Selavy Oh's work, as long as I've known it, has always involved math and physics and, for the most part, it features cubes or sticks coming together and/or falling apart in different ways.
I can think of four recent installations by Selavy that break this pattern or do something entirely new: Dancing Mountains, a landmark Land Art piece in Second Life consisting of mountains that rise and fall guided by scripts, even in her absence; The Final Show, her entry in the Final Five showcase for the Brooklyn is Watching Best of Year 1 Festival, where she curated the works of other artists within her own virtual recreation of a Real Life art gallery; the monumental State of Formation piece at the IBM Exhibition Space last month, where land rose to meet your feet as you crossed water and a camera guided you right back to the inside of your avatar's head; and finally her latest and for my money, the finest work at this year's Burning Life: Irregularity.
Photo by Selavy Oh
The contrast between the brutally dry desert land of the thematic build festival and this delicate structure is already striking but it was in conversation with Selavy that I learned that it is also self-healing and not in the way that you might think. It seems it has a mind of its own: "I'm really curious what the end result will be. It transforms. Every visitor flying to it adds to the irregularity. The edges don't go back to the same place; it already is different and no longer completely regular."
"I added random numbers to the position to which an edge moves back. It's basically adding noise. In reality, everything is affected by noise, but the point here is more that the visitors cause changes. When an edge moves back, it is displaced from the last location by maximally plus-minus 0.2 m in x and y and +0.5 in z, so it'll slowly rise. One edge may, by chance, move completely away; another one may approximately stay there, and on average the whole structure will retain its shape."
Selavy was inspired by Sol Lewitt's minimalist sculptures, which are mostly cube-based - and doing very well in art sales, by the way. Last week, his Horizontal Lines, Not Straight Not Touching sold £3,000 over estimate at auction for £11,000.
The notecard offered at the site of Irregularity reads:
'irregularity' consist of 1872 identical poles. The poles are arranged so that they form edges of a three-dimensional regular grid of 2.5x2.5 cubes. By omitting cubes and edges, the remaining poles, still organized in a regular grid, form a hollow sphere. thus, constructing the sphere can be conceived as removing those parts of the grid which do not contribute to the shape, like a sculptor carving wood.
Initially, the structure is completely symmetric and regular, but becomes more and more irregular over time. Each visitor actively participates in this transformation: When avatars fly through the structure and collide with it, the edges touched fall down and the structure temporarily becomes damaged. After a certain time, which depends on how many visitors are present, the edges will start to rise and slowly move back towards their original position. However, they never end up in exact the same position, thus resulting in an accumulative disarrangement of the structure.
Irregularity will be even more irregular after my hard work at the site
She is the mistress of sad art, of robotic art, of mystery and melancholy, all in a virtual space, but when you talk with her, there's a bit of jocularity, of no-nonsense to Bryn Oh that's light and engaging. In conversation yesterday, the Canadian artist got to speaking about Second Life's building blocks. "I kind of like prims. It's fun to just use them. It's like Lego."
As the discussion progressed, we got on the topic of weather and how cold it can get up north. Like -30. It didn't occur to me to clarify this at the time, but I hope she was referring to Fahrenheit and not Celsius degrees. Brrr. "Snow was my very first toy, before Legos," she explained. What did she make? "Oh, snow homes, people, and often underground tunnels, which are nice and warm inside."
Years later, Bryn is still making tunnels and secret places that can only be negotiated via camming - that act of zooming and panning one's viewer (camera) down nooks and crevices. What they lead to is often the very heart of the matter, the answer, or partial answer to the question that the installation poses, for there is always a story, a conundrum, and a sequence of events in her art that need to be discovered to comprehend the whole. She is a virtual storyteller.
Vessel's Dream is such a creation. "They will only be able to go through a few rooms before they cannot continue with their avatar," advised Bryn. "At this point they must switch to holding down Ctrl and Alt (at the same time), and using the left mouse button. With all three held down, you can now change the angle and enter the tunnel. They then let go of the left mouse button, move it over a new target and hold it down again. Letting go, they can zoom forward using the scroll wheel. It's a bit like spiderman moving like this. Again they must click on things, as many parts of the build can be activated," she instructed.
Vessel's Dream has not yet been made public, but like all of Bryn's works, it appears to be an advancement over her last. Now her machinima is helping her to tell the stories, always aided by her Machine Poetry, which one discovers here and there, like messages in a bottle, lonely and cast away on old parchment paper: Histories of sentimental, often persecuted and ill-fated angels and robots.
