A Burst of Conversation: AM Radio’s "The Red and the Wild"

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Avatar AM Radio unveiled The Red and the Wild to the public yesterday. It is the first such art installation at the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts, a hybrid art and design studio at Ball State University funded by the Lilly Endowment. AM is a narrative artist who uses prims, Second Life®’s basic in-world creation tools, to paint moody settings that are awash in nostalgia for a time when objects of wood and metal were shaped and crafted in a workshop or barn, and not in some faraway factory in Taiwan. A keen observer of nature, his Plein Air scenes are hyper-real, and always unmistakably American… the wheat fields of Illinois near his current home, and the vast expanses of the Northeast. Those who know, however, realize that there are surreal secrets and surprises tucked away in every AM Radio build.  

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It seems like forever ago; it seems like only yesterday. Matthew Kiddomen, then a member of our working group (NPIRL) and someone who left the grid for good soon after, sent me an IM some 20 months ago inviting me to come at once. “You must see this. It’s incredible,” he said.


I Set a Stack of Books by AM Radio

It was up in the sky above the IBM sandbox… a wheat field, an old rusty train, a table set with an odd assortment of objects including a violin, some grapes, and a sketch book. Also a quaint garage, an old fashioned gasoline pump, and a shadowbox recreation of Jacques-Louis David's painting The Death of Marat. There, too, was the creator of all this, a rather surprised but nevertheless congenial and very tall gentleman by the name of AM Radio, sporting a long black coat and top hat.



He had bits of straw about him and the air of a chimney sweep. Within five minutes there were many of us there. I recall that I teleported Pavig Lok and Orhalla Zander, among others. We peppered this man with questions and he answered them all quite obligingly. Yes, he’d created this about a year ago. Yes, it had been up in the sky all that time and no, he owned no land.

Today, even if you are only a minor explorer in Second Life, odds are good that you have ventured onto at least one installation created by AM Radio. You probably own a set of sticks that he has given you. Perhaps you also have one of his dragonflies.  

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Engine, by AM Radio

Edges, by AM Radio

AM and I spent an hour conversing on Saturday, looking back at all that has transpired, and how it has influenced his thinking behind the creation of his newest: The Red and the Wild.  

So much has happened to you in the past couple of years. 

AM Radio: Huge learning experience. Often people will see me and say, "Oh, you're a person." And I have gotten used to it, but AM Radio really sort of became a brand. People think it’s a bunch of people building. So I have learned a lot, you know, managing that. It really is a careful process. So there is the learning aspect, but really in the last couple years I think the most important thing, the most meaningful thing for me has been the idea that we can participate in these virtual world activities, and have a real impact on the real world… and sometimes it is only vaguely related. Showing up at a concert in Second Life, and someone in Africa gets a cow.

Not long after he rezzed The Far Away at Dreamworld, AM Radio began to sell plots of wheat to benefit Heifer International with 100% of the proceeds. Heifer is an organization that works to end hunger and poverty by providing livestock and environmentally sound agricultural training to improve the lives of people who struggle daily for dependable sources of food and income. It is best known for allowing people to "purchase" cows ($500US a piece) and other livestock. Today and just 20 months later, the sales of AM’s wheat have raised enough to buy a REAL herd of cows: $7,300 or nearly 15 cows.

Is there any way to know how your fundraising efforts have specifically benefited anyone?

AM Radio: Not specifically, not like the Adopt-a-Child programs you see on late night television. We like the cow metaphor Heifer uses. You know that $500 US is equal to a cow, or $120 a goat, but even then it’s impossible to say. Even if you knew you bought an actual cow because that cow’s milk is bought by other people in that town, trade occurs and neighbors converse, enemies begin to see advantages to understanding their neighbor. It's exponential.

Saturday was World Malaria Day. I recall that you did some fundraising for nets. Have you continued that effort?

AM Radio: Nothingbutnets.net - In 2008 I sold an off-road vehicle and the Lindens from those sales went to Nothingbutnets. That's a great program. Literally one net potentially saves one, or even two lives. For just $10 USD? I mean… come on, how better to spend ten bucks? Two Big Mac meals, or a teenager in Africa has anti-malaria nets at night to sleep in.

Is that vehicle still for sale?

