We have just completed a forty hour festival in Rosario, our virtual culture experiment in Second Life. It was a night-time festival that lasted for ten consecutive nights and, because Second Life has four hour “days”, this meant that, in reality, it lasted for ten one-hour sessions, which took place every four hours.

We have taken to regarding the 4 hour day/night cycle in Second Life as just that: a cycle. There are six cycles in a twenty four hour earth day, and so LaVoco, our radio station, will have six morning shows and six night-time shows every earth day.

Semano Semano (which, literally, means Week Week in Rosarian) had a series of interconnected aims, and I am happy that we met most of them and had satisfactory reasons for failing to fully meet the others.

The team core consisted of Jutta and me working with three students from Helsinki and four students from Dublin; with additional help from several avatars that we knew only from Second Life.

The whole team had worked very hard for many weeks conceiving, building, designing and scripting the objects needed to transform a bare valley into a festival site, with lots for people to do and lots to take away.

The forty eight hours before the opening felt like an adrenalin-fuelled race against time, as minor failures in scripted objects impacted on somebody else’s plans. For a team that had never worked together like this it was very painless. Voices were only slightly raised and, in the end, more things were done than had even been planned for. We had a synchronised national dance in full national costume, for instance, that somehow came into being when we weren’t looking.

Interestingly, this period of quasi-panic also inspired people to take time off to record and edit videos from inside Second Life. These proved to be very useful for those people running the live tv feeds, because it gave them quirky content that they could drop into gaps in the schedules, and reuse whenever they needed to.

The main aims of the Semano Semano production were to:

• provide an event to announce Rosario to the rest of Second Life;
• attract Second Life residents to visit the place;
• provide activities for them to do when (if) they arrived;
• recruit people to upload videos and images for inclusion in the simultaneous DINA Host City project.

DINA Host City was Arcada’s large cross-media production that I have described here. It was designed as part of the activities in Helsinki during the week of the Eurovision Song Contest. Non-stop television broadcasts were streamed live into La Moyena Valo, the festival valley in Rosario. Video taken in the valleywas streamed, in turn, out to DINA and broadcast on cable tv in Helsinki, on the web, and over Finnish mobile phone networks for those with the latest phones.

Our role in DINA Host City was primarily to alert people across Europe to what we were doing, and to encourage them to make their own videos (preferably with their mobile phones) and upload them for inclusion in the stream. The first part worked. People came, saw the stream, stopped and asked questions. They took the information packs away happily. The second part didn’t work. Why? Well, none of the avatars I spoke to had the right kind of phones, or were particularly interested in going out and taking movies, figuring out the format to save them in, and then uploading them to their computer and from there to the DINA web site.

The people who came, and to whom we spoke, fell into two broad categories. There were a lot of people from Europe who were in Second Life while half-watching the television in the other corner of the room. They didn’t want to leave the room because they were half-giggling, half-enjoying Eurovision. They were happy to be in Second Life with other Euro-fans, chatting about what they were half-watching.

There was also a second group of people, mainly from the American continent and from Australia, who had no idea what the Eurovision Song Contest was and, in many cases, thought that we had made it up, or that it was a pale imitation of Idols. (For those who don’t know: this was the fifty first song contest and during that period it has gone from serious to camp to kitsch several times.)

During the ten sessions we had a total of (approximately) 700 people participate in some sort of activity. The numbers varied wildly from session to session; partly because we failed to appeal to as many American residents as we would have liked, and (judging from conversations we had) partly depending on what else was, or was not, happening in Second Life at the same time. The Terra Z racing was popular, though, every time people were introduced to it, as was the skydiving.

The ninth session took place the hour before the contest itself began, and was almost full from the outset. It didn’t stop because nobody wanted to leave. Instead it simply carried on throughout the three hour televised contest. Finally it finally melted imperceptibly into the final tenth session. During this unplanned five hour party there were never less than thirty people in La Moyena Valo, and we estimated that over 100 people were there for at least fifteen or twenty minutes.

The ten festival nights featured a range of activities and contests including an island treasure hunt, mountain sky-diving, and a round-the-island motor rally on Cubey Terra‘s Terra Z hoverbikes.

These were all popular, and we intend to develop them into a regular program after the summer break. We will take care to announce these well in advance, and to try to encourage even more participation from around Second Life. It has been suggested that we try to make Terra Z racing the next big craze in Second Life, and we might just follow this up.

Rosario had attempted to enter the song contest, as it often does, but was barred from entering on the flimsiest of excuses: a bureauacratic assertion that it “was not a real country”. Nonetheless the team created a video for what would have been the Rosarian entry: Al Dek Manto by L’angelot. This can be seen here, although it was also uploaded to YouTube where it was watched by literally several people. The video was picked up by Finnish television and shown regularly on the digital youth channel.

Both Mambo Milosz and Kittie Ellison were interviewed by reporters from SLNN, one of the leading Second Life online newspapers, and this was duly printed the next day. We had not planned for this, and it was a welcome bonus. We also managed to get some real life coverage too but, oddly, that did not excite us as much.

As a result we felt that we had achieved almost everything that we had set out to do – with the single exception of persuading people without the right equipment to use it to upload clips! We had also discovered that there were clear benefits to organising the development of Rosario in terms of time-based productions leading to public events.

It seems to me that we have now completed this phase of the project, a month or so ahead of schedule. The infrastructure is almost completed, and we have begun to attract outside residents. We are beginning to develop the village of Orakoro as a crafts and media centre, with the active participation of a group of people we only know through Second Life.

We now have Mac’s Newstand, a large area that stocks links to almost every known Second Life related publication as well as links to all sorts of other related material. I have taken to using it myself as a valuable resource, and I am encouraging any staff or students who want background information about the environment we are in to go there and use it. Next year I might even make its use a compulsory part of orientation for the new students.

The galleries are open and we have an interesting exhibition of paintings in one, that ties into a parallel exhibition in real life. The big screens are functioning and streaming video into Rosario twenty four hours a day.

The next step is to run an intensive period of production to finish the work needed for LaVoco, the radio station. The station will broadcast creative commons licensed music, and our aim is to broadcast it across the whole of Second Life. This is alleged to be impossible but we suspect that we may have found a way to do it without requiring listeners to be on land that they own. We need to test this, while compiling playlists, recording jingles, and setting up the web site.

Then, after the summer break, we can move on to establish Rosario as a major in-world centre for odd sports and activities. This will include setting up and running leagues for sky diving and road racing, as well as working out ways to make the treasure hunts into educational orientation exercises for new residents (including the new students who will be arriving).

The success of Semano Semano, and the methods we used to facilitate the course have convinced me that we are right in our pedagogical approach to Second Life, and that we need to move further still away from “teaching” and towards methods centred on shared live production.

I have written about the event from that perspective in another entry that looks at the use of Second Life as a key component in a virtual learning environment.