Machinima by Bryn Oh
Here are just some of the blogposts we've done about Bryn and her work in Second Life:
Polish Olza Koenkamp (aka Piotr Kopik) is a full time artist with two full lives: one as a human and another as an avatar in Second Life®. His virtual self operates a store where he sells freakish avatars of his own creation. In Real Life, he paints and is a co-founder of szu szu, a group that creates art for public spaces.
Now Olza has made this charming seemingly animated machinima in which his avatars speak not with text, or voice, but with emoticons.
Olza is fascinated with the inside of his body. He doesn't care what it looks like, but concentrates instead on his feelings, how his body works and its relationship with his mind and psyche. His interest in Eastern philisophies and practices such as yoga, led to his "realization" that he needed to REBUILD himself.
From that point forward, he gave his Real Life works the moniker PSYCHOSOMATIC REBUILDING. In Second Life, he refers to his activities as PSYCHOSOMATIC REBUILDERS.
You can teleport to Olza's PSYCHOSOMATIC REBUILDERS shop from here. Hat tip: Cutea Benelli.
Most everything that Rezzable Productions showcases has an element of mystery to it, and today's first look and reveal to the members of the Not Possible IRL and the Impossible IRL groups was no exception.
All photographs have not been retouched.
New and completely unknown Rezzable artist 3D Soup has created an immense sculpty sculpture called the Grand Odalisque: a hyperrealistic sleeping female nude, complete with stretch marks, pimples and calluses on her feet. She is lovely and endearing and we all know someone like her in Real Life. In fact, she probably looks like many of us do in Real Life.
Reminiscent of the works of Lucian Freud or Ron Mueck, the Grand Odalisque marks a leap forward in content creation in virtual worlds... an exacting portrayal of, and the embracing of our very real physical qualities.
As RightasRain Rimbaud (aka Jon Himoff), CEO of Rezzable commented, "It's really about realism, isn't it? It's an amazing piece. Gives you another dimension and level of access. At the same time, this piece makes you wonder why the avatars haven't changed or become more realistic on the Second Life® grid."
New media rockstar Gazira Babeli admires the Grand Odalisque
When I inquired further about 3D Soup, RightasRain stated that the artist believes that the piece will speak for itself, and is not taking any interviews. Of course, most old timers who remember the groundbreaking work of a certain Starax Statosky who later became Light Waves, believe that he is the only person capable of doing this quality of work. Coincidentally, Light Waves worked for Rezzable Productions until he left the grid, creating the startlingly poetic, very majestic sim Black Swan, which will be leaving Second Life at the end of August, to be re-rezzed on Rezzable's own OpenSim grid. Light Waves was also responsible for the creation of the Greenies sculptures and avatars, and the Ballerina which is currently rezzed at the Greenies Home Rezzable.
You can view the Grand Odalisque, rezzed at Black Swan, by teleporting directly from here, and then walking through the door on your right and down the pathway.
Ingredients: 1 (one) Second Life® account/avatar 1 (one) or more prim-based virtual artworks
1 (one) each, notecard giver and notecard explaining your artwork
1 (one) Brooklyn is Watching landmark or slurl Patience, a pinch Tolerance (omit ego)
Instructions:
1) Log into Second Life
2) Using the landmark or slurl, teleport to Brooklyn is Watching
3) Rez your virtual artwork there
4) Garnish your artwork with your notecard giver
5) Sit tight until the following weekend
5) Direct your browser to the Brooklyn is Watching website and listen to the weekly podcast to hear if Real Life art critics reviewed your piece.
~*~
That's my take on the recipe offered by the man who conceived it, Jay Newt (aka Jay Van Buren), back in March of 2008 when he launched what was to be a one year mixed realities project: Brooklyn is Watching (BiW).
The finalists were tasked with creating original virtual art that relates to the virtual version of the Jack the Pelican Presents gallery, and...
Nebulosus Severine enveloped the virtual gallery in a luminous fortress-of-solitude-like structure — that is a meditation on the nature of the self.
DanCoyote Antonelli exploded the metaphor of the virtual gallery by using the building blocks of that illusion as raw material for a dynamic, rhythmic, abstract sculpture stretching up into the sky.
Selavy Oh exploited the intrinsically flexible nature of virtual space by creating an interactive maze of nested, shifting Jack the Pelicans in which she curated a show within a show featuring artists not selected by the judges.
Bryn Oh turned the gallery into a ruin of glowing technological fragments infested with digital flora, inviting the viewer into her own idiosyncratic fantasy narrative.
Glyph Graves used the gallery to show how art is a reflection of its physical and social environment by creating a work that changes based on the number of people viewing it.
~*~
The project is now slated to go on... indefinitely, and while it's had its share of bumpy technical moments, the concept and the people behind it have given the most acclaimed virtual artists in Second Life a reason to roll up their sleeves and not only participate with their art, but also to launch their own BiW initiatives and boost the effort in every way they can think of.
