Art In Space: an Art Show in the LOOT Space Apartment
by SealWyf, HSM team writer
I love hosting art shows in Home. You could say it’s one of my obsessions. And most of the art shows I have hosted have been in the service of the Homeling Collective.
Part of the fun is the sheer challenge — finding ways to overcome the inherent unsuitability of PlayStation Home for such an enterprise. In the first place, there are only a few private spaces which have a large number of eye-level, well-lighted picture frame spots. And one of the best of these is a space that is no longer available, the Chamber Apartment. Those of us who own the Chamber counsider ourselves lucky, especially if we are in the art-gallery business.
There is also the sad fact that most of the picture frames available in Home were simply not designed for the best possible display of images. Either they have a reflective “glass” that dims the image, or their options for displaying a picture at the correct aspect ratio are defective.
The latter problem is surprisingly common. You would think that the first thing a developer would check when designing a picture frame would be whether it actually displayed pictures correctly. One of the best frames is still the original: the Harbour Studio picture frame. It adds no reflection, its “stretch, clip or letterbox” options work correctly, and its clean, minimalist design does not get in the way of the art.
But the main problem with Home art shows is that they have to be in private spaces; clubhouses have no picture frame spots. Clubhouse furnishings are stored on a central server, and so far Sony has been unwilling to use their servers to store users’ images. (I suspect there are lawyers involved — intellectual property has always been a hot-button issue on Home.)
And so you are limited to using private spaces for art shows, which means you can only invite eleven guests at a time, and they must all be on your Friend List. For those of us whose Friend Lists are perpetually maxed, this makes hosting an event even more of a logistical adventure.
When I first got into the art show business, I imagined myself as the gracious gallery hostess, a Home-based Gertrude Stein, strolling among my guests and pointing out the felicities of the works on display with a few insightful, literate comments. Within minutes of opening the First Homeling Art Show, I discovered that the host sees very little of it. As the sole manager of guests, the apartment owner constantly shuttles between the XMB and the PDA — fielding messages, deleting and adding friends, checking the list of people already present, sending invites, responding to requests for invites, and sending XMB or PM messages urging patience if the space is already full. Hosting a full-fledged Home art show is one of the most exhausting experiences I’ve had in our virtual world.
That said, it’s also one of the most rewarding. There’s no joy in pulling off the easy; it’s the difficult that gives satisfaction. And so I continue to run these shows, and other improbable Home events, as often as my schedule allows. I relish the challenge. But I also continue to lobby for tools that will make them easier.
We received some wonderful tools with advent of the LOOT Space Station apartment. As others have noted, this is simply the most awesome private space in Home. What makes it unique is not just its stunning visual design, though that itself is nearly worth the ten-dollar price tag. What makes this space the “real deal” is its interactive media.
Like other LOOT private spaces, the Space Station has the full EOD suite, including movies, live video feeds and several channels of Internet radio. But it has broken new ground with social media integration.
One aspect of this is the display of scrolling Twitter feeds. But for me the “killer app” was image integration — fifteen interactive screens that display content from the photo hosting site Flickr, as single images or in slide shows. Any publicly-accessible Flickr image can be used. The total number that can be displayed in the space is an astonishing 450.
Is it any surprise that my first reaction to the LOOT Space Station apartment was an enthusiastic cry of “Art shows!”, followed by a dash to the Estates store? I wandered around my new space for a few days, trying things out. Then I posted the “Art In Space” event on the Collective’s Fluidic Space website, and started recruiting artists. This was going to be perfect.
As we all know, perfection is elusive. My first disappointment came when I started using the Flickr screens, and discovered that they stretched images to fit. The more useful options of “clip” and “letterbox” were not available. This meant that each image had to be edited — manually letterboxed by adding borders in PhotoShop, so its shape would match the screen aspect ratio. Which meant in turn, that I needed to determine the aspect ratio of the screens.
There are two styles of Flickr screens: landscape and portrait. I quickly discovered that the landscape screens have the same aspect ratio as a wide-screen TV, approximately 1.78 to 1. This means they correctly display most Home screen captures. The portrait-style screens required some experiments. I created calibration images, loaded them onto Flickr, put them on the screens, and examined the results. I finally decided to use the proportion of 1 to 1.3.
Then I ran into another unexpected problem: the LOOT Space Station screens can only access the most recent 200 images in any given Flickr account. To make older images visible, you have to re-load them. This would be a nuisance, and in any case I didn’t want to clutter up my personal Flickr account with the art show images. So I created a new Flickr account named HomelingArtShow to host images for the “Art In Space” show. It’s public, so you can use the images in your own Space Station if you wish, or view them from your web browser.
As a final refinement, I created name-tag images for each artist’s slide show. This meant I didn’t need to spend my limited time as the art show host telling the guests who the artists were.
Besides the slide-show screens, the LOOT Space Station apartment has the advantage of music, through the RadioIO feature of LOOT’s EOD. Having streaming music in an art show is a major advance for us. I started the show using the “Chill” station, but my guests soon rebelled and switched to “Classical.” You have to love interactivity, even when your plans get over-ruled.
After all my preparation, I was apprehensive about the show itself. Was it reasonable to have twelve people in this space, with eight active screens displaying a total of 71 images, plus the drain of the streaming audio? Would everyone be able to see all the images? Would I crash, and eject everyone from the apartment, as I had during the First Art Show? Would the audio freeze up? Would I be able to field all the Friend List and invite requests in a timely manner? Was this thing actually going to work?
As it happened, the show was a remarkable success. It ran for five hours, with a total of 24 attendees. A few people froze or poofed, but I was not one of them. There were only two or three people waiting to get in at any given time. Everyone seemed to enjoy the art. And when they got tired of that, they danced on the bar. I was even able to get some video captures. When I finally logged off and fell into bed in the small hours of the morning, I was exhausted, but I was smiling. We had pulled it off.
The LOOT Space Station apartment has given us exciting new resources for media shows in Home. I look forward to using the Twitter feeds in a future Home event, or exploiting the slide shows to tell stories. This changes everything. I am deeply grateful to LOOT for creating these tools.
However, we still have the greatest limitation of private spaces: their limited visitor capacity. Only twelve people can attend an event at the same time, and one of them must be the apartment owner. In addition, the host can only invite people from their Friend List.
If we had these screens in clubhouses, our events could accomodate 32 guests at once, and none of them would have to be on the club owner’s Friend List. Serious public Home-based art shows would become a real possibility. I might finally be able to play Gertrude Stein, instead of spending most of the event in a “PDA coma.”
I’m hoping that the recent advances in clubhouse skins mean that club-based media and image display are just around the corner. A media-capable clubhouse skin would be a best-seller. Especially with large, active groups such as the Homeling Collective, and its tradition of in-world art shows.
February 1st, 2012 by SealWyf | 4 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer by day, and an officer in the Homeling Collective by night. She has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is utterly addicted to PlayStation Home.
It was a wonderful event. Thank you
Loved the read as well (as usual). Am hopes this article will inspire some develo *cough* LOOT *cough* per to create clubhouses with media functionality.
You said it! I’d love to buy the Space Apartment for a club!
I liked this article. It was rather very well done, and I applaud you for the good work.
I see so much potential in these LOOT Space Apartments -- from Art shows to manga auctions, the limits are really just in your brain huh!
Very good article, Thanks