inachi* Codie is Nyotaimori on March 21 at 1 PM PDT

Introduction

With emphasis on poise and presentation, nyotaimori displays sushi artistically against the eyebrow-raising backdrop of a living female statue. Inachi turns nyotaimori into interactive performance art in the virtual world of Second Life. A nyotaimori event is about universal beauty, wonder spectacle, and cultural discovery--three qualities that often fail to convey in Second Life. The goal was to see if nyotaimori could work in Second Life, and to see if its success might go towards helping a good cause.

This website documents the event and the experiment of Inachi's Nyotaimori I.

Time & Place

Nyotaimori I was held in the Blackfriars Theatre, a historically-accurate virtual replica of Shakespeare's indoor theatre in Shakespeare, Second Life, on Saturday, March 21, 2009. The event started at about 1 PM PDT.

People

Nyotaimori I was conceived and designed by artist Ina Centaur. The "living statue," also called the nyotaimori, was SL Celebrity CodeBastard Redgrave.

As fitting in the setting of the Blackfriars Theatre, during the second hour of the event, three actors (Caliban Jigsaw, Ixmal Supermarine, and Kerry Takashi) from the SL Shakespeare Repertory Players enacted an Elizabethan-accurate performance of Act 1, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night.

Purpose

While the main purpose of the event was to raise funds for Ina Centaur's SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC), Nyotaimori Iwas advertised more as groundbreaking art (and spectacle) than as fundraiser. Inworld fundraisers for a well-known cause have experienced attendees who would dump (sometimes excessive) funds (on the order of hundreds or thousands of US dollars) regardless of the item offerred. Focusing more on content creation than on publicity, the SLSC is only moderately well known, and there were many who arrived having never heard of the SLSC. Thus, the other part of the experiment is to see if people would buy, and if they would buy with prices that fluctuate primarily based on location.

Of course, the visitor's purpose is simply to buy sushi off Codie, and, if things work out, to undress her in that way...

Design

nyotaimoripricing
inachi Codie is Nyotaimori on March 21 at 1 PM PDT - Traditional Chinese Poster
inachi* Codie is Nyotaimori on March 21 at 1 PM PDT

The design and implementation followed an Ina Centaur 3-Day Schedule, often used for Ina Centaur's "Projects of Pure Whim. (PoP-W)"

March 21, 2009

At roughly 1 PM PDT on Saturday, March 21, we started this wild and wacky experiment! CodeBastard Redgrave, and I, and others sent out masses of group notices and conference IM's, and our plurk's. Our first bite was at 1:11 PM. Shakespeare Timeless, the avatar himself, filmed the event, whose unedited documentary recordings are available below. At 2 PM, the SL Shakespeare Repertory Players performed a scene from Twelfth Night, which naturally brought about a discussion of the fundraiser's goal. 173 unique avatars rezzed in between 1 and 8 PM, and their particles swirled as they examined the various sushi pieces arranged on Codie. Some bought; some stared; others crashed. The event dragged on, with much of the sushi not bought, and in the end, we all sat around and just hung out and talked before leaving off in enervated exhaustion! 42 unique avatars bought L$70,930 (less than US$270) worth of nyotaimori sushi for the delight of virtual tummies and perhaps other things.

Documentary Recordings (1000x)

Results & Analysis

The event lasted from 1 to 8 PM before exhaustion of host (Ina) and nyotaimori (Codie) took over; only a small fraction of sushi were bought, and we raised only about US $270.

The consumption rate might be affected (in hindsight, to user confusion in value) by a glitch of some sushi being set to "buy copy" instead of "buy original". But, as shown in the graph above, sushi consumption was rather steep in the start (perhaps that may also be due to the higher frequency of inworld-based grassroots publicity notices being sent). One reason why might be because of the varied pricing, causing consumer confusion over which to get. In the video above, one notices a lot of particles swirling around, which documents a number of users reaching out to select sushi; perhaps variation in pricing causes the fatal hesitation behind denial to purchase. Another might be how the real-estate phenomenon of "location, location, location" does not necessarily scale to avatar body estate. As summarized in the Design section above, sushi pricing ranged from L$100 to L$1000 to L$125,000, with variation semi-random and dependent on location. Curiously, several attendees commented along the lines of "I would donate... had I the funds." 23 people bought sushi but did not pick them up, likely due to their unfamiliarity with this particular realistic "buy original" feature of SL's intrinsic commerce system—which, explicitly, requires the user to "take" or "pick up" the object they purchased (by default, the "by copy" system automatically creates a copy for the user in their inventory).

Other than usage of some tracking technologies I created back in 2007, this event is almost entirely script-free, with each sushi bought vanilla-style, via Second Life's intrinsic price setting; for the next event, I will probably have each sushi contain a simple script with touch-detection to get a touch to buy ratio, and a public announcement when sushi has changed ownership (bought). The transaction would then perhaps not seem as "intimate" and realistic-"personal" as buying sushi off a celebrity.

For future events, I also hope to have more time to properly present the benefactee of the fundraiser—as it stands, with the time budget of my 3-day plan, there was barely enough to get the actual content and bare necessities finished. Spending the necessary time on publicity, I hadn't the time to write a coherent speech or rally mantra for this fundraiser.

Stats Summary (provided by SLtracer and SLdonate)

nyotaimoriSecsVsLshow We raised L$70,930 at the event (US$263.26, at L$260:US$1, less 3.5% automatically deducted by Second Life) from 42 unique avatar buyers. For the record, here is a listing of all 101 transactions showing exactly what was bought when at this event.

Publicity

Publicity in any self-funded event is haphazard (perhaps even more so by a penurious independent artist). Thanks go to many who helped spread the word. Unfortunately, there seems to be just three unique articles about this event, including the PR Lora Constantine and I launched. Well, here they are, anyway:

Envoi

The event received mixed feedback in the approval department. While a considerable portion of our 176 unique avatar attendees (count initiated between 1 pm and 8 pm; 203 total on March 21) found it innovative and interesting, there were a few whom, having not heard of the SL Shakespeare Company, severely questioned the cause. Fortunately, much of the negativity was kept in private IM. When the complainer bothered to listen, the conflict was resolved, and in other cases, I suppose the conflict just adds to the difficulty of starting a theatre company in virtual worlds with absolutely no external funding other than my time and my life.

Inachi hopes to put on more Nyotaimori events in the future. Stay tuned to this website for more details.

 

 

© 2009 Inachi by Ina Centaur