Worlds in Motion, a CMP-owned blog that is one of the leading chroniclers of our emerging industry, picked up today’s news that Mark Stephen Meadows (aka “pighed”) will be MoU’s second artist-in-residence.

Meadows, an internationally recognized portrait artist and author, is also today marking the release of a book titled “I, Avatar; The Culture and Consequences of Having A Second Life‚Äù with a launch party in Culver City, California. If you’re in the Los Angeles area and free tonight, all the deets are here.

The book relates directly to the work Meadows will undertake during his residency; he has been commissioned to build six avatars – six self-portraits – in six different virtual worlds. His journey from world to world will be explored as a first-person travelogue; in so doing, Meadows will identify the unique abilities and limits of each system, exploit them, and then build avatars that show those differences as a gallery of six completely different self portraits, thus revealing the impact of context on personal identity. The self-portraits resulting from his residency will be made available online and will likely be presented at an upcoming gallery showing in San Francisco.

Meadows has an eclectic body of work straddling art and technology and addressing digital humans, virtual worlds, and emotional interfaces. He started the first company to create content for virtual worlds in 1994, and has been exploring the avatar in such worlds through a variety of media since those early days, including graphic novels entirely shot within these environments.

Cool stuff indeed.

Tags: art, avatars, Machinima

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Artist In Residence, Mat's Thoughts, Press Coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.