Students take to virtual streets for urban art

An immersive city centre is created for art students from ten different European countries to gather together and to express their creativity using the latest technology in 3D form. We wanted to combine  young people’s fascination about virtual spaces with teaching street art forms and vandalism.  The use of virtual  immersive space became the inspiration behind the project.

Rezzable Productions has been chosen to be the Opensim partner for this European Community Project headed by the Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi – Telematica. 

The project aims at encouraging wider arts participation, creative teaching and learning through a new integrated methodology that combines Web 2.0 and Open Sim.  This platform encourages students' creativity through developing street art works in Open Sim Environment .  The students along with their creative skills they get a chance to work on their digital , social , and civic competeces. The teachers encourages them also to think and act on the entreprenership, cultural awareness and expression.

Rezzable has set up a website for teachers and students where they have access to tutorials , forums and registration information. Once they are in the virtual platform they have access to more then 30 hours tutorials on building in 3D so that they can create any art form as they wish once they move into the city centre.

In this virtual platform , the students have the necessary tools to create any art form and turn them into digital format and upload them to the virtual city.  The participating schools' students exhibit their street art in the Metro where they choose. The technology we have set up for the students enables to share comments or critics through guest books system. Each student receives a guest book where other students or teachers can leave comments and those can be read or shared online. Students from all over the world to gather online , chat and use voice to interact with eachother. This is where the students can deeply  engage in constructing , and discussing with their peers. This experience enables them to grow artistically and personally by seeing the results of their work in the bigger picture and seeing the effect of their art in their city instantly.

The project is nearly coming to an end. The bare city without any street art work has been handed over to students about 8 months ago. During that period they have learned how to create 3D work , and exhibit their artistic work in a 3D environment. The city centre is being filled with wonderful art in each corner. During that experience they have also learned to be responsible citizens . The Metro City centre has a mayor and the mayor sets certain rules for the wellbeing of the city residents. So the students can learn from their experience as the main aim of this project is to get to know the difference between aesthetic and street art forms, graffiti and vandalism, and how different choices can lead to different consequences.

At the end of June 2011, the students will have an end of year exposition where each one of them will get a chance to show thier street art individually. The whole project has transformed the empty city centre into a living city centre with full creative art.