I thought we'd find out what is on Jay's mind these days now that so much has gone down, and the future seems to be wide open.
We already know what your original vision was for Brooklyn is Watching. What is your current vision of what BiW can be?
Jay: The biggest thing that has changed in my mind because of my experience organizing this show is that I really think control needs to start to shift in the direction of the community that has grown up around this project. There are people remote from Brooklyn who are willing and able to have more of a say in what BiW is and what it becomes and I'd like to find ways to let them.
Regarding the Festival, what have you learned from this experience that would be valuable to other Second Life'rs wishing to organize events around a theme? Or around the arts?
Jay: Well, organizing artists is like herding cats... but I knew that before. Never try to organize something this complicated in two months. Don't have a day job. No really - the parts that have worked very well in all this are the parts where specific people had discrete tasks they were responsible for and the authority needed to see them through from soup to nuts: Penumbra Carter and Stacey Fox making the machinimas, Dekka Raymaker and Wltrr Rajal making the virtual version of Jack the Pelican (art gallery in Brooklyn), and so on. Where I got into trouble was when people had overlapping or dependent duties - one person couldn't act without another. Also, give yourself twice as long to plan as you think you'll need.
How much do you get out beyond the BiW borders? Will this remain the same or do you intend to explore other lands?
Jay: I probably won't as long as I'm involved as I am just because I don't have time. I do think that focusing the conversation on what people bring to BiW is useful for two reasons: 1) You can't have a good conversation about everything. You need to limit it somehow and this is an easy (if arbitrary ) way to limit it. 2) It is one thing for us to give our honest opinion about art by artists who have actively sought out our opinions. It would be pretty nervy of us to just roam the grid saying what we think about all kinds of stuff when probably the people who made that work never wanted our opinion in the first place.
How has your opinion of art in a virtual setting changed from day one of the project to now?
Jay: Really this summer has just confirmed what i thought about it before -- its uncontrollable, it wants to stay wild. I think the virtual art has the capacity to undermine peoples assumptions about art more than art in a real space can. The SLon De Refuse is amazing - its more BIW than BIW - and Selavy Oh's show within a show inside the final five is another great example of how virtual art can turn everything on its head.
What has all of this activity meant to Jay Van Buren and his real life and how are you finding the time to balance both lives?
Jay: I'm not. I'm completely strung out and brain-fried. After the 23rd of August I'm gong to hide for a week from everyone and then I'm only going to talk to a few people at a time about where BiW should go. In late September we'll emerge from hibernation stronger, better, with a solid plan for the future and more people on board helping me in some kind of official capacity. With job titles. And sharks with lasers attached to them. I'm going to get me some of those, too.
Teleport to Brooklyn is Watching's headquarters, sponsored by Popcha! and the University of Kansas' Department of Visual Art, from here. This is where you can rez new artworks on a weekly basis.
Teleport to the 30 Best, sponsored by the University of Kansas' Department of Visual Art, KU Art, directly from here.
Teleport to the Final Five exhibit at the East of Odyssey from here.
Some people are just effortlessly cool, like that kid in grade school who got all A's or 100s in homework without ever studying. Nur Moo is a virtual chameleon in Second Life® who lives a colorful pixelated existence (and I'm not referring to the RGB scale), ranging from patron saint to artists, to hipster who's A list parties at her acclaimed Poetik Velvets are sumptuous experiments in fun, to photographer and legitimate artist in her own right who totally gets that we're not in Kansas anymore.
Nur is often the protagonist in her photography, and her self-portraits are both intimate and instant theater, employing the latest creations by Second Life's leading fashion and fantasy designers to tell a new story. We can't be sure if she is disguising herself or revealing all, but of one thing we are certain: We want to look.
"The experience of immersion into a virtual world is as individual as the person sitting at the computer. One may log in just to experience it - like a game, another to create a replica of their favourite places off the grid, another to step into the shoes of a character from a book they read. Poetik is not that kind of experience. Its creators and participants cover a spectrum of personalities, visions and motivations, but the overriding common thread is the desire to seek ways in which to express a sort of remix of the real world and the virtual. Second Life has its technological limitations, but it is of course far more malleable to the whims of the imaginations of its denizens." - Nur
"Poetik is an organic entity emerging from binary, strings of codes and rows of pixels that can be directly influenced by the artists who have created wordless, changeable, beautiful things for the enjoyment of all. Simply attending an event or going on your own to explore an immersive piece of art can be enough to stir the emotions and inspire the artist hidden within every living creature, reawakening the fearless expression we might not have felt since we were children." - Nur
In real life, Nur is a graphic and fashion designer living in Parma, Italy.
