RMB City is under intensive construction now, here, from the city plan images and city live images from SL,

lets feel the forming of your city.

RMB City at Yokohama, featured in ARTINFO (Courtesy of Lucy Birmingham)

As the Yokohama Triennale hits the halfway mark, two recent articles give prominent mention to Cao Fei and RMB City’s “Play with Your Triennale” project.

Tokyo Artbeat‘s Rebecca Milner calls it a project “…that endeavors to facilitate a public space for creation, construction, and discourse on the current and future state of the real and the imagined.” Read the full article here.

In ARTINFO, writer Lucy Birmingham assesses the Triennale as a whole, and mentions how Cao Fei’s piece is a visitor favorite, alongside a photo illustrating just that. “On the other hand, the response has been more favorable… to Cao Fei’s virtual navigation RMB City Project, which invites players to help build her Second Life utopian art city.” Read the full article here.

A recent article in the Financial Times focuses on RMB City and the greater context of art in digital worlds.

“A fast-paced, pulsating vision, RMB City condenses contemporary urban China into an amalgam of symbols and icons, from shiny new skyscrapers to the much-loved panda,” writes Natasha Degen. Read the full article here.

Dormitory in the People’s Worksite- the amazing details eating into our prims…

It’s one of the hardest concepts for newcomers to SL to grapple with: prim limits.

A “prim” is short for “primitive”, and denotes the basic building block of Second Life. A simple shape like a pillow might be 1 prim, but to create an entire bed (let alone the room containing it), you will need different prims for the mattress, the bed-posts, the blanket, etc… And so on and so forth, up through the levels of complexity, until you hit the limit, which is currently 15,000 prims per SIM (the basic unit of land in SL). The reason for this is technical- I suppose at the basic level, prims take up space somewhere on Linden’s actual servers, and in general, the more complex a SL location gets, the longer it will take for your own computer to process it and allow normal interaction of your avatar.

The logic is understandable. But in some of my most frustrated moments, it almost feels like a canvas that has a finite, limited number of brush strokes you can use upon it. Or at least, a limited number of “tiny” brush strokes, with a higher number of “broad strokes” permitted. This seems to be one major reason why so many territories in SL look the same – basic building shapes covered with various flat textures.

Obviously, every art form, especially in its infancy, has these limitations. The 100-foot reel in early silent film. The size of original 78 gramophone records. The inability to build skyscrapers before the advent of the elevator. What’s interesting is that as technological advances keep breaking (or at least “pushing”) these limits, often people romanticize the creativity that the earlier restrictions fostered. In the age of cheap and nearly-infinite digital video, older filmmakers complain that younger ones have no discipline in shooting. “Dogme 95”, the mid-90s filmmaking movement spearheaded by Denmark’s Lars Von Trier, revolved around setting up “new” rules and “obstacles for filmmaking, as a way to force more innovation. Certain musicians and sound-artists try to re-emphasize the object of the “album” and its linear structure as a way to combat the modern, fragmented, mp3 free-for-all. Perhaps someday, when we have reached the era of infinite prims, we’ll look back upon these days of scrimping and saving, trying to make a tree from only 2 prims (that still sways in the breeze), as a golden time of dynamic problem-solving and pure creativity.

RMB City archive editor compared the data from one of the computer in the RMB City workday before and after the National day. In the late Sep and early Oct, you can see that in daily work, the visual software and the word processors are the major applications occupying member’s work.

At October 5-6, Communication was prior than System Utilities at August 28-30, even though Categories of Business/Design were the same top 2. Following were the similar categories like Reference/Personal Productivity/Fun.

Then when comparing the applications and sites, the former one were similar, Word or Excel, Photoshop or Illustrator/ Powerpoint, Finder was always open. The latter one varied a lot.

Step 2.

Then we compare this 4 Sims in Sep 28^th 2008,with some basic statistics.

RMB City Key Metrics dating from August 1^st to Oct 1^st,, mainly used the data of statistic bar (ctrl+shift+1) in Second Life. For RMB City ground breaking was in 14^th July, Preview Center opening was in 25^th July, we can not record the change of them. However, the Olympic opening and Worksite opening were involved.