I am really interested by how Internet contributes to give everyone access to art, being by stimulating new types of artistic creation or new types of artistic presentation.

But virtual worlds are accelerating this democratization at an unprecedented rhythm. Here is a review of the different types of artistic presence in Second Life.

Some artists or galleries just reproduce their exhibition on SL:

• Jen Berkman, who owns a gallery in NYC says that it is far much better than reproducing the paintings on a website.

• It is not at all limited to contemporary art: even the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen of Dresde has opened a virtual museum in SL, reproducing its famous gallery of Old Masters and its architectural environment.

Some other artists use SL to sell online some of their offline pieces of art thanks to scanning:

• Carla Chandrayaan is an amateur painter which sells for about 350 Lindens each piece of her scanned worked (about $1.25). With the boom of real estate in SL, it is not silly to think that the need for decorative art will follow the trend, but it remains hard to charge a high price for just an image.

• The “twins” Ysaline McKay et Kymi Mountain have also created a French art gallery in SL, which renew the concept of “originality”: they sell a unique item of each piece of art, which means that “scarcity marketing” can also be part of SL.

Finally, some artists use SL as a creative place in itself:

• Sasun Steinbeck has created specific SL pieces of art such as polymorphic sculptures: they are randomly generated (you will never see twice the same), with personalization options (music, shape) when you click on them, and have necessitated 8 months of programming in SL script!

• Dancoyote Antonelli (whose real-life name is DC Spensley) pioneered hyperformalism as “an art movement that creates abstract art in the digital world”. His work includes single paintings that can transform into others on command, a variety of giant moving sculptures.

• The Metaverse gallery is a project of University of Texas at Dallas Art and Technology, and I have loved their “glitches”, which are realized from pictures of SL characters (such as the one on the article’s picture). You can see more of them on Dean Terry (leader of the project and professor at UTD) Flickr space here.

I am not a sheer fan of SL (too slow, and I never find what I want), so my opinion is biased, which is why I would like to know:

What do you think of these initiatives? Do you consider those creations as “pieces of art”? Do you think that people will enjoy discovering art by this way? Do you like digital art based not only on digital tools (type of art which is more than common since the creation of Photoshop) but also on virtual communities? Do you think that there is a real benefit for an artist in being present on SL (in terms of visibility and profit he can make)?

Read more about Fidji SIMO here.

“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

OK folks, I must confess this post will surely be of little interest for most of our readers. Nonetheless, I felt like sharing with you a few personal thoughts about world’s leading CMS, Joomla.

To say it in a nutshell, I truly believe that these CMS (content management systems) are quite valuable, and could very well meet a wide success. More powerful than most wikis or blogging platforms, they already power corporate or community websites. Amongst all the existing solutions, Joomla! (formerly Mambo) seems to be more or less the best option, although I can only compare it with Wordpress and SPIP, having only a superficial knowledge of Drupal, the most serious contender. Wikipedia lists another 30 platforms, so please feel free to provide us information on those if necessary.

So here I go with ten points, some of them very favourable to Joomla, other being mere pains in the ass. Up to you to make your own overall opinion, mine remaining positive at the end of the day.

Here for the pros :

1) Joomla is both free & fully open-source. Even better, the developers are actually trying to make their little jewel GPL-compliant. Since according to Jeremy, all open-source developers cannot decently work with commercial stuff, that ensures at least a steady support from an important developer community.

2) Joomla has a large, growing user base. So that means: plenty of free advice, forums, feedbacks, suggestions, etc…Many forum threads are so active that should you report a problem, you might expect an answer within the next hours ! Great.

3) Joomla’s modular structure rocks. There are simply billions of additional components and modules available, some of them useless, other being swarmed with bugs, but then the important user base ensures a large documentation thanks to forum+evaluations. What’s more, installing/removing them is piece of cake, and guess what: entries on the database are kept, so you do not need to bother backuping/restoring the SQL database if you just feel like removing a component for a better one, then change your mind. (I have done this like 10K times. Maybe I am not well organized, though).

4) Security issues are now (fairly well) dealt with. OK, some security breaches are corrected every month or two, which is not very engaging. Nonetheless, Joomla’s latest version now tells you when you compromise your site security with risky settings (ever heard about chmod, globals.php…?). This is just plain cool.

5) Joomla’s administrator interface is damn good. Ever tried SPIP ? Well, its interface compares to Joomla pretty much like Windows 3.0’s compares to Ubuntu+Beryl (or Mac OS X, of course Vincent+Kari:-). Besides it is handy : while Wordpress is OK, and may be slightly more straightforward, I am quite sure it could not handle dozens of additional modules in its current form, while Joomla ’s usability would seem unaffected.

6) Templates are great. A single site can handle multiple templates, and each of thoses are quite easily customizable. Don’t bother too much though: hundreds of really nice templates have been designed, just make your choice…Drupal and Wordpress lag far behind there.

And the cons:

7) Online documentation is poor. Really, there are many things you ought to find out by yourself. Hopefully, forums are flooded with help topics (see point 2). But it’s not really the way one should proceed, right.

8 ) Installation is tough. Very tough sometimes, depending on your server. Of all the solutions I know, only MediaWiki can compete in terms of complexity – which is stupid since some wiki solutions are just as useful, without any hassle about Apache configuration, PHP/mySQL and all that jazz (PBWiki for eample). Anyway, I guess it’s the price to pay for running such a powerful software.

9) Upgrading from Mambo to Joomla is painful. Which is surprising since the source code is almost exactly the same. Nevertheless, you’ll have to reinstall all components and fiddle with some files (.htaccess, etc…). Not very user-friendly…

10) SEO is an absolute nightmare. This will be the subject of a forthcoming post….