You can view more of Nur's images on her Flickr stream, or teleport to her galleries at Poetik Velvets from here.
A graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada is studying avatar design in Second Life® and is looking for participants who would be willing and interested in contributing a small portion of their time to developing this academic research.
Interested participants would be involved in a small 2-4 hour workshop session one day and a follow-up focus group for 1-2 hours involving an avatar design critique session with peers.
Both sessions will take place on Odysseyin Second Life.
The researcher plans to watch participants create avatars based on established Modern Art design guidelines borrowed from Art-History to see if they still translate into interesting and useful avatar design. The research will be taking snapshots and video of the avatar creators during the building process so they can be critiqued during the peer review session.
At the end of this research, the researcher will write about the strengths and limitations of using Modernist guidelines to inform avatar design in Second Life and other next generation virtual worlds. All participants will own the rights to their own avatar creations being generated during this workshop.
The researcher will only document these designs in order to visually illustrate their relationship to the theoretical frame-work.
Any potential participants must meet this criteria:
Genuine interest in designing avatars – especially designing for themselves as well as for clients/friends/other people.
Some arts background (including arts produced exclusively in SL)
Relative fluency in navigating the building controls in Second Life.
Reasonable fluency in English (written) and/or ability to use an in-world translator effectively.
The willingness to allow their avatar designs made in this case-study session to be publicized, documented and researched by the author.
The willingness to participate for the duration of the research project.
Professes not to be a member of a captive population (inmate), psychiatric in-patient nor a youth under the age of 19.
The willingness to sign a consent form (over the age of 19).
If you are interested, reply with your name (SL name only is fine), background, contact information availability (including your local time zone) and specific design interests. Submit a notecard with your proposal to uuuuuuu Heliosense, or via email to Jeremy Owen Turner at jot@sfu.ca. Replies of interest must be received by August 10, 2009.
Potential participants will be notified of the status of their participation by August 13, 2009 for sessions happening on the following week.
I'm not saying there is only one way to enjoy art from the other side in Second Life®, but the new Hotel Dare Showcase which opens today allows the visitor to step right into it (in fact, you are sucked in) on a whole new level. The approach is not new to us. We already enjoy Frankie Rockett's Art Box and AM Radio's Death of Marat, among other installations, but never have we had the opportunity to become a part of Real Life art to this degree.
Gattina Dumpling has already curated three sessions of the Hotel Dare (not to be confused with the Showcase), a concept space she conceived that goes far beyond the typical gallery setting to feature the location-appropriate works of rotating Second Life artists who have been given a hotel "room" to do whatever they wish with it. The latest version resides on the Poetik sim (teleport directly from here).
Now Gattina has acquired half a sim - dubbed the Hotel Dare Showcase - which will be devoted to celebrating the works of Real Life artists. The inaugural show pays tribute to Ray Caesar, and includes the participation of Marie Lauridsen, Katat0nik Pidgeon, Autumn Hykova, and Leetah Moxie, as well as Daniel Luchador who created most of the rooms.
Complete avatars are for sale at the arrival point. Enter the "lobby" of the Hotel Dare, which this time around looks more like a grand salon, and admire/become the art. Hint: It helps to walk up the paintings.
Blackbird by Ray Caesar
Gattina was traveling yesterday but nevertheless responded to my email:
"This is very hard to do from an iPhone. I dropped out of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before I graduated. And I started college at age 16. For fine arts. I haven't painted anything in about 14 years. I have had an interest in "lowbrow art" (see juxtapoz and hi fructose magazines) and artists like Ray Caesar, Mark Ryden, Camile Rose Garcia, and Sylvia Ji since I first visited the La Luz De Jesus gallery in L.A. about 11 years ago."
Wikipedia: Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other subcultures. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor - sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it's a sarcastic comment.
Ray Caesar's Blackbird, interpreted by Hotel Dare Showcase in Second Life
Gattina: I can remember the first time I saw Ray Caesar's art. It was a few years ago in Juxtapoz magazine and I can remember feeling that I wanted to ...
It wasn't just the feeling of wanting to own some of his art. It was more of the feeling "I want, I want, I want to.. BE that. I want to BE there.I want to GO IN THERE.
L'accord d'amour by Ray Caesar
Gattina: His work inspires an urgent sense of yearning. The viewer wants to crawl into these worlds he has created, to explore the dark nooks and crannies his subjects inhabit, to root around for secrets and open letters addressed to someone else and ... to find what they have lost. Ray Caesar owns all of our mysteries. He collects them and ensnares them in his art, he captures them in hidden drawers and hides them under beds and shadows them in corners of century-old rooms and in the murky depths of the sea.
