo.

“Second Life was created by Philip Rosedale in 2003 at his company, which is called Linden Labs. He was interested in creating a virtual social network.” Drax says. “And it is a society. Everything that you have in real life, you have here.  People come to Second Life to date, and shop and work. There are discos and TV shows, concerts of all kinds, and even tedious city council meetings filled with real, retired civic administrators. ”

Draxtor, the reporter has documented stories ranging from real world movie releases integrated into the World, to adoption in Second Life, efforts to cure disease using virtual communication and collaboration, and the salaciously world of simulated kink.

“What I like about Second Life is the entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is a creative engine. The educators and educational institutions are the big winners in Second Life. There is actually a replica of the Harvard Law School, with Harvard professors that I can instant message, and they will get back to me! In real life I would call their office and I could not get through to them, not in my lifetime!”  Drax says, as his avatar sits in a steel cage, dressed in the now infamous orange jump suit of a Gitmo imprisoned terror suspect.

“Virtual Guantanamo is the only place in either world where anyone can physically go to and gather at to experience what it is like, and to discuss what has happened there.” He adds. There are lectures at Virtual Gitmo from top scholars on the subject. Aside from the physical landmark, Virtual Gitmo is noteworthy for another, fairly new effect on societal zeitgeist: Lifeheads react very strongly to seeing a digital version of themself shackled in a cage. “People are very connected to their avatars, and when they see them imprisoned, there is a psychological effect. There are many studies about this phenomenon.”  Not unlike a real person looking for some perspective on the notion of personal freedom voluntarily stepping into the damp blackness of a solitary cell when visiting Alcatraz Island , Lifers are inclined to submit their avatars to temporary imprisonment as a way of gauging the degrees of suffocation and isolation that are part and parcel of being held captive at the infamous Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay.

As the bearded, bespeckled family man passionately explains the potential for Second Life citizens to tackle, and perhaps sway popular opinion about controversial human rights issues such as extraordinary rendition and state sponsored torture, he pauses. “What the hell?” Drax mutters, distractedly reading a rapidly developing text script that runs down the left side of his large monitor.  As he sits, virtually, locked in solitary confinement in one of the worlds most notorious prisons, he also fields dozens of incoming Second Life communiqués, including a totally random request to loan a thousand dollars to a virtual stranger, which incredibly, he does, in Linden Bucks, the Second Life Currency – at 23% interest, with a six month payoff. “I just made $230!” He says proudly.

“He (Despres/Drax) is pioneering an area that is no doubt going to be increasingly important as people tire of the mainstream media.” Interjects Starr Sonic, popping in, literally, for a chat. The scarlet trussed, thigh-booted Sonic is the alter ego of an Australian producer for the Second Life Cable Network, a popular in-world media offering that Despres works as a freelance journalist for. “He is using a virtual world to raise awareness on human right issues, and I congratulate him on his achievements.”

*Draxtor Despres , Starr Sonic, and indeed an entire Metaverse of people can be found at www.secondlife.com. The site is free, relatively easy to join, and requires only a computer connected to a high speed internet connection.

Every Human has Rights website -Media Awards

and so proud to be in

Top 50 Human Rights Blogs

Robertt Avro’s machinima on YouTube

For the Children (the serious one)

Human Rights (the one about the concert at Spinoza)

Draxtor Despres’ award winning machinima on YouTube

AWARD WINNING SL VIDEO – Unesco Human Rights Awards
Videographer: Draxtor Despres – Speaker at opening of festival

Interview about Human Rights Festival on Tonite Live with Paisley Beebe

Slide show by Jackie Gerstein

Articles

SL-NEWSPAPER ARTICLE by NAZZ LANE…

Blog by Wildstar Beaumont

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