A sculptural installation that has attained A State of Grace

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Glyph Graves' latest, largest and certainly most stirring installation had many births. Originally conceived in early spring of 2008, it didn't reach fruition due to his busy schedule and limited prim availability. Since that time, however, he has made a name for himself as a notable sculptor in Second Life®, and today marks the public opening of his Strangers Also Dance, the inaugural show at IBM's brand new art and architecture exhibition space, curated by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani (aka Andrew Sempere, Research Designer at IBM's Center for Social Software).

Glyph is an Australian biologist who's virtual self is best known for kinetic, mostly abstract alpha sculptures that emit musical notes and eerie-to-sweet sounds when triggered by an avatar's proximity, though he is increasingly working with partially inverted solid-textured sculpts.

I've been a fan of Glyph's work for some time now and frequently feature his work on my own sim. This winter I happened upon this video by Todd Vanderlin and shared it with him as it reminded me of the behavior of several of his undulating sculptures and their responsiveness to avatars.

Scary Vines from vanderlin on Vimeo.

Glyph has since incorporated this thinking and included it in his reactive reeds. I mention this because he is an artist that is unusually receptive to new ideas and, like his sculptural work, acknowledges and rapidly evolves with his environment. This isn't to say that he is malleable or excessively adaptive. Rather, he is acutely aware and sensitive to exploration.

Strangers Also Dance is a remarkably immersive installation based on a poignant story that conjoins our Second Life universe with an alternate reality sweetly suffered by jellyfish that ventured too far from their warm gas giant home, becoming displaced in an environment that they find difficult but make the best of.

Importantly, Glyph approached the design of this build and its narrative beginning with its climatic circumstances. The Second Life ground upon which the adventure begins is suitable for humans (aka avatars) but too cold for these extra-SLterrestials and plants. Even so, the landscape is other-wordly. Obeying the laws of natural selection, a delicate pink creature was unable to keep up with its peers and has crystallized, laying dormant until it is visited, and touched, and therefore warmed by the avatar's body.





The avatar is enveloped by the creature, which begins to whisper to its guest:

Freed Alien Jelly: Nothing that will hurt you little one. Your warmth has freed me from the cold down here. Let me show you something few have ever seen... rest now. In your sleep, strange fragments of dreams of swimming in strange clouds come unbidden. Suddenly you feel disturbed as the hard crystalline surface you rested on melts away, then comforted by a sense of gentle enfolding and warm gratitude.

Delicately, a luminous jellyfish breaks free from the crystal, enclosing the avatar and floating upwards, all the while reassuring its capture that it will be gentle until...



... finally, almost tenderly, it deposits its human prize somewhere new, somewhere quite different, on a strange and wonderfully tropical terrain.



Sit on one of the immense tubes and you are one with this new matrix, downloading information as quickly as the creatures can share it.

The time was a memory past
through banded clouds
over hot seas
we swam

then later,

of cold stars and eternal night
we arrived,
we stayed too long
we could not go back

Released, you begin to explore, learning as you go about their sorrowful plight which they seem to accept with enormous grace. As I listened and absorbed their story, I couldn't help but admire their forbearance. My empathy grew.


"Do you want to know how we felt?" asks Biocrystal darkness. "When we first left the cradle of our world? Remember, our home, always bathed in warm clouds, always immersed in soft light. (Silence) Then dark. (Silence) What light there was, sharp like thorns and cold. (Silence) Enter. And feel."

Technically, there are a number of hallmarks: All sounds throughout the installation are played note by note. The speakers (the green plants) are designed to produce a spatial sense by cascading the notes down prim by prim as well as having them arranged around the sphere. A stereo effect is created by splitting the stereo track into mono components and playing them in opposite prims, which is also swirled by playing the pairs in consecutive prims.

Glyph's cellular automata react to both the avatar touching them and to the state of each of their local neighbors. After they've been touched, the music begins to self-propagate in a repeating pattern, which is different each time.

