Wix
Asemia
I love playing around with text, and yet I hardly ever have the words themselves inside my head. So, what I end up doing is use the poetry or the prose of others, or sometimes I use generative text. I have no idea why I cannot make up a tale. It seems that my mind only works in single instances that have no past or future.
Another thing is that I am very tired of words. It seems like as if all I ever do is talk. All everyone does is talk, for that matter. A global obsession with communication. Usually short sentences so that they can also fit on twitter. This I do not like. I do not want to share anything and everything in short snippets. I would, however, like to tell a long tale, if I could – which, unfortunately, I can’t.
Recently I have been very disenchanted. Still am actually. And, with this kind of deep level turn off from life, words would not work anyway, even if I had the talent to make them into a tale. Hence – asemia:
http://elifayiter.wix.com/asemia
Making new things
Wondering about ways of making 3D virtual output visible/accessible elsewhere. Yesterday I made a calendar for the SL alpha.tribe group which I am also thinking of giving as a new year’s gift to my family and my colleagues. One thing which I am all too aware of is that none of them really know what I do. In fact, I find that even trying to explain to someone (let us say, my sister) what it is that I do, how it actually works, is really very difficult. Giving them a present which shows the output may work for that.
The other thing is that these days I seem to be far more inclined to playing around with things that are offshoots of the virtual output rather than actually rezzing the virtual output itself. Like making videos, slideshows, websites. And I have accumulated a lot of material for that, especially through documenting Syncretia before I deleted the place.
So, one thing planned is assembling virtual output such as videos and photos in Wix, which is this really great, completely intuitive, online interface for creating flash sites. I already tried out some stuff there a while back and I love it! My graduate student Naz (see her work here and here – I am rather proud of her ;-) is also using Wix to put together her masters thesis project and she has worked absolute wonders with it, combining her photographs with recordings of her own voice, set at different pitches – which I want to try doing also by the way. So, why not avatar tales via Wix?
And then I have also suddenly started to wonder about making books. This came to me while I was googling someone who was making a presentation at the conference last week and I found out that they are using a place called lulu to self-publish books. Then I looked a bit more at this whole idea and it turns out that amazon has a whole sub-system for self-publishing called createspace. Of course, this is all rather complex since one needs to fill out all kinds of forms (also with the US IRS, where these places are located) for tax purposes. Both places let you purchase ISBN numbers and then you sell the stuff on amazon. I am not sure that the books that I make would actually sell in that sense. But it might be nice to make books right here in RL, in Istanbul, to give away, not to sell. Or even to sell – who knows? I know people who do that and the output can be quite stunning. There is this long standing idea that I should have an RL photo exhibit of my virtual output at Galeri Nev here in Istanbul and custom created books may be something that could supplement a photo exhibit.
And of course, there needs to be a full documentation of my stuff for my PhD viva, which I guess will happen sometime next year. And books may be good for that as well.