Bryn Oh: Vessel's Dream - Sneak peek

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."


Bryn Oh, as captured by Bryn Oh

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:

• The Machine Poems and virtual sculpted storybook by Bryn Oh
• Attaining presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh
• Beautiful Mondays in the eyes of the Virtual Film Archive
• Bryn Oh chronicles the fall of the angels: A story in prims
• Crap Mariner's marathon video session: 31 videos in one day: Bryn Oh's steampunk alphabet
• Self-hypnosis and Bryn Oh's Steamgarden

The Machine Poems and (virtual) sculpted storybook by Bryn Oh

Posted by Bettina Tizzy
Poetry by Bryn Oh
Photography by Dil Spitz "DilSpi" - ©All rights reserved

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







Teleport to Rabbicorn directly from here.

Here are just some of the blogposts we've done about Bryn and her work in Second Life:

• Attaining presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh
• Beautiful Mondays in the eyes of the Virtual Film Archive
• Bryn Oh chronicles the fall of the angels: A story in prims
• Crap Mariner's marathon video session: 31 videos in one day: Bryn Oh's steampunk alphabet
• Self-hypnosis and Bryn Oh's Steamgarden

The apogee of fandom: Kevlar Keen breathes life into Bryn Oh's art

Posted by Bettina Tizzy


Kevlar poses for me at Immersiva

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.

Attaining Presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh

Posted by Alpha Auer

4Jetpacks4 was an immersive installation created by Bryn Oh, with the participation of Glyph Graves and Nonnatus Korhonen earlier this year. I was privileged to be one of the group of avatars that were given the tour of the research centre back on March the 6th. I will not talk here about what 4jetpacks was all about. The extraordinary video by Evo Szuyuan above does that far better than I ever could. What I will attempt to do instead is to talk about "immersion" and "presence" as integral parts of virtual world creativity. I know from personal conversations we have had that this is a subject as dear to Bryn Oh's heart as it is to mine, the thing which she puts at the center of her (virtual) creative activity.

I will quote a bit from scientific sources while I try to set up a basic definition of "presence", as a sense of “being there” in a mediated environment (IJsselsteijn, deRidder, Freeman and Avons, 2000). Lombard and Ditton (1997) define it as an illusion of non-mediation in which a user no longer perceives the display medium as a separate entity. A high level of presence will help users remember a virtual environment as more of “a place visited”, rather than “a place seen” (Slater et al., 1999). A success indicator of the attainment of presence is also considered to be the realization of similar behavior patterns in virtual environments to those in the physical realm (Slater and Wilbur, 1997), and even the manifestation of similar physiological responses towards a given event to its approximation in the physical realm (Meehan, 2000).

Various definitions of the term “presence” and their relevance to the immersive virtual experience are discussed by Mantovani and Riva who challenge the notion that experiencing a simulated environment deals with the mere perception of its objective features; instead proclaiming that presence in an environment (real or simulated) means that individuals can perceive themselves, objects, as well as others not only as situated in an external space but as immersed in a socio-cultural web connected through interactions between objects and people, leading us to the paramount importance of the interacting agent within a virtual culture, i.e., the avatar.

And this to me, lies at the very heart of the problem where artistic activity in a virtual world such as Second Life® is involved. Is the goal to be sought the "perception of objects" only? Or could it be that what would set artistic activity in a virtual world as a genre apart, would involve conditions wherein "individuals perceive themselves, objects, as well as others not only as situated in an external space but as immersed in a socio-cultural web connected through interactions between objects and people"? For me, without the shadow of any doubt, it is the latter. And it seems to me that this definition is what 4jetpacks is/was all about as well: That the creation of an immersive experience was the primary intention became obvious to me during Bryn Oh's opening statement where she addressed the importance of "presence" in virtual art. In her terminology the word "presence" is interchanged with "immersion", which does of course add up to very much the same thing. "Viewing" art, i.e., "the mere perception of its objective features" does not seem to overly interest Bryn Oh, and I am so very heartened to observe this in a fellow content creator, and one for whom I have a great deal of respect at that.