Since 2006, IBM has played an active role in empowering Second Life content creators with the IBM 6 sandbox which recently doubled in size and is open to all residents on the grid, whether they work for IBM or not. PatriciaAnne Daviau, its manager, has done an admirable job of maintaining a lively and active community there, though I can't help wishing that they didn't force teleports to one central location. It makes it very difficult to share works-in-progress with others who must then go by the coordinates to find their way.

Thanks to Jessica Qin's (aka Craig Becker, CIO Office of Strategic Initiatives) initiative and drive, IBM has moved to advance its presence with the content creation community, and particularly fans of art and architecture, with the launch of the new two-sim IBM Exhibition Space.

Teleport directly from here.

Mechanoid Biology and Almacan

Posted by Alpha Auer

Japanese artist Kazuhiko Nakamura, aka. Almacan, displays his extraordinary paintings created with Photoshop and the 3D software "Shade" at the Mechanical Mirage Art Gallery. It may be that what Almacan presents us with strangely coincides with my current obsession with the biological in artwork, but I am utterly bowled over with Almacan...


Monorogue

Writing on his painting "Metamorphosis", Almacan says that he became engrossed in the 3D rendering of the worlds depicted in 16th century’s painter Archimboldo’s pictures. "His pictures were expressed with illusionism, a technique in which human faces are drawn by the combination of various objects. I began to want to create on a new illusionism by adopting a motif he had not used, by seeking an original image. I envisaged the scenes from the novel “The Metamorphosis“ by Kafka, which I’d read when I was 16 years old. Even now I have a distinct memory of its absurd story in which a human creature is transformed into an insect.I thought that this story’s theme would match Archimboldo’s painting style. This work is a fusion of the two worlds produced by Archimboldo and Kafka, and homage to them.

First I looked for insects in photo books and the Internet, with the intention of forming a human face from them. I became confused by the astonishing configurations of insects and the diverseness of their textures, and was not able to summarize my image successfully. However, the theme of this work is not realism, but illusionism. I changed my way of thinking and consequently chose to design an original insect based on human face parts. Next, I mixed this imaginary insect with a real one, with the purpose of adding vagueness to the border between reality and fantasy."

Almacan seems to confine his interest in biology/entomology to this one painting, "Metamorphosis" alone; saying that his primary interests are surrealism, cyberpunk, 19th century machine designs and armor. However, I see his obsession related to biology in almost all of the work presented on his website. A minute examination of biological form is translated into a hybrid visual language utilized in the creation of some truly bizarre mechanoid/biological systems which transform themselves into a human representation, a portrait.


Shell in the Darkness


Glasshead

In his 1996 book Abstracting Craft, Malcolm McCullough discusses the emergence of a new kind of craft centered within the computer environment, thanks to which "after two centuries of separation the conception and execution of (everyday) objects are once again in the same hands". I am an artist/designer working solely in the digital realm but who received her formal training during the pre-computer era. So, I have inevitably given much thought to digital craft and how it differentiates itself from its analog counterpart. Computer generated imagery, the computer image work for me has many correlations with subconscious processes, with collage and assemblage in the sense that the early surrealists used them. In fact, now that I am thinking about it I even wrote a paper which I subsequently turned into an illustrated flip book: While many who regard the computer as yet another "tool", will definitely not agree with me on this, I assert that the computer as an environment has fundamentally affected how we conceptualize as well as implement creative output. It is the utter freedom of the unlimited choices and sub-choices, the unlimited undo's, the unlimited combinations and iterations from the initial piece, all achieved within hours, if not indeed minutes, which for me bring about a profusion of ideas and combinations of ideas which is simply do not recall having had in the bad old days of pen and paper.

And Almacan's amazing paintings are making me consider this all over again...

Yes, of course the likes of Archimboldo created bewilderingly complex portraits, and Vanitas paintings. But, is there not something else going on here regardless of these precedents? A freedom of combination not to so easily to be found in the analog realm? A freedom from the very fear of error? Culminating in the visualization of the strangest fantasies? And yes, I also know that when in the wrong hands, computer generated painting can bring about the most horrifyingly trite and facile results. But, in the hands of Almacan, this for me is the pure magic of the subconscious mind set free through pixels.
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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.