AM Radio: That vehicle is not. You know, that was another thing I learned. Growth can be unpredictable. I had a very kind sim owner offer three sims, plus Princeton, and NMC and everything got complex really quickly, so I went back to my roots with the charity work, focusing on Heifer.

Sometimes it is best to keep the message as simple as possible, is it not?

AM Radio: Yes, exactly. Splitting off was requiring management at levels I am not ready for yet. I need help!

He went on to create The Quiet for Princeton University and Husk for the New Media Consortium (NMC). Then came The Refuge and the Expansion for just one week, a sim-wide version of the wheat field, and today that same installation is three sims large, under the patronage of art collector Alexandar Vargas. Since then, AM has conjured two other acclaimed sims: Beneath the Tree that Died for the University of Kentucky and Waiting for You.

Time-lapse machinima by AM Radio: "This is about 200 minutes of time lapse captured with FRAPS. A visitor with a powerful face-light visits about half way into filming and briefly lights up the center." Music is Artemis

If people wanted to help you, what could they do?

AM Radio: Right now, the easiest thing to do is get the word out. Often people apologize to me, especially at music events hosted on the sims. They say, sorry, “I can't donate right now.” And I totally hear that. But one of the great things about Second Life is that participation alone adds to the momentum. Showing up and being excited inspires those who do have the ability to donate.

How has your view of art in a virtual scenario changed in the past two years?

AM Radio: That Virtual Worlds is a valid art medium. It went from “Oh, this is neat.” To, “Wow,  something is happening here,” to “Wow, it's in the New York Times.”

Is this a confirmation? Or did you believe it was less than that before? And how about how you approach your art? Has that changed in any way?

AM Radio: I don't think I thought any less of the medium. I think I paused more on the perception of Second Life by its own users and the Real Life public, and yes, (it) absolutely changed my art process. I think in my Real Life art, I have always been drawn to organic subjects. The fields, the trees, but there was a frustration, having been born in the mid-seventies, and really growing up in a very plasticized and prepackaged, processed world... sunlight, for our generation, is something seen through Plexiglass windows, and my art is a reaction against that. It's looking for more… for the organic. So it was an attempt to tear down the fakery, all that plastic in impossible colors, and awful rugs, and terrible media, like television, but in Second Life, there's almost an acceptance that much of this generation has already been living virtual. Everything is controlled, and marketed, from the music to food, to the computers the cool kids use. And now, here I am in a virtual world, trying to create the organic. I think it is still a search, but almost feels like…(pause) …a responsibility.

The wearable HUD at The Red and the Wild plays a tone and guides your camera to a specific angle when you touch a specific number - Photographs courtesy of Newdoll Nikolaidis

AM Radio: You know my critics like to peck that I am too close to (Andrew) Wyeth, but why not? Why can't we bring that here? Why can't we make sure we don't forget where we are, that this is all those plasticized windows filtering our sunlight.

I can't help but think... you and I both spend so much time in world. How has all this changed your own sense of place? The ability to create your own environment and live in it, and share it?

AM Radio: Let me be careful how I answer that. I don't want to dissuade criticism of my work... but my work is deeply personal. What you see is so much a part of me; these are symbols of my life and events, and my emotions. Yates said “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams...” My sense of space here, I suppose, has become a more elastic version of real life. You know I can place out what I want and I can share things, but people can visit and bring their own emotional baggage, and see what they want, and expand my own understanding of my own memories. It's like having hundreds of people analyzing your dreams and posting their thoughts about them on Flickr... thousands of them.

You mean... that they can affect your own understanding of your creations?

AM Radio: Yes. Some artists…

…prefer not to read the reviews of their works, for whatever reasons. I take it this is not the case with you. How much of what you read/hear/discuss about your work are you absorbing? Is it malleable? Vulnerable?

AM Radio: I think I try to read as much as I can. I think I often do go off on tangents on builds, and I sometimes forget about the bigger picture and mission of Second Life. It's easy when you have access to a sim to just cover the sky when Windlight isn't really jiving with what I am trying to do, but I still find myself challenged by this specific limitation to not be able to easily share settings. What I did was try to make a build that allowed you to easily remove my tinting. You can lower your draw distance a bit and return to the default sky, for example, and also it is a tinting, so the Windlight bleeds through, allowing for the user to work with their list of presets in ways they haven't seen them work before.


sensations by Thea Denja - Taken at "The Red and the Wild"

Your works, all of them, seem to hearken to days - we can only speculate - of your childhood. What we do know is that most people don't live like that anymore. The train that was rusty in The Far Away is new and more of a concept at The Red and the Wild. Are we entering a new era?