Bryn Oh is an exquisite builder. Every texture, every prim, every shape and object placed in perfect proximity, culminating in visual systems that I am awed by over and over again. And a very good thing that this is so: The immersive experience needs that level of concern for perfection to be pulled off with credibility. Creating an immersive experience does not imply that one can get away with shoddy visuality. If anything, it would imply the exact opposite: For us to become fully "present" within the "artwork" involves a level of visual expertise on behalf of the artist whereby perfect cohesion and gestalt are achieved to the extent at which not even a tiny component of the installation appears out of sync, thus distracting us from the immersive experience through its ineptitude or its misplacement within the overall system. Whether the visual gestalt that is meant to bring about "presence" involves high levels of abstraction or realism, opulence or stark minimalism would not be the issue at all by the way: I would seriously doubt whether one would need minutely detailed craftsmanship emulating realism to attain a state of presence. But, I would dare to say that what one would need would be a continuity of visual language - which as any artist worth his or her salt knows is a devil of a thing to pull off.

However, presence needs more than visuality. It also needs narrative. It needs a story or a situation endowed with sufficient power and imagination to pull us in. "Presence in art" needs substantial planning. An observance of fine detail whilst maintaining a firm grip on the whole. In other words, not a thing to be pulled off in one afternoon. Amongst much else, it is visuality, performance, role play, cyberpsychology combined. Bryn Oh has whatever it takes...

In the end, for me, the attainment of "presence" is more than likely to be the thing which will eventually create a "genre" out of the currently rather haphazard conglomeration that is the state of art in virtual worlds today. It really does seem to me that art generated in virtual worlds needs to be contextualized within the broader framework of contemporary art, given a raison d'etre, a property unique onto itself - and the attainment of "presence in art" would be a not too easily imitated attribute of virtual world based artistic activity. 4jetpacks gave me huge hopes in this direction and I am very grateful to Bryn Oh for having given me just that - hope!

...

A video created by Bryn Oh on 4jetpacks ends this post:



Also please read the post by Hamlet Au on NWN talking to Evo Szuyuan about her utterly remarkable SL-video skills and all that is involved in the attainment of the perfect SL-video here.

Bryn Oh pokes fun at da boys

Artist Bryn Oh has discovered machinima, and we never know what she's going to do next!

Beautiful Mondays in the eyes of the Virtual Build Archive

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

If you read this blog with any regularity, I trust that you are already quite familiar with Bryn Oh's stunning sculptural and narrative work and especially her sim, Immersiva (teleport directly from here), as well as her Condos in Heaven installation, which I blogged about last year. Nevertheless, prepare to shine a new light on the subject.

This is the second video in what is to become a weekly documentary-style series produced by the Virtual Build Archive, a joint project of Gala Charron (Tamara Russell) and Lainy Voom (Trace Sanderson).

Condos in Heaven from The VBA on Vimeo.

Lainy shared with me yesterday that this is Gala Charron's first machinima in Second Life® (can you believe it?)! She explained, "The VBA started because we both love exploring Second Life and wanted to keep a visual record within some kind of framework. It will hopefully become a mix of regular builds and some art installations. It makes me sad when builds are no longer there. We want to create something permanent from something transient and (are) also trying to communicate something that is beautiful and inspiring, especially sometimes to non-Second Lifers who complain that there is nothing going on in Second Life and say that it is an ugly place!"

The pair's stated aim is to publish a new machinima every Monday "to document, through film and narrative, some of the most beautiful builds within the virtual world of Second Life. We hope, over time, to build the site from a small acorn into quite an extensive catalogue of in-world created content. Both Gala and Lainy will take it in turns to create a video of an inspiring build and present it on the archive site."

Mondays just got a little brighter...

Wizard Gynoid: "I think it's important. I have an intuition about it"

Posted by Bettina Tizzy


Could this be the shape of our universe?

This is a favorite blogpost of mine by Hamlet Au of New World Notes in which he describes the October 2008 unveiling of a virtual E8 Polytope created by Wizard Gynoid with the guidance of renown physicist Garrett Lisi (and sometimes Second Life® avatar, Garrett Netizen).