His work depicts romantic landscapes, dreamy and lush, angelic inhabitants gaze upon the viewer, at times serene, at times accusatory. Porcelain- skinned girls sprout mechanical limbs and mile-long tentacles bloom from under delicate petticoats. There is something reflected in the mirror, hidden behind the drapery, lurking in the shadows. The observer is all too easily lost in these worlds. The viewer is the victim in his vampiric world, lulled into submission by his supernatural creations. Ray Caesar claims to have been born a dog. For a dog he is also a soothsayer, an architect, a magician. An analyst sitting behind a large wooden desk, taking snippets of our dreams, hopes and fears, moments of our childhoods and locking them away in the astounding worlds he has created.
Ray Caesar's L'accord d'amour, as interpreted by the Hotel Dare Showcase in Second Life
The most amazing realization occurs when it dawns on you that all of his art was created in Maya. His images are the very best of computer arts; the nuances and layers stagger and enthrall the imagination.
Images by Ray Caesar
Ray Caesar wrote: I color the models first in a very simple way, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture that may be painted digitally such as a flower petal or from a digital photograph such as a wood surface. I collect textures the way some people collect little silver spoons and I have a story about each texture in my collection…
As my work is printed I am often asked about my original, but it exists only in the computer in a dimensional world of depth, width and height. I am fascinated by the concept that this 3-dimensional space exists much as another reality and even though I turn the computer off, I am haunted by the fact that this space is still there existing in a mathematical probability, and the space that we live in now might not be all that different.
Descent by Ray Caesar
Gattina: I picked the team I did for the build because they are people I have worked with before and I knew they would be able to translate my vision for the build and make it a reality. Daniel is known as one of the most talented builders on SL, Katat0nik is an artist in her own right and has won the award for best fashion designer Japan Second life, Marie and I share the same aesthetics, love the same artists and she is an amazing skin artist, and Autumn and Leetah were happy and excited to do the hair.
Ray Caesar's Descent, as interpreted by Hotel Dare Showcase in Second Life
Teleport to the Hotel Dare Showcase directly from here.
When it comes to virtual creations, I'm a snoopy gumshoe. I want to know what everyone's making, and especially a handful of people I keep track of at all times. For the past year I've been pinging "Anything new, Nom?" now and then, and not getting a straight answer. Just invoking the guy's name here with some news makes me happy, for Nomasha Syaka (rez: 9/13/2006) is the British creator of the poetic sculpted Icarus that I often rez at my own Chakryn, as well as the wacky blender where I take folks when we're up for a giggle. His in-world group I use my nose to type is worth joining for the name alone. He is also renown for his electric guitars, sculpted tigers and wolves, among other animals, but he has been suspiciously quiet for a long, long time.
So an IM from the owner of Blackwater GalleryJurin Juran to say that she was dancing, and why, had the effect of a bottle of vintage champagne. It turns out that he has been making motion capture animations. Like a hundred of them! Fluid, fun, funny and lots of the oolala variety.
The first and most vital necessity was to dance... and obviously to speak with Nomasha.
Nomasha's sim, re-purposed and lovely
So... what have you been up to for the past year?
Nomasha Syaka: Getting these animations ready – they are very difficult to make and process. I made it my mission to produce better animations and I think for the greater part, I have. Most of the feedback I have received so far suggests this and I have been as obsessive about it as I was about making art objects in SL.
Did you have experience with mocap before?
Nomasha Syaka: None at all, nor with animation generally. Self taught. Though I use someone to process the data once it is recorded and he is a real expert.
How did you recruit your dancers? Did you dance, too?
Nomasha Syaka: Lol, my dancing would qualify for NPIRL. No, I use professional dancers always, recruited from London dance agencies.
Fruits and noobs and bears and all sorts of things zoom by and over the animation stands
How do you make mocap animations?
Nomasha Syaka: The dancer wears a special suit and multiple cameras record the dancer’s movement. These calculations are then transferred onto a computer character and a lot of processing has to be done by hand to ‘clean’ the information and make them suitable for Second Life®. The SL avatar skeleton is a freak, so you have to make a lot of adjustments for it.
You were among the first creators to provide Second Life's musicians with beautifully crafted guitars. Do you have music in your background? (There are over a dozen fabulous animations for guitar players, by the way). Why guitars?
Nomasha Syaka: No music background, at all. I learned the violin as a child for a couple of weeks, and then the teacher disappeared and was never seen again by anyone. Later on I learned the flute, but then the school's music building caught fire and burnt to the ground. Not a good history with music. I made the first guitar because I knew it would be difficult, as no one had made any decent ones at all.
