Galleries 2 & 3 Game environments and 3D worlds create a virtual platform where in multi-user and social spaces real-time dialogue takes place with real people around the world. An exhibition of installed 3D virtual environments curated by Kathy Rae Huffman, Lab3D offers a variety of new virtual experiences and the unique chance to connect with the international artists and gamers who create them. Altzero5, by Squidsoup (UK) with sound by Icaras (UK), is an online software tool commissioned by Cornerhouse. It allows users to freely download 3D navigable sonic environments using their own sounds, and as composer, the user creates an unique interactive sound and visual space. Squidsoup’s live activated soundscape will be performed throughout the Cornerhouse galleries, bar and café on the opening weekend. Beyond Manzanar by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand uses the spacial characteristics of navigable 3D virtual reality environments. Archival photographs of the Manzanar Internment Camp alternate with paradise gardens constructed from ancient Japanese scrolls and Persian miniature paintings; images of the immigrant American Dream alternate with media images of betrayal and hatred. Earth, John Klima’s geo-spatial visualisation system, culls real-time data from the internet and accurately positions it onto a three-dimensional model of the earth. Recently shown at the Whitney Biennial (2002) it offers a physical representation of Earth’s weather status. Melinda Rackham’s Empyrean is softly embodied in the multiuser electronic scapes, where in-tensions and strange attractions between organic avatars make sense of otherworldly, yet oddly familiar domains. The theoretical on-line discussion forum empyre will focus a discussion on Lab3D in June 2003. www.subtle.net/empyre In Transit by Michael Pinsky is an animated 3D map developed in collaboration with V2 Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam. It compares travel nodes and mode of transport so that the viewer simultaneously experiences the mapped view and the filmed documentation of a journey. Q4U, a multi-user game environment by Feng Mengbo, will be installed at Cornerhouse and the Media Lounge of the Huddersfield Media Center so that visitors can experience simultaneous real time competition. Sat 17 and Sun 18 May Gallery 3 Altzero5 Altzero5 creates a live activated soundscape throughout the galleries, bar and café. This performing installation will allow the public to contribute compositions to the online work on view in Gallery 3. Meet Squidsoup and Icarus and participate in the interactive online work in the gallery. They will give informal active soundscape workshops for young artists interested in sound and 3D space. They will also assist with the technical aspects of creating work and uploading sound compositions to their website. Contribute your own composition from home by following instructions at http://www.squidsoup.org/ Web3Dart Gallery 1 Web3D Art 2003, an online competition coordinated by Karel Dudesek and Kathy Rae Huffman since 1999, is an international selection of 25 works by artists, researchers and students from 10 countries. Juried this year by Masaki Fujihata (Japan), Arghyro Paouri (France), Karel Dudesek (Austria/UK), Tom Holley (UK) and Kathy Rae Huffman, the selection was the official Art Show for the Web3D International Symposium, an ACM SIGGRAPH event. It will be shown at several venues during Lab3D, including: ICA, London; Watershed, Bristol; Folly Gallery, Lancaster; Ravensbourne College, Kent; Center of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia; the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Australia, and at The Media Centre, Huddersfield, UK. http://www.web3dart.org