AM Radio: Maybe more toy-like at The Red and The Wild. The new sim is inspired by elements of my boyhood. The house itself figured centrally in my life. The other houses I have built were more abstract memories of houses. This one is nearly accurate. In fact, it is odd to see people walking on its porch and not feel like they're trespassing somehow.


AM Radio's train at The Red and the Wild 

What age were you?

AM Radio: Oh, I must have been about ten.

Does the red abstract burst have a name? Care to explain it?

AM Radio: The sim has the same name (The Red and the Wild). I had been fooling with prims in an abstract way. I had started doing that way back; you might remember the boxes on The Far Away: The Way the Air moves.


The Way the Air Moves, by AM Radio

I think abstraction fails in a vacuum. I think an abstract painting looks far more interesting when a lady wearing a Packers jacket is fumbling through a museum looking at them, wondering if she should know more.


The Speckles in Your Iris, by AM Radio

AM Radio: There is a dialog between the abstract and the real that occurs in any abstract art, and I have had a really difficult time accepting abstract art in virtual worlds because that dialog is often missing. I think (that dialog... that ether for a relationship) most often works when the artist interrupts the abstraction with some inclusion of the avatar... with most avatars based on a very real human form. So, I have been really leery about using Abstraction in Second Life. I use it a lot in Real Life in my collage work. You can find some of those real life works on the new sim. 

Tiny Little Pieces of Radio, by AM Radio

AM Radio: I had been thinking about these large shapes and not really understanding how I might get away with using them, and be able to explain myself to an art critic, or press, and I was really kind of at a dead end with it, but a friend from Atlanta, a very talented music, film, and 3d artist, sent some music he had been working on. One of the tracks included samples from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. At one point in the movie, and in Capote's Novella, Holly, the main character describes her anxieties and her fears as “the mean reds,” and immediately I thought of this large shape, these looming things in our lives that seem to want to tear us down. At the same time, these looming things, these anxieties, inspire us to become who we are, how we behave, how we react to things, how we present our avatar, how we define our virtual spaces.

In fact, in the movie, Holly has created an entire virtual world for herself. Her escape is the commoditized world where money defines what's real, and I thought “Wow, this is really relevant to virtual worlds.” Later in the movie and in the novella, Holly says... "But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll just end up looking at the sky," and suddenly my thoughts on injecting abstract shapes made sense.

I had the courage to say that this abstraction means something, that here is a symbol of something, that we have these abstract parts of ourselves, these fears, these wild things we try to bury, and without them, we don't become who we are. The Red and the Wild really is a comment on that relationship that abstraction and realism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they rely on one another to even exist. In the end Holly, of course, realizes she's living in a self constructed world, and immediately begins to redefine it.

Teleport to The Red and the Wild directly from here. 

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AM Radio's project, "The Space Between Those Trees," is a finalist for the Linden Prize, which will be awarded to one Second Life Resident or team with $10,000 USD for "an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world."

Juria's very, very mixed realities

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

In Second Life®, Juria Yoshikawa is the odd looking woman who took the grid by storm with her colorful abstract kinetic art for three seasons and then abruptly disappeared for several months, because - in Real Life - Juria is the male 40 year old Lance Shields, a Tokyo-based multimedia artist and creative strategist at a global marketing company who has been all but consumed with his job + working on an MBA.

Now Juria is coming out of from under her textbooks, thanks to a retrospective show sponsored by Atlanta's Kennesaw State University in Second Life (teleport directly from here), and a first... a showing of her work in Real Life.



While Juria works on a scale larger than conventional gallery work because she is interested in people experiencing the work in a physical way - flying through them, riding on them and socializing within the art - her creations will be shown and sold via FLART (flat art) during the Boston Cyber Arts Festival at Jeff Lipsky's (aka Filthy Fluno in SL - Yes, the one who was featured in last month's New York Times) CounterpART Gallery April 23 thru May 10.

See also:

* Haute on the grid... Being dOts - Machinimator and artist Evo Szuyuan captured the experience on video
Seeing Spots, Being Dots (Dance of Mayhem Plus Homogeneity) from Juria Yoshikawa on Vimeo.