I was relieved to discover that you've rezzed the Blender on the revamped sim. I would have been miserable if it had vanished.
Nomasha Syaka: My favorite build... never been sold.
Nomasha makes it possible for you to dance moving over and around a white tiger, via four different animations
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Are all your interests coming together with this new venture? Music, tigers, art, and now...
Nomasha Syaka: Time for some more sculptures, I hope!
Will there be a NPIRL category of dances?
Nomasha Syaka: When I record myself dancing – for sure.
You can teleport to Nomasha's Ministry of Motion from here.
An acquaintance of mine has had several of her storybooks for children published with some success. In fact, she makes a decent living in Los Angeles in this manner and that is quite an accomplishment given that writers and illustrators with ideas for children's books are a dime a dozen. But there is an opportunity created by virtual worlds that intrigues me and I expect will pique the interest of book publishers, too. Eventually... One of these days now.... Seriously! I cannot, for the life of me, understand why they haven't capitalized on this platform already. Certainly animation studios and production houses are beginning to look at virtual world imagery as both a source and a resource (I can tell you that folks from Disney are frequent readers of this blog) and conceptually, I do believe that even a television commercial for a major brand may have been heavily inspired by content created in Second Life®.
Virtual artist Bryn Oh is already considered a master at delivering supremely immersive environments through the use of her sculptures coupled with original prose, poetry and even a play in which the attendees took part. There are simply thousands of us - virtual residents - who have attempted to explain to each other how moved we've felt by what we've experienced through her art via photographs, blogposts and machinima.
Her newest installation, curated by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani (aka Andrew Sempere) at one of the two IBM art sims in Second Life - Rabbicorn - is a second installment on her dark but moving Daughter of the Gears story. And it really is a story. Instead of turning the pages, we teleport to the next chapter. Instead of gazing upon the illustrations on a 2D page, we walk around the characters and situations. We hear the music, we move in and out of light and shadows. We are right there. But even if you never logged in to Second Life, the potential for the events to unfold in a traditional book is very much there through the use of well executed photography.
German photographer Dil Spitz "DilSpi," instantly agreed to capture some images of Rabbicorn for this blogpost when I approached her, given that she is already a fan of Bryn's work. Dil donates the proceeds of all sales of her images taken in Second Life to organizations that help stalking victims in Real Life. Keep in mind that Rabbicorn is a predominately dark build, so photography in this case was a challenge and Dil respectfully did not tweak the gamma or brightness.
The Machine Poems that follow on this page were written by Bryn for previous installations and not for Rabbicorn, but I thought I'd post them here to give you a taste of her storylines.
Charlatans
All my friends Are charlatans Beetlebots And Videonauts In dark nights With search lights Broken hearts Are useful parts Carry me From the street And love me though I'm obsolete
26 Tines
The laboratory is silent The scientists gone We have seven hours Before the dawn Come to me through the half-light To my jar by the rack Surrender your cord To the adaptor on my back 26 tines At the end of your cable Connect you to me So that we are able To feel emotions drawn Through the cables caress And forget till the dawn Our loneliness
Hardwired
All my dreams Were programmed by you So that they would All come true Fly on the wall Then to the street Robots When obsolete If I could only see you One more time Maybe you would Change your mind Resale hunters With laser beams Take all the parts but My hardwired dreams
Kevlar Keen was so captivated by Bryn Oh's story and art for The Daughter of the Gears, that she created an avatar in tribute. Yes, friends, this is an avatar, and not Bryn's much admired virtual sculpture. It seems that Bryn approved, too.
Imagine how you would react if a piece of artwork at your local museum suddenly came to life and walked up to you. That is precisely how I felt when I glimpsed at Kevlar as the "Daughter" out of the corner of my virtual eye. The resemblance is perfect, right down to the beanpole legs and knobby knees, plus the "face" can be opened to reveal... ah, you will have to hunt Kevlar down to find out! This is a one-of-a-kind avatar, too. What must Bryn have thought when she saw it?!
Bryn developed both the character and the concept for the Daughter of the Gears when Rezzable Productions invited her to create an installation for the mysterious and poetic (and hallowed) Black Swan sim. I get a lump in my throat when I think of it, but we've learned that Black Swan will soon be erased from the grid. It seems it has less than one month left. However, you can now visit the piece on Bryn's own sim, Immersiva, by teleporting directly from here and looking for the tower.
Bryn Oh: It is a story about a mother who watches as her daughter becomes sick. And as her life begins to fail she transfers her daughter's soul into a vessel. A machine. When the townspeople find out what she has done they come to take the daughter. They see her as an abomination against all their beliefs and to all they hold true. But to take her daughter they must first get by her.
