 Hello everyone and welcome to the 8 30 to 9 a.m session of the 2021 open simulator community conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation Painting in the Meta. Our speaker is Kisma Reline aka Julieta Surreal Dreaming and Kisma is a mixed media artist who is a graduate teacher of international creativity. She's a red thread guide and a certified cosmic smash book teacher. She offers classes in a mixed media art journals and altered books. Sounds like a lot of fun to me. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios and details of this session and a full schedule of the further events coming up for this conference. The session is being streamed live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments during the session you can send tweets to at open sim cc with the hashtag OSCC 21 and if you're in world you can direct message me any questions and I will ask them to Julieta when she finishes. So welcome everybody. Let's begin the session. Julieta, I turn it over to you. Thank you Meg and thank you OSCC. You guys are awesome for doing this every year and I am very honored to be here. So I stand here before you today is Kisma Readling speaking to you from my art studio in Newport Beach, California and I would love to share a bit about transitions from real life to virtual virtual to real life as an artist and I would like to tell a little story so I'm going to go back to about 2020. Now I was an artist enjoying my own creativity giving art classes three times a week at a local art studio as well as in my home studio where I did occasional workshops and just had fun you know with students and lots and lots of creativity on weekends and I had been accepted that year into two different exhibitions that were going to be happening later in the year. Now here's the thing. COVID happened right? COVID happened and all of a sudden it seemed like in the course of what like a week for all of us the rest of the world and I went into home sanctuary mode and found ourselves with a new existence. Mine was as a solo artist in residence and at that time both studios shut down so I turned to technology of course me and millions of other people for several years prior to lockdown I'd been offering how to extra backup art videos on YouTube for my pain art students but they were all gone now so I turned to amp and everything up I went in and I padded my website and I started doing YouTube live stream to replace the classes the live classes and I added zoom and put self-paced video courses on my website and I set up Twitch and I set up Instagram and TikTok and opened a new Facebook account just for art courses and an art community and within five months I found that just about any art technique a person could ever want to learn had saturated YouTube and there were umpteen new class communities art community springing up mostly for women and these women artists gobbled up the courses and in fact my own Facebook art community grew to 70 women in less than a week but those same 70 women joined hundreds of other Facebook communities and quickly these artists became like junkies enrolling in four and five plus online courses at the same time even if some were on the same day and same time of week so out of nowhere this is how I felt at that time out of nowhere there also came an art student expectation a sense of entitlement that if a person couldn't make your class that week that as an art teacher you would have a recording for them to watch at their convenience at a later time so it became more about making videos editing uploading time was suddenly added to our teaching time and within the first nine months of lockdown I and other art teachers became slaves to our newly created ADHD art students we were responsible for that our own personal art practices became secondary and uh was quite a disarming experience and situation for a creative to find herself in though exponentially art courses flooded the internet and an outpouring of more students than could ever be imagined spring up and though this seems a wow mind you the entire art world turned upside down of course and all of these courses or most of them because there was just as many new art teachers springing up online were offering their courses for free the market became a competition give free give recordings or else thus no income okay so my story reflects a lot of similar stories we all had to scramble and I bet that every single person up here today though already involved virtually were totally impacted by COVID and forced to take a large portion of our professions to virtual or go out of business welcome to the new world right sink or swim well for me the dilemma now I've been in virtual worlds namely SL since 2009 living as julietta surreal dreamy role playing as an art gallery owner a curator for what I'd always deemed as virtual artists virtual fantasy artists who are known as pseudophotographers their art is photos taken around sims tweaked with a photo app slapped onto a prim hung on a showroom or gallery wall and voila art exhibition SL style everyone loves fantasy role play that's why we came to virtual worlds for a while right well during my role play time I had been happy to support the fantasy of SL artists for you see my mindset didn't even consider me being an SL artist let alone bringing my real life art in I mean why would I ever want to bring my art in pop it on a canvas prim and show it in a fantasy exhibition in a fantasy world my art was in a fantasy for me it was real life plus why on earth would I ever want to let anyone know my real identity in a fantasy world well the COVID transition happened and last year the same thing but at the same time perhaps some of you remember I stood here as an artist adding my real life name to my virtual name and yes I'd made the transformation to show my real life art to have my art seen by possible patrons I didn't care anymore what reality my viewers ran I just wanted to share my art plus the role play had ended for me because by April 2020 due to the unpredictable nature of the world and my almost lack of total income and for how long I realized I needed to cut back I really couldn't afford to keep the land my SL gallery was on so I shut it down and I began to turn all my attention to art blues projects and we did migrate surreal art gallery to HG Hopper's craft world but due to everything I wasn't in the mood to break into a new art scene virtually plus it already had a really healthy Italian art group established and fully operational so we sat on it and it's still empty today so here's my quandary I was I was going through having those art shows cancelled and both of them cancelled in the same week okay of course the explanation given was due to COVID so by summer 2024 I was constantly feeling stagnant and constantly eyeing those 15 canvases stacked against the wall in a corner of my studio and I became depressed and started having really bizarre thoughts like do I bring my real life art into SL and open Sims do I start painting in meta do I create an avatar for me for Kisma readling if I do this do I blur the line between virtual and reality oh my god