The Mighty Sliz has come into being, born online last night in the Demon Soul realm of the World of Warcraft. I am a Troll Mage. My first order of business was to up my stats and get familiar with the interface. I spent a few hours at this and must say I found WoW to be pretty Wow. My character took to the place right away and I have completed enough quests to reach Level Five. I had been advised to join the Horde – as that is where the group Ars Virtua have their guild and I am hoping to collaborate or at least interact with this cool online artists collective.

Then it was time for my meeting with Sigilbringer – a.k.a. Jeremy O. Turner – my long time friend and collaborator. We have been working together in virtual environments for five years and this meeting marks the beginning of what looks to be another exciting chapter in our collaboration. Jeremy and I also work together with the The Second Front Performance Collective in the online world of Second Life and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, also in Second Life. We have done presentations and performances in the virtual worlds of Onlive Traveler and the text based world of Achaea . And now here were are in World of Warcarft, pondering the strange new environment.

We waited for the crew from Ars Virtua to arrive. Ars Virtua are an artist’s group working in Second Life who also have some work developing in the World of Warcraft. I am reproducing part of their mission statement here – direct from their website – as it touches on ideas I am interested in and explains some of the concepts artists are working with in virtual frontiers:

from arsvirtua.com: “Ars Virtua is a new media center and gallery located entirely in the synthetic world of Second Life. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation… Ars Virtua brings the art audience into “new media” rather than new media to the museum or gallery, and calls upon its audience to interact with the art and one another via their avatars within the space.”

Cool or what?! Lots more interesting stuff to read on their website, do check it out – Ars Virtua. Here are some of the people from Ars Virtua meeting up with us for the first time:

I know some of these folks as their Second Life personas but it will take me awhile to get it all straight in WoW. We had a little conference and created a plan to complete quests to up Sigilbringer’s stats so we could move out of the Valley of Trials and into the game.

Good old Nobleorc and Ignobleorc helped us out alot, not to mention Shivvy, who really kicked some wild boar ass.

I was happy to see that my character/avvie/toon/SLoon could dance and I spent some time after the wild boar hunt and cactus apple collection practicing my moves.