The mob climbs the tower and reaches the top. The mother fights them and wins. But is mortally wounded. And as she lays dying, she realizes that her daughter will now live forever alone and lonely. A girl in the body of a machine in a hostile world. So the daughter of gears goes into stand-by mode like a computer. And in stand-by she dreams of her mother for eternity.
As with every Bryn Oh creation, there is always a bit of poignant sadness, and also discovery. You can read the accompanying "machine" poems on Bryn's blog.
More coming soon on Bryn and her latest: the Rabbicorn Story.
On Werner Kurosawa, geodesic domes, and Green Phosphor’s novel work in Second Life
Posted by Bettina Tizzy
Years ago, a friend of mine who owned a large manufacturing centre sought to enclose the entire building complex within a geodesic dome, modelled after architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller’s lattice shell structures. His goal was not merely an aesthetic one, for it is said that such domes maximize efficiency in energy use for both heating and cooling, while being structurally strong. Fuller’s maxim: “Doing more with less.” That was my first introduction to the futurist, and I’ve admired many of his ideas ever since. As an irrelevant but nonetheless fascinating aside, virtual world residents who find their schedules unbearably stretched may take an interest in the fact that Fuller practiced Polyphasic sleeping for two years: only two hours a day via very short naps at regular intervals.
Fuller and Shoji Sadao dreamed of placing a climate-controlled geodesic dome over Manhattan – Photo courtesy of NeutralSurface
Buckminster Fuller’s domes were the first thing I thought of when I rezzed at Green Phosphor’s new facility in Second Life®, which is surrounded by an immense – even by SL standards – webbed rotating sphere. The effect is both elegant and highly dramatic.
If you click to enlarge, you will see that the spec at approximately the middle of this image is me, standing on a platform above the dome
Werner Kurosawa, the virtual architect
Created by Belgian architect Werner Kurosawa (aka Werner van Dermeersch), Green Phosphor is among the most handsome and livable virtual corporate campuses that I know of.
It was so not a surprise then when I visited Werner’s website and discovered various videos on Buckminster Fuller and links to the organization that bear the maverick’s name.
“Of course it is a tribute to him because he surpasses the ordinary, which every architect should do to have the right to use the title of architect. On the other hand, it was for my friend and client Tom Barman – lead singer of the Belgian group Deus - who used the “image” of Bucky as a reference to me when he wrote the song “The Architect” in their latest CD (look for the tape recorder on the bottom right).
In addition to his architectural work, Werner creates art installations, “from big to small.” From time to time he collaborates with his friend and composer Serge Verstockt on contemporary classical music and he also teaches Master classes in Art in Antwerp.
His Second Life name, of course, alludes to two of the greatest film directors of all time. He described a scene in Werner Herzog’s latest film, where an upside down image of a waterfall is seen in a drop of rain clinging to a leaf. He loves all films by Akira Kurosawa, but “Ikuru holds a special place in my heart.”
When Werner gets real, his predilections range from the university that Kasua Sejima built in Lausanne, the Lemoine house in Bordeaux by Rem Koolhaas – there’s also a great video about it here, via Gizmodo - which he believes to have been a milestone at that time, and the pyramid of Cheops in Giza.
Given the environmental advantages to the Green Phosphor dome, I expected Werner to answer affirmatively when asked if he considered ecological issues when building virtually. I was mistaken. “I consider environmental issues in Real Life. We would have to stop using computers and the Internet if we were to consider environmental issues in Second Life,” he said.
Most of the people in his life - including his Real Life clients - think he’s wasting his time in Second Life, “but I believe there is a big future ahead for the 3D Internet.”
Certainly the Real Life company Green Phosphor thinks so. “We produce the leading tool for visualizing data within virtual worlds,” said Ben Lindquist, the company’s CEO. “While our tool works in Second Life, Sun's Wonderland, and soon in Forterra's OLIVE, we have only one headquarters - the virtual headquarters that Werner Kurosawa built for us in Second Life.”
In this video, Lindquist explains how the company is using patent-pending technology to implement a virtual laboratory that has the potential of reducing the time and cost spent on drug development by up to 50%.
“I met Ben Lindquist at Brooklyn is Watching. I saw him building his first Graphs there and found them intriguing. When Green Phosphor rented half of the sim and put a prefab house there, I proposed that I would make a unique workplace in exchange for knowledge and a steady place to experiment next to BiW,” explained Werner.
Lindquist seems pleased with the arrangement: “The space that Werner created for us makes me happy when I move around in it; its design is clean yet comfortable; curvy yet solid. He took into consideration how the water in Second Life interacts with surfaces; reflections play upon the virtual cement and the view out into the rest of the sim is always interesting, thanks to the phantom prim structure Werner created to rotate around the entire island.”
