Love them or hate them, virtual worlds area an aspect of online culture that continue to glimmer with utopian promise. These realms offer a fruitful space for creation, gaming and commerce while raising a numbers of questions about the body, gender and identity. Researcher Gary Hayes just produced the above video, 2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World?s A Stage and a related post which documents the many virtual world prototypes in various stages of development. In viewing the video, it is quite interesting to compare the graphics, perspective and intended demographics of each of these participatory spaces. [via Digital Urban]

[Holy Fire: the Electroboutique corner / Photo: Yves Bernard]

Yesterday we launched Vague Terrain 11: Curediting, the newest issue of our digital arts publication. This collection of texts and essays, subtitled Translational Online Work, explores established, emerging and experimental modes of curation of internet and new media-based artwork. The issue provides

a "screenshot" of actual tendencies within curatorial and editorial models: artistic creation and the processes of its re-formulation within different presentational contexts are brought together under the label CUREDITING, a hybrid between the two concepts of "curating" and "editing".

This combinatory notion of curating/editing is discussed in a range of ventures which span computer assisted curation, email art, online video, social networking and crowdsourced curation as well as questioning the presentation of net art in a number of contexts, within both web-based and traditional spaces of exhibition.

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Vague Terrain 11: Curediting was curated by the Vienna-based CONT3XT.NET collective and includes work from: Joasia Krysa, Laboratorio 060 (Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano, Daniela Wolf), Annette Finnsdottir, Eva Moraga, CRUMB (Beryl Graham and Verina Gfader), Greg. J. Smith & Neil Wiernik, Ela Kagel & Ursula Endlicher, Michelle Kasprzak, Furtherfield (Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow), Geoff Cox, Jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans) and Domenico Quaranta.

A really exciting call is presently making the rounds courtesy of Medialab-Prado in Madrid. VISUALIZAR'08: Database City sets out to curate a body of work which mines both contemporary urban informatics and artistic visualization - hopefully producing projects with the same kind of mojo as Stamen Design's Oakland Crimespotting (pictured above). An excerpt from the call:

Urban environments, which are becoming increasingly dense, complex and diverse, are one of contemporary society?s largest ?databases?, daily generating volumes of information that require new methods of analysis and understanding.

How can we use the data visualization and information design resources to understand the processes governing contemporary cities and better manage them? What can we learn from studying traffic and pedestrian movement flows through the streets of Madrid? What would happen if we filled the streets with screens providing information updated each moment about water and electricity consumption?

There are calls for project and paper proposals, both of which are due on October 5th. Invited participants will attend a workshop and production crunch at the venue running from November 3rd to 18th.

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Extensive information on the call is available at here. If you'd like more information on the Medialab Prado VISUALIZAR initiative, Regine Debatty has an excellent series of posts on various past workshops and projects.