* The Hall of Twisty Smears... Rezzed

* Memespelunk - Second Life through Juria Yoshikawa's eyes: Expect the unexpected

AM Radio and Miki Gymnast collaborate - Two distinct art languages converse

Today, the Alexandar Gallery marked the opening of The Refuge and the Expansion - a new show spanning two sims - featuring several works we are familiar with and some new things (and great freebies, I might add) by AM Radio (teleport directly from here), and yet a third sim which brings together AM Radio and Miki Gymnast's art in a project that embodies two disciplines and provides us with poetic opposites.


This photograph by AM Radio

We relate to AM and Miki's work in such different ways. His painterly and hyper-real and immersive situations as can be seen at The Far Away, The Quiet and Husk, are so much more than recreations of objects we know and recognize. Rather, he invites us to look through his eyes and gives us emotional and cultural reference points. Chocked full of hidden metaphors, his fields and landscapes invite us to walk through memories, which are not necessarily his own. He is a visual narrator. If you follow his Flickr stream, you will see an actual story unfold that integrates all of his work.

In contrast, Miki is best known for her sharp eye with respect to geometric shapes that spill out of the traditional frame and are often quite Not Possible IRL. Her installations are generated via intricate scripting work and inspired by mathematics, featuring mostly colorful panes of glass in complex, undulating and soaring structures.

The result of their collaboration: a smokey-colored Klein Bottle sits in a tilled field, surrounded by mega prim walls that define the lighting and mood of the scene, (teleport directly from here).




"From a purely academic standpoint, art is a communication and all communication is grounded in some vocabulary," said AM. "I believe that the best abstract art is shown in a context."

What was your interest in placing abstract art here?
AM Radio: It is a contrast, and as a realist I think people tend to write me off somewhat. 'Oh well, AM won't be interested in this or that,' and I don't get an invite or an LM, when in fact, I am very intersted in abstract work. After seven years of art school, I understand the concepts, theory and talent that goes into the work.

"For example, here we have a tilled field and a sky and a horizon... it implies things like gravity and space as we experience them in Real Life," said AM. "When you put something like what Miki does in this space, it literally shows you - as a dialog - all of the rules its breaking. It forces you to think about what the piece is really doing. Like an abstract work seen in Real Life, the context is our personal experiences, the baggage we bring everywhere we go. When you present such a work in a vacuum, the dialog is more muted and guess work... like two people speaking foreign languages, attempting to speak with simple signs."


AM Radio's walls do speak

You've been extra particular about the light qualities here... the walls disinvite play with Windlight...
AM Radio: There are a few points there. First, mega prims are indispensible. The second, we need to be able to share Windlight settings and thirdly, look at the result if both are allowed.

If I understand you correctly, you are giving us a Windlight preset in-world by creating these walls.
AM Radio: I wish I could share this as a windlight setting, but I cannot. For now, the compromise is a megaprim.


Miki Gymnast

"I want to see this in Real Life," said Miki, "a farm in the mid-west, with such a sphere."

A Master Scripter in addition to being an artist, she explained that the Klein Bottle is a sphere with no outside and no inside. The Klein, in fact, is a one-sided surface - like the Möbius band - but is even more complex since it is closed and has no border and neither an enclosed interior nor exterior. While it is possible in Real Life, it is costly and complicated to produce.


Alexandar Vargas... a patron of the arts

The expansive three sim exhibit was made possible thanks to the generosity of Alexandar Vargas, the owner of the Alexandar Gallery. While several of his sims are dedicated to a permanent display of sculptures in a garden setting, he is taking a more active role in hosting very large installations, such as Madcow Cosmos' recent Tarot deck. I met with him yesterday at The Refuge and the Expansion to learn more.


Alexandar Vargas and AM Radio

What is your opinion of this show?
Alexandar Vargas: I have never seen such talents as AM and Miki. AM is probably the one artist here in Second Life® that has really touched me with his work. The fields he has here take me back home, since I grew up in northern Tennessee and drove through the midwest a lot... lived in Nebraska for a while, too.

You have been an empowering force to artists. How did this happen and when did you get started?
Alexandar Vargas: Probably in January. I received Light Waves' Ballerina as a gift, and began collecting art since then. I decided to place it on Welsh Bay. I think that (virtual) art is as impressive as Real Life art.

