Art Box - A new way to become the art in Second Life®

Now you, too, can be a part of Banksy's "Pulp Fiction," complete with a banana gun


Posted by Bettina Tizzy

This is the second piece in a new ongoing series on how and where to regain our "fun," in Second Life®, when so many of us are hard at work and living two full lives.

A summer rite of passage for many Southern California residents is to attend the Pageant of the Masters at the Festival of the Arts in Laguna Beach. The show is the presentation of a series of recreations of works of art brought to life as living pictures or "tableaux vivants" using heavily made-up and costumed people to portray anything from human figures to a piece of Wedgewood china.

Tickets cost anywhere between $20 to $50 and then you must drive there (traffic is a nightmare), park (another nightmare) and devote at least 45 minutes to walking to the venue and finding seating. I'd recommend doing this once in your lifetime, but even though it's impeccably realized, I must admit that it actually gets a tad boring after 20 minutes, let alone an hour. Once I got over the shock of how perfectly they had recreated an image, my mind began to stray towards thoughts of dinner and the guaranteed traffic jam home.

Much more fun is to be had simply by logging in to Second Life and spending an hour or two with friends hopping from one virtual destination to another, turning our avatars into art.

This notion of becoming part of the art piece is not new in Second Life, as we have seen with AM Radio's Death of Marat, and Robbie Dingo's staggeringly beautiful Starry Night video (do NOT miss this if you haven't seen it already). Then there was yet another virtual Starry Night created by Tr3ssis, and of course, the delightful and surreal freebies that four Yip was giving away when we first discovered her.

Thanks to a fellow by the name of Frankie Rockett and his Art Box, there is a new way to become a living part of classic or contemporary paintings. Art Box employs Holodeck technology to rez a series of famous illustrated, painted or photographed backdrops on demand, and then makes a number of props available to you, including clothes, a sandwich, a banana gun and what not, to complete your "picture."


"Son of SL Man" by Frankie Rockett

You may have seen this machinima of Frankie's that takes place in his 3D recreation of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks"...



That Nighthawks set is now available to you and your friends, free of charge and with lots of cool props, as well as backdrops from Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World...



As well as the amazing photograph of workers taking lunch a top a skyscraper construction site by Charles C. Ebbets...



Or become part of the ad "blown away..."



Or scream...

Edvard Munch's The Scream

There are over a dozen choices of sets to rez and Frankie tells me that more are on the way. Fun! You can visit Art Box by teleporting directly from here.