So successful, in my view, was Werner’s rendering of Green Phosphor’s look and brand in Second Life, that I asked him if he’d collaborated with the company’s advertising or PR agency to bring it about. “No, but Ben has a nice father, Mark Lindquist, a famous sculptor whom I sometimes meet in Second Life and we have a lot of fun!” replied Werner.
Werner Kurosawa
Still, the people in Werner’s Real Life have a hard time understanding what he finds so compelling about virtual worlds. “People aren’t used to navigating in 3D and run around like flatlanders. I have the same experience with my work in Real Life when the scale gets really big or something is out of the ordinary,” he mused.
And Werner has been known to work on a very grand scale.
In Second Life: Werner's Twisted Tetrahedron Tower - 3,500m high
In Real Life: Werner's Lightwall installation: 1,2 km across and 16km high. Photos courtesy of Werner Kurosawa
“They have difficulty grasping what is going on and it takes a long time for them to really see it. They aren’t used to flying around or even disconnecting what they are seeing from their bodies, especially when their view gets out of the XY plane. They get disoriented,” he continued.
Z Apartments at Saturn - Photos courtesy of Werner Kurosawa
Werner explained how, soon after he graduated, he created some installations with plans and models and televised video of those models. “While they couldn’t read the plans and most could not read the models, everyone accepted television as ”real” (which it wasn’t). Perspective drawings where read correctly even when they weren’t drawn right.”
He is primarily interested in perception and perspective: “You have to keep in mind that the view you see in Second Life is calculated as a projection on a 2D surface of a “3D” world based on the same perspective model that was once made 500 years ago with a steady horizon at 1.65m high seen with one static eye. And we know that it isn’t “reality” but until now our society and products are based on that. We have two eyes moving in a moving head on a moving body.”
Werner freely admits that he was disgusted with Second Life after one or two hours the day he rezzed back in January of 2007. Some of his students had recommended it saying that it would really be his thing. He explained: “It was ugly. It had a much lower resolution than the 3D game engines I had used a lot before to do performances. The first engine I hacked was Duke Nukem back in1993. You had to pay for everything, and most avatars didn’t make contact with each other and those who did weren’t interesting at all. I returned many months later and it was more the social community that kept me going and finally introduced it as a tool. I was using the Unreal Engine 3 at that time with a lot more possibilities for 3D rendering.”
Hyperbolic Space - Photos courtesy of Werner Kurosawa
“Then, by meeting some very interesting people from all over the globe, I found I had a reason to stay inside. People started to ask me to sell them things I had made, which was more trouble than it was worth, so I always give my creations away. To this day I haven’t spent a penny in SL. And when you are creative and curious, you can find enough tools to make things yourself or trade with others. I do try to script my own things. SL gave me the need to program, which is also a new evolution in architecture with all the generative architecture going on. I try to learn with a lot of trial and a lot of error, but I do a lot of copy and paste from existing pieces of code wandering on the net. I see it as a tool and my experience with programmers is that they can program but that doesn’t mean they have ideas on what to create.”
So what does Werner wish that he could do the most that he cannot? Turns out he’d like to fly in Real Life... just like he does in Second Life.
You can visit Green Phosphor by teleporting directly from here.
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A Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Commonly Used in this Blog
Cam - The act of zooming and panning one's viewer (camera)
FLART - Flat art in a 3D world (more often than not, imported Real Life paintings and still photography)
HUD (Heads-Up Display) - A visual display of preset options as part of the user interface (UI)
In-world - Being inside or "online" in a virtual world
IRL - In real life
Landmark (LM) - An "address" and shortcut that enables a Second Life® resident to teleport to another place
Linden - An employee of Linden Lab™, the company that owns Second Life®
Linden Lab (LL) - The company that owns Second Life®
Linden or $L - Currency in Second Life®
Mega prim - A very large and useful prim that is not endorsed by Linden Lab, and not scaleable
NPIRL - Not possible in real life
NPISL - Not possible in Second Life®
PIRL - Possible in real life
Prim or Primitive - A 3D object that is manipulated and used as a basic building and creation material
Rez - The action of creation in a virtual world; also the birthdate of an avatar/account
Sim - A simulator and virtual region hosted by a single server CPU
SLT (Second Life® Time) - Local time within Second Life®, which also happens to be Pacific Standard Time because Linden Lab is located in San Francisco, CA
TP or Teleport - Moving from one location to another in a virtual world
Windlight - Sky, water and atmospheric lighting effects in Second Life®