Today, Bryn Oh teleported me to see what Wizard calls "the best representation of my previous work. The previous E8 Polytopes were like sketches of this." The new mathematical structure consists of 6,672 prims that were generated via script by Wizard with the assistance of Desdemona Enfield. "Desde's giving me a crash course in quantum physics," laughed Wizard, but those of us who know them both realize that this is exactly what is happening.

In Lisi's seminal work from which these mathematical virtual creations stem, "Theory of Everything," the E8 Polytope may at last reveal the link between gravity and the other fundamental forces of nature.

"It has all 240 vertices and if you look straight down from the top, the zenith downwards, you will see a hole through the middle. If it were flattened, it would form the perfect spirograph," Wizard explained.

Here is a TED talk recorded in February, 2008, in which Lisi unenviably attempts to get us up to speed on his unified field theory in just 18 minutes.



I wondered outloud if there is a benefit to realizing an E8 in-world. If it can be realized in CAD, then isn't that enough? Why here? Why now? "This is going to sound paradoxical, but somehow it's more real here. You can almost reach out and touch it. You fly around it and bonk into it," she replied.

Wizard was unaware of any Real Life reconstructions of the E8, and believes that it would be a hugely expensive proposition to try to construct the same sculpture in Real Life. Indeed. Faster, cheaper, easier to create in a virtual environment, and people from all over the world can visit it and share it simultaneously from the comfort of their own homes.

Had Dr. Lisi been involved in some way with the creation of this newest model? "He kept giving me hints and guidance," said Wizard. Did she mean the he wanted her to figure it out herself? She believes so. "I think of him as a mentor or teacher."

Wizard's parting words to me this afternoon about this work brought it all home: "I think it's important. I have an intuition about it."

I like to think that she is right.

This latest E8 is due to disappear any moment, along with the sim it is sitting on. If you hurry, you might still catch it by teleporting directly from here.

Bryn Oh's abandoned robot theme park - Tomorrow's featured NPIRL-Koinup Safari

by Bettina Tizzy

Tomorrow, January 10th at 11:00am SLT, and awaiting on the other side of your teleport (directly from here) will be Bryn Oh. For an hour, this talented content creator will give an intimate and informative tour of one of the most photogenic sims on the grid: Immersiva. I've had the experience, and I guarantee that you will never look at Bryn's work the same.

A few weeks ago, Dusan Writer - the coolest businessman in SL, and yes! He is the same man who acquired and created a home for Eshi Otawara's Flower Tower - underscored his role as an arts benefactor by giving Bryn Oh her very own sim to do with it what she wished. Imagine Bryn with the abilty to create her own ground textures... her very own world.


Bryn Oh and Mr. Lightbulb

Immersiva is emerging as one of the truly great sims on the grid. Before you go, you really, really should add Bryn's Windlight preset and all its blue-ish atmosphere. You can download it and get installation instructions here (it's easy!) or set it up manually:


Immersiva Sky Windlight setting by Bryn Oh:

Go to World at top left of your screen. In the drop down menu at the bottom pick environment settings and then environment editor. Click on Advanced Sky. Then click the button "new".

If you are using a Mac, go to your Applications folder, right-click "Second Life WindLight", select "Show Package Contents", then open Contents > Resources > app_settings > Windlight

Under Atmosphere

Blue horizon R=0.24 G=0.43 B=0.50 I=0.50
Haze Horizon=0.65
Blue Density R=0.08 G=0.21 B=0.39 I=0.39
Haze Density=4.0
Density Multiplier=0.36
Distance Multiplier=11.6
Max Altitude=586

Under Lighting

Sun/moon colour is all set to 0.18
Sun/moon position is 0.25
Ambient is all set to 0.11
East Angle is 0
Sun Glow focus 0.1 size 1.81
Scene Gamma is 1
Star B is 0

Under Clouds tab

Cloud Color is all 0.7
Cloud Density x and y is 0.5 and D is 0.54
Cloud coverage is 0.5
Cloud scale is 0.53
Cloud detail x and y is 0.5 and D is 0.12
Cloud scroll x is 1.45
Cloud scroll Y is .01

Now give this preset a name, such as "Immersiva" and save it. Voila! You are ready.


