As work continues preparing for the SL11B Community Celebrations, which will take place between June 22nd and 29th, 2014 inclusive, a further call has gone out to anyone wishing to use the event’s auditorium during the festivities.
The auditorium can be a conference centre, classroom, lecture hall or small live performance venue, perfect for a range of activities or small-scale events.
If you are an educator or creator or similar, and have a skill or interest you would like to teach or talk about, the SL11B organisers would like to hear from you. If you are a performer, a poet, a spoken word artist or a dancer, and would like to give a performance, the auditorium could be yours to use.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual, a small group of residents, a community group, or a group of friends who have an idea for something other SL residents may appreciate and which is suited to the venue. If you can imagine it the SL11B Community Celebration team can try to accommodate it.
Celebrations to mark the eleventh anniversary of SL opening its gates to the world will take place between Sunday June 22nd and Sunday June 29th, 2014.
And now applications are open for you to be a part of the magic.
The theme for this year’s celebrations is a quote from a speech Sir Winston Churchill gave in 1943, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”.
‘The Sims Lie Empty’, SL10BCC, 2013
Right now, we stand at something of a new awakening for Second Life. There is an air of freshness and promise as the Lab once more reaches out – genuinely reaches out – to re-engage with all of the rich diversity of communities which make-up Second Life. We are also seeing a resurgence of interest in the whole concept of virtual worlds and their potential, partially as a result of emerging technologies, but also because people are once again willing to make their case for using virtual worlds, be it for education or research or medicine or entertainment.
Yes, there are still challenges and hurdles to overcome – and we’d be very foolish to link the future of SL and virtual environments to a single element of technology (or even a subset of technology), because the human mind is so much more creative than we can ever, at any single point, define, while technologies come and go.
And that is what this year’s theme is about: the sheer creativeness and inventiveness of the human mind. It’s already given us this incredibly diverse virtual world, a true melting-pot of ideas, imaginings, creative ideas and artistic expression. Now is the time to mark and celebrate all of this rich diversity, our digital home, created pure from the empires of our minds – and for those who dare, to look ahead to what may yet come to be as we continue to push at the very frontiers of imagination, creativity and the mind.
Whether you want to express what Second Life means to you, or whether you want to take a look down the road at what might yet come to pass – or what you’d perhaps like to see SL become – you can now apply for exhibition space on one of the SL11B Community Celebration regions and share your vision with others. Of course, there are guidelines all exhibitors should be aware of when applying to be a part of the celebrations, but now is the time to get thinking about how you can best reflect this year’s theme.
And that’s not all, the event team are still seeking applications from Performers, Volunteers and speakers and performers in the Auditorium.
Do note, however, that all applications should be submitted no later than Tuesday May 20th.
Given this year’s theme does encompass the opportunity to look to the future of virtual worlds, I’ll leave you (again, given it is one of my favourite video shorts!) an imagining of virtual environment as seen by Bruce Branit.
Since my initial post on the SL11B Community Celebration announcement, the original SL11BCC post has been expanded to include links to the various application forms.
Currently, the organisers are seeking applications from Performers, Volunteers and speakers and performers in the Auditorium. All applications should be submitted no later than Tuesday May 20th.
If you wish to be an exhibitor at the SL11 Community Event, please note that applications will open on Sunday April 27th.
The SL10B Community Celebration Lake Stage by Kazuhiro Aridian
SL11B, the Community Celebration marking Second Life’s eleventh anniversary, has been officially announced, with a blog post which reads in full:
The event will be held from Sunday June 22nd – Sunday June 29th—seven days of amazing exhibits, music, conversation, debate, firework displays, games, puzzles, sports and everything else the wonderfully inventive communities of Second Life™ can pack into seven days and 11 sims.
Actually, even that won’t be the end of it, as the sims will be open for a further seven days for everyone to explore.
My monochrome rendering of the A’stra Main Stage from SL10BCC, create by Toady Nakamura and Flea Bussy
The theme for this year is a line lifted from Winston Churchill’s 1943 address to the American people, while visiting Harvard University: the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Why this quote? I’ll let event PR lead Saffia Widdershins explain:
Last year’s theme was “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” but we focused mostly on looking back, and rightly so, as 10 years was an important milestone and a perfect opportunity to reflect back on where we came from.
This year it’s time to look forward; to imagine where we are headed.
When Winston Churchill said this in 1943, he could not have imagined a virtual world like Second Life, but now, more than seventy years later, his words have come true in this new world that we have created.
If there’s one thing that makes SL unique, it’s our community of users. Users from all corners of the globe come together under a single umbrella to build a community that comes from our minds and our imaginations. Everything we see, touch and use in Second Life is a product of our imaginations, our minds, and our community.
And this year, at the SL11B Community Celebration, we want to celebrate precisely that!
Details are understandably sparse at this point in time – this is, after all the initial announcement – but rest assured, more details will be appearing as the plans start to come together.
I’ll be doing my usual coverage of the lead-up to the celebrations and the week of festivities itself, as well as covering any other SL11B activities which may be going on across the grid that I get to hear about.
For those wishing to keep bang up to date with the news on SL11BCC, click the FOLLOW link on the blog!
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 