will this make me go crazy maybe I am crazy so art blue and I discussed it and decided yes I was crazy no we decided that I should go for with the new plan so I set up a Kisma ksr avatar in SL uploaded those 15 newly painted never before seen by anyone pieces slapped them on primes while making some inquiries with a few SL galleries and within 30 days had my first exhibition but I I couldn't just be an SL artist because I'm a real life artist I paint so I joined real life with SL galleries and within 30 days I had that first exhibition scheduled no it's me saying it now here's what we did here's exactly what we did I invited lots of friends from real life to come into a zoom opening with me while I had an avatar standing in SL in that art gallery and I had created two little art patron accounts for potential real life guests you know the ones who were courageous enough to log in and experience the environment firsthand um and you know what it worked it really worked being in SL am I exhibit opening in my avatar and in a zoom share screen event with real life people at the same time it was kind of funny I mean it was successful all my paintings in SL sold at the opening in SL I only sell one piece of each piece of art just like real life and in real life I actually sold four pieces from that and I repeated the same step for other events and all of them were successful so we decided in 2022 that we are going to begin sort of a new little business where we're offering real life virtual art gallery openings for people and I began to talk with art blue about it and we began to look at how to make it easy for visitors like real life art patrons to come in to worldly you know come in world events like an art show a grant opening OSCC without feeling so overwhelmed because the current viewers we use are way too complicated for just a visitor there's too many options too many menus and just crazy busy we learn the mechanics of how to do real life SL exhibition open openings but we lacked that one important thing the temporary baby guest viewer now art has something he's going to say now so I'm going to just step back and as he shares with us I am going to play on the screen I hope the video of that first little experience let me get up to that sorry you guys I kind of fell behind um let me find it where is it you guys looking how far behind I fell sorry sorry okay let's see if this will do it all right Marcus I'm gonna I'm gonna put it in now I should have had this done I thought I had it done okay put the URL of course and here we go let's see if this works hopefully everybody can see it and let me get rid of these commercials okay and art there you go it's all yours please welcome art blue thank you Kisma question is how can people who are using the computer on a Microsoft office level managing a browser managing email and Skype and zoom just to give two examples to be led to be guided into the matter so we the open simulator community will profit from it and speaking on this subject with Kisma for some time she invited me to put some thoughts into it that I will happily present I'm not only working in the field of the arts I'm also working in organizations where open simulators being promoted to be used in schools it would extend this talk to bring all the facets that come from this field up now on the table so I go on what Kisma experienced as the difficulties with her two art patron avatars one avatar was stuck in a corner in the gallery and jumped up and down until finally managed to turn and the other art patron avatar could not make it into the elevator to go up we'll see it in the video of the elevator it was hard to see how much a visitor user struggles with the firestorm fewer so many options menus buttons and also possible visual configurations make it difficult to handle the situation individually and also just as a side mark to teach open simulate in a classroom which must include teaching of the fewer some of you may remember we spoke one year ago about america art also to meet in viabella and in frame we are we said we need to have a browser for meeting in a virtual world to attract new contributors we need to go this way we need an interface a very light fewer to bridge into open simulator for visitors kisma calls them art patrons to avoid the plain terms clients customers or buyers students okay maybe it's time to give focus on it once more i'm willing to donate two thousand dollar upfront for such a light fewer have an idea for a name and an icon thing comes that comes from the arts it was once a very big movement in second life that some may remember it was art in heads which ended in 2015 heads have a spiritual dimension that goes by the golden head excavations a head embodies a link to the higher knowledge okay i shouldn't know where such a head just seek for the golden head in the kipedia and we'll find golden heads have been created over 3000 years ago an avatar being created with this fewer will always wear a golden head as a start as a contribute to the early creativity of mankind looking beyond reality any developer interested to work on this private project with such a trajectory of presenting the presenting the result in one year from now on and oscc 22 maybe please contact me or juliette uh immediately so back to kisma thank you okay thank you so much art blue and thanks to all of you thank you for listening come visit the surreal museum here at oscc that i curate i've added new pieces to the collection as well as a few new gifts and please come to art blues talk tomorrow which will lead into the sharing of our current fantastic art project and we also are offering an experience at the lunch break for about 20 minutes of it and if anyone has any questions please feel free to ask unless we're out of time you can always on i'm me and then i'll be at lunch break at region three booth seven uh today so thank you thank you thank you make thank you oscc staff i'm i'm done all right thank you kisma and art blue you know it's a great thing because i too have been in s l and i went in there specifically to start art gallery so i know the whole dilemma of trying to get that regular life into a virtual space and uh i feel it i feel it i'm looking forward to your your golden hat let's see what it does all right as a reminder of to our audience uh you'll want to check out conference dot open simulator dot org to see what's coming up on the conference schedule following this session we have a break and the next session begins at 9 30 am and is entitled virtual world's education consortium across the metaverse also we encourage you to visit the oscc 21 poster expo in the oscc expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper grid resources in oscc expo two region along with sponsor and crowd founder booths located throughout all of the osc expo regions you know the best way to do this this is what i love to do is just open your map zoom in on one of the regions and click and go that's how easy it is so you know explore jump back and forth you'll have a lot of fun all right well thank you very much for joining us and we'll see you at 9 30 am for our next session