Skills Hak and her Biological Avatars

Posted by Alpha Auer

Sometimes one cannot help but believe in telepathy, so great is the coincidence of one's thinking about a person and them contacting you: I had not heard from Skills Hak, the creator of Insilico in quite some time and while a return visit to Insilico (and particularly a minute inspection of that Cyber shopping district over there ;-) has been on my to-do list since last Fall, I do tend to fall into a most lamentable daily rut, I find. So, what with one thing and another I have not managed to go back there despite all my good intentions.

Until yesterday that is, when I took a group of my students and co-instructors on a cultural field trip to Insilico, as part of a hybrid art and computation course which we are teaching at my university. Subsequently I logged off, logged back in an hour or so later and - hey presto - there was news from Skills, about the completion of an avatar, of which she had already given me a sneak preview a few months ago; a dragonfly! (Of course, a more sensible person than myself would immediately come to the conclusion that Skills Hak had spotted my name on her visitors list and contacted me through that connection - but telepathy is sooo much more dramatic, isn't it? hhh)

I am not going to pontificate on the glory of this creature but leave you with the images I took - one against a dark sky and one in stark daylight:





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The avatar is also equipped with a combat mechanism and targets avatars which it bombards with an amazing arrow and particle combination. I tried to take a really good photograph of this spectacle as well, however this image is the best that I could capture and trust me it is nowhere near doing the real thing justice.

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The Cyber Widow rezed at Syncretia. Sadly I had to remove her after a while due to her prim intensity. A larger image is here.

Note: I am getting more and more engrossed in the relationship between biology and art. Thus a recently discovered mind blowing blog named Bioepehmera, (which, incidentally, seems to be in the process of changing its location these days), has been holding quite a bit of my attention. It seems to me that Skills Hak's two avatars, the Dragonfly as well as an earlier one, the Cyber Widow, are befitting material for Bioephemera.
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You can see the biological avatars of Skills Hak at her store Gemini Cybernetics located in the above mentioned cyber shopping district at Insilico. Larger images of the Dragonfly avatar are to be found here on Flickr. A previous post on the beautiful and yet doomed sky city, Insilico can be read here.