Back in January, Alexandar had two sims which he used as his home, but then he began to voraciously acquire art...
Alexandar Vargas: Once I ran out of prims, I moved off my home estate and then took over my brother's sim. He and I both own the Cove... it was the first sim we purchased.

Was it hard to find great art? Or was it hard to choose between the immense selection?
Alexandar Vargas: It was neither difficult to find, nor difficult to choose it. It was more of an issue of having room for it.

And then you got a third sim?
Alexandar Vargas: Yes, each time I ran out of room, I got a new sim. When other artists approached me and I saw art I wasn't aware of... that floored me, to be honest.

How many sims do you have now?
Alexandar Vargas: God... um, six I think, that I use for art. I really enjoy it. Lots of times, I just walk through the sims when I can't sleep. It is important to let others know about virtual art. It is just as valuable and beautiful as art in Real Life, and it is a shame when some don't think so.

Kiss the Sky: Tipping point on the axis of a virtual world

2008 has already been a landmark year for art in virtual worlds. It is the year that Brooklyn is Watching gently dipped its toes in Second Life® and found itself nearly crushed by a multitude of artists and artwork. Babelswarm, the winner of the Australia Council for the Arts' Second Life arts residency, came to life. Blackthorn Hare got his Masters degree in Second Life sculpture. This year also marked the launch of Arthole, which I will write about soon, and the opening of the Kirsti Aho Museum, and one week ago, we celebrated the unveiling of our Garden, simply the largest collection - ever - of content creation that is not possible in Real Life.

Meanwhile, another show just debuted that is critical to our understanding of the unique possibilities in a 3D virtual medium, and the list of participants reads like a Who's Who of virtual abstract art. I welcome guest blogger Bjorlyn Loon, and her insightful piece on this collection.


by Bjorlyn Loon



DanCoyote Antonelli’s (aka DC Spensley) new exhibit, Kiss the Sky, is an historical document in recognition of a community of artists in Second Life. Like most of us, artists and critics are searching for new words and constructs to define their virtual experience. Says Antonelli: “Since virtual worlds are a change of venue – a drastic change of venue – the former critical language is not enough.”

Dancoyote Antonelli: "The people in this show are each like a Picasso, or like the abstract expressionists of our time. They have embraced virtual world conditions, and are representing an avant-garde within an avant-garde that is nearly incomprehensible in material-world art. Feel the history, we are living in it!

One of the reasons that Hyperformalism has not mainstreamed until now is that there are a lot of practitioners that are not communicating with each other. In Second Life Hyperformalism has found a home in that it is an indigenous art form. Hyperformal work has always existed uncomfortably in the material sphere.

While space in virtual worlds is a simulation, place can be real. In fact, art experiences are the only thing that can be real in both the virtual and material worlds at the same time.” Kiss the Sky is tiered in the air above New Media Consortium’s NMC Arts Lab (teleport directly from here), and visitors are encouraged to interact with the works, and to experience them on many levels, including sight, sound and play.

Not all of this work is brand spanking new: it is not intended to be. What is new about it is that it is all together. This is a survey, a critical milestone to mark this time in history and present the shared histories of these artists in one concentrated punch.”

In addition to work from DanCoyote Antonelli, Kiss the Sky artists include Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

Antonelli has developed a new native architecture for experiencing this exhibit, which might otherwise be difficult to maneuver as a result of its massive scale. Strategically placed purple seats call up a menu where you can select from among the 35 works in the exhibit, and the seat will gently transport you to your choice. Says Antonelli, “What is important is that there is no remediated architecture here: Interface serves content. The seats take you to all the exhibits, near the sign that only opens when you are near enough to read. The signs and seats are in the same place in each exhibit, so once you get it, you have it.”

Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in a hyper-medium, including abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network, as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. Because Hyperformalist works are unique created entities that are not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and the artworks encourage fascination with form and pure relationships. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist movement.


Juria Yoshikawa’s creation embraces Kiss the Sky in sheer physical dimensions. "In all three of my works, as the name of the show Kiss the Sky suggested,” says Yoshikawa, “I tried to create forms to pull people in and draw them skyward. In the large piece Infinite Pixel Loop most of all, I was aiming at a reaction of immersive upward motion."


