Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
On Friday (8/14/09), the Westin St. Francis in Union Square will be rocking with the trippiest light show in any world. Virtual world performance artists Oddfellow Studios will be spinning up hundreds of tranced out partiers both in real life, and in the virtual world of Second Life. The event is the debut of a game-changing entertainment company at the edge of 3D technology and therapeutic applications.
Oddfellow Studios, the duo of “Fish” Fishman and Shava Nerad (aka Tuna Oddfellow and Shava Suntzu in Second Life) have been entrancing folks in SL for about three years now with their graphics and multimedia show. The show is graphical jazz – 3D graphics usually improvised over San Francisco's SomaFM internet streams. On Friday, the show will be extemporized over the trance/psytrance/Goa tunes spun by Second Life DJs Jamie Ondecko, Nostrum Fordor, and Thomtrance Otoole.
Tuna Oddfellow is arguably the most famous avatar in the world. Selected by NBC's America's Got Talent promotion in 2007 as the “most talented avatar” in Second Life, he appeared on the “New York Audition” and “20 Best Acts” episodes that summer to a total live television audience of twenty million in the US.
Since then, the artist and professional magician “Fish” Fishman, the man behind Tuna Oddfellow, and his fiance and business partner Shava Nerad have developed the show into the realization of science fiction.
In 2008 they incorporated as Oddfellow Studios, to create a research and development and 3D tool shop on the model of Industrial Light and Magic to produce next generation online/offline 3D entertainment.
Their immersive “Odd Balls” – dance parties attended by hundreds in Second Life every week – have gone from a hobby to a vocation to a business that sounds like a fantasy. “The glib elevator pitch,” says Fishman, “is that we get people stoned over the Internet.”
In early 2008, engineer and former yoga therapist Shava Nerad noticed something amazing about their performances. “The art is psychedelic,” she admits, “but something more was going on. People were getting literally tranced out. I recognized the state from my meditation background – we were throwing people into a strong theta brainwave state, like Vipassana meditation.” Nerad's background as a staff engineer at Digital Equipment, MIT, UNC/Chapel Hill, and her twenty-seven years of Internet experience allowed her to transform this observation into reproducible technology – three patents are in the works.
At the intersection of yoga and science, psychologists have been studying the similarity of meditation states to brainwave profiles since before 1975, when Harvard's Dr. Herbert Benson's The Relaxation Response hit the New York Times best seller list.
Theta states have been lauded since the 1960s by the Veterans Administration for their benefits in addiction therapy, but no one has ever managed to find way to deliver theta therapy that would be accepted by people suffering in withdrawal. It's hard to get people with addictions to sit through meditation, brain machine sessions, or multiple neurofeedback sessions. But the presentation Oddfellow Studios produces is like being in the middle of a rave multimedia light show. “People enjoy it. We have people who come to every show we ever produce, and they say it sustains them all week,” smiled Nerad.
When the international market for sleep aid prescription drugs such as Ambien tops billions a year, Oddfellow Studios hopes they can get more people off of drugs and back to a naturally relaxed state. Nerad admits, “Our show is euphoric, but the effect is entirely produced inside the brain – nothing enters the body except the light from a computer screen. We have to wait for the human studies to come in before we can make any firm claims, but the experience of well over a thousand people says it works.”
The Second Life Community Convention is coming home to San Francisco this year. The virtual world run by SF company Linden Lab recently celebrated six years of virtual community. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is giving the keynote on Friday morning, and Oddfellow Studios closes out the evening. The conference runs through Sunday.
SLCC09 is produced by the nonprofit The Future United, and attracts Second Life “residents” as well as a good segment of Linden Lab staff to their annual conferences. All proceeds from the concert will benefit the nonprofit.
Tuna and Shava's Second Life wedding made Business Week (http://bit.ly/tunashavabizweek), but the real world couple is waiting until they are out of startup mode and can afford the time and resources to plan a real wedding. “Meanwhile, our life is an adventure. It's like Buckaroo Banzai every day.”
Resources:
Oddfellow Studios http://oddfellowstudios.com
(please note images for press use at bottom of http://oddfellowstudios.com/media.html)
SLCC 09 http://slconvention.org
SLCC registration: http://slcc09.eventbrite.com
event-only registration: http://slccoddball.eventbrite.com (event is free with SLCC09 registration)
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