Bryn's "Ferrisquito" in the background...

Immersiva has its own page on Koinup, which you will find here.



Once a month, NPIRL and Koinup - an inclusive social networking site for all Virtual Worlds that permits storage and sharing of imagery: photography, Machinima, and "storyboards" - are offering the NPIRL Safaris - with many of Second Life's best content creators, exposing the participants to new sims, new content, and new ideas that are leaving the old world behind and breaching the future.



Among the Virtual Worlds you'll find images of on Koinup: Second Life®, World of Warcraft, Lively, The Sims, IMVU, vSide, Kaneva, There, and more.

The Not Possible IRL (NPIRL) and Impossible IRL (ImpIRL) groups are dedicated to identifying and sharing well conceived and realized content creation in Virtual Worlds which would not be possible in Real Life: architecture, landscaping, art, animations, fashion, particle effects, building tools and scripts... show me, I'll show you.

Bryn Oh ruminates: Who are our favorite Second Life "characters?"

She's no stranger to these pages, and she hasn't touched the tarmac even once since she set flight as a content creator, leaving us enchanted time and again with her steampunk imaginings and sculptural story-telling. Now Bryn Oh has begun her own blog, and in one of her inaugural posts she lists some of her favorite characters in Second Life®.

Oh boy... *rubs palms together and grins.* Bryn, to your great list I would add these names, which I jotted down in under two minutes. In no particular order...

Gazira Babeli
Tooter Claxton
Truthseeker Young
Orhalla Zander
Arcadia Asylum
Molotov Alva
Blaccard Burks
Hamlet Au
Andrek Lowell
Ordinal Malaprop
Komuso Tokugawa
Tuna Oddfellow
Flea Bussy
Chance Abattoir
Naxos Loon
Spiral Walcher
Adam Ramona
Sabine Stonebender
thomtrance Otoole
(of course, this list is quite, quite incomplete)

What do all these people have in common? One look at them makes me smile. Their avatar is instantly recognizable. They rarely change much (though Flea is certainly an exception to this rule and Tooter's not far behind). Tooter, we miss you! Hurry home! And yes, they are all certifiable characters in Second Life.

And Bryn, welcome to the madcap world of blogging! Here are some interesting stats about blogging in the U.S...

According to Blog World Expo:

- Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
- More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
- Over 57 million Americans read blogs.
- 1.7 million American adults list "making money" as one of the reasons they blog.
- 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
- 9% of Internet users say they have created blogs.
- 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog.
- Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs.
- Over 120 thousand blogs are created every day.
- There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
- 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs.
- 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006.
- 51% of blog readers shop online.
- Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.

Now, get thee over to Bryn's blog and let her know who you think the greatest characters are in your Second Life!

Bryn Oh chronicles the fall of the angels: A story in prims

It is hardly surprising that Toronto artist and painter Bryn Oh’s installation at Second Life®'s answer to Burning Man, Burning Life 2008 which opens on September 27, has many steampunk features, or that it includes dozens of humming robotic insects, for these are acknowledged and signature elements that we have come to expect in her work.

What I hadn’t anticipated were the delicate, intricate details… the lightness that she has given steampunk overall, and I certainly had not expected a story, or one as sad as this artwork conveys.


Better quality viewing is available here

Art: Bryn Oh
Music: Arcadia and Tiny Fuge by Kevin MacLeod
Machinima: Bettina Tizzy

Bryn’s most recent installation at arcspace, the Gashlycrumb Tinies, has already appeared in the hardcover book Bryn Oh and the Tinies by Aiko Aichi and Ritva Nybacka.



What follows are excerpts of a conversation I had with Bryn a couple of days ago.

How long did it take you to create this, and how is it different from previous works?
Bryn Oh: I have been here for about a month. Kind of lonely really, but for me the main difference is the finished piece. I am really happy with it.

Are you going blind? All this tiny prim work! How many prims is this all told and how tired have you been?
Bryn Oh: Very. It’s been a nightmare. This is about 2,000 prims. No rotating textures, just tiny rotating prims. It is shown for one week only :) I hope the music plays okay.