Conversely, the pulsating rock specatacle of i7o’s Zhu Name Unknown contrasts with the aerial setting of Kiss the Sky, suggesting a literal and conceptual grounding.


According to the artist, Adam Ramona’s works in Kiss The Sky “explore the audiovisual relationship between the avatar and virtual space. Sound and vision are created and modified dynamically by the avatar's movement through space, creating a real-time composition unique to that user and time.” Seen here: A Rose Heard At Dusk


Seifert Surface is directly concerned with the mathematics of 3D, which Antonelli describes as “one genre of hyperformalism.” For example, Surface’s Spore, created in 2006, “is based on a process that turns up in nature a lot: 'growing' new objects around some axis at an angle of 2pi/Phi from the previous one, where Phi is the golden ratio, (1+sqrt(5))/2.” Siefert’s Meandering Hypercube “is a projection of the hypercube from 4d to the 3d of Second Life, just as the 3d of Second Life projects to the 2d of a computer screen.”


Veteran artist Sabine Stonebender describes her KissTS – MoreAndLess as “Positive space vs. Negative space in an endless cycle,” and it is mesmerizing.


Of his Plant Deco installation, artist Vlad Bjornson says “The changing, geometric shapes of each piece are fractal and self-similar in nature, somewhat like the structure of Real Life plants. The colors of each piece were inspired by some of my favorite artists, borrowing color pallets from their works. Each piece changes to a unique configuration each time it is touched, with billions of possible combinations.”


AngryBeth Shortbread extends her Real Life art into Second Life with a strong emphasis on sound, play, and interactivity. Her Pusher-Tron is no exception.


Nand Nerd, who refers to himself as an… “Artist? I'm no artist. What would I know about art? I'm an Engineer, damnit,” has always been intrigued by Antonelli’s art. “The flexi-hedra started off as a whimsical use of the new flexible path feature,” says Nerd, “Once I'd seen the outcome I was hooked and developed a range of polyhedra to be given the same treatment.” Nerd’s Square Antiprism Tower at Kiss the Sky responds to touch in unexpected ways, which defy gravity.


Nebulosus Severine, who has been working in Second Life since 2005, produces works which she describes as “Chromotive [Chroma (color) + Emotive (drawing out or evoking emotion)].” Her Pulse Points (I, II, III) is a crystalline structure which surrounds the avatar in pulsating light.


Chance Abattoir is interested in interactivity, and brings skills in texturing, building, 3d modeling, and scripting to the artistic task. His 5.3.5(2) juxtaposes dissimilar shapes which evolve according to the angle of view, and change further, and more dramatically, upon touch. Chance elaborates, “It's not meant to convey anything other than self-reflexivity. Each part of the art refers to another part of the art.”


In the year and a half that elros Tuominen has been in Second Life, he says that he has “never stopped learning about building, scripting, textures... I feel like a child, playing with everything I find, and expressing myself freely.” Tuominen is a prolific artist, treating his friends to new poetry or sculpture every single day. For elros, Underconstruction City v.06 is a massive work, demonstrating his increasing mastery of the medium, and communicating his expanding reach towards impossibilities.


Sasun Steinbeck has been working on her Morphing Sculpture for years, perfecting it. It scintillates against a starry night sky or cloudless blue with equal impact. Like many of the works within Kiss the Sky, Steinbeck’s is configurable by the visitor, in this case via choices of texture.


Selavy Oh describes her Soft Structure as “part of a series of conceptual works exploring and utilizing inherent properties of the simulated world of Second Life. Motion of the structure is created by virtual wind, the color reflects cloud density, and the cloud-like fragility of the installation is emphasized by temporarily dispersing the elements upon avatar intrusion.”

In sum, for all their differences, the works of art in Kiss the Sky achieve Antonelli’s goal of creating a historical node. People will look back at this exhibition, with the experience of years, and see a tipping point, where, according to Antonelli, “Hyperformalists on Second Life have more in common with each other than we do with the material or conceptual art worlds.”

All photos by Bjorlyn Loon, with these exceptions: Overview: Antonelli, Infinite Pixel Loop: Yoshikawa, Morphing Sculpture: Steinbeck, A Rose Heard At Dusk: Ramona, Pulse Points (I, II, III): Severine, and Soft Sculpture: Oh.