Condos in Heaven is based on a poem she authored for this project. Before she got started, Bryn researched real angels from the Bible. Apocalyptic writings have explored the concept of fallen angels who succumbed to temptation or rebelled against God, and have therefore been exiled or banished from Heaven, but in Bryn’s scenario…


The bee at the heart of the captured angel

This has a new feel about it... more delicate, but also looks more real. It is the closest to real I've seen virtual steampunk get.
Bryn Oh: I was contemplating how angels would appear to us (in the future). Mystical gods… but would that change and would they become less mystical as we became more advanced technologically? They would (ultimately) allow us to conquer them. What would happen if mankind discovered a way to heaven; what would we do? For resources, we will destroy habitats, etc., and drive species to near extinction, but what would stop us? What are our boundaries? So I thought, perhaps, finding heaven would be. I am becoming more and more interested in the narrative, immersing one into a story in Second Life.

Bryn Oh: This is a store that sells accessories taken from the angels.

In fact, the store's “accessories” include the wings taken from Hadraniel, the guardian of the gates of heaven who is five stories tall and Cassiel, the angel of solitude and tears that appears in post-biblical Judeo-Christian mythology, and presides over the death of kings.


Gabriel's wings

Why ice? (Referring to the texturing of the building) Did the Playa have anything to do with your decision to use ice as well?
Bryn Oh: It is what mankind would build in heaven… their idea of what a structure should look like. It is faux ice. It is a way to glamorize the selling of chopped up angels and make it so people are not horrified.

Bryn Oh: I think of the angels as a kind of beekeeper with the human race as the bees but with the ability to sting. I am hoping that people will come in and sense that there is a story to figure out and piece things together. See the little boy and his father who are shopping? The angels have been defeated and their wings are removed and sold as accessories.

The shopkeeper's face... is that rust or blood stains or both? He also looks like a drone.
Bryn Oh: It is rust. I don’t like overt imagery like blood. They are all meant to be advanced but flawed. There is a secret room, of course. (Most of Bryn’s installations include one or more secret rooms). The gramophone plays, too.

There is the notion of artificial replacement... a futuristic selection of the species. You have put the beetles to work.
Bryn Oh: Steampunk insects are not cute, but edgy. The beetles are an idea that I have not put in words yet… a feeling, sort of. So let me try now. I think of them as something made by mankind and brought into heaven, kind of accidentally, much like a foreign bug comes into a country in a crate. They are a replacement to the bug that went extinct, to maintain the food chain. When something becomes extinct, it is replaced with something else to keep things working. The good pyramid. For example, if the fox became extinct, rabbits would overrun the countryside, causing problems for other layers of the food pyramid... so build a robotic fox - a steampunk one :) That is how I see the beetles. They came from earth to heaven accidentally. I think too much.

Do you hope that your virtual work might someday become much more of a full time thing?
Bryn Oh: I see Second Life as a possible new frontier. For example, when I paint in Real Life, I use large canvases to block out the peripheral vision and allow the viewer to come into the painting and become more immersed, but Second Life is absolutely immersive. It is being inside a painting.

Has your Second Life art influenced your Real Life work?
Bryn Oh: Originally, I brought Real Life ideas that didn’t work into Second Life. I guess that right now I have stopped bringing in Real Life ideas and am now exporting Second Life ideas to Real Life. It is reversing. This build, for example… could it be as effective as a painting in Real Life?


Love notes


The baby carriage: The baby’s eyes are watery earth orbs, and the infant holds a praying mantis - The Violinist, a tiny (and musical) robobug – as its toy. Gently floating just beyond the baby’s reach, is a robotic june bug

How does the baby tie into the story?
Bryn Oh: It is the wonderment that he has. Unaffected and still pure, but a product of an advancing human race.


The surgical procedure

The slurl for this installation will be posted on opening day of Burning Life 2008: September 27.

See also:
* Crap Mariner's marathon video session
* Edward Gorey's alphabet gets steampunk'd
* Self-hypnosis and Bryn Oh's "Steamgarden"

Crap Mariner's marathon video session - Thirty one videos in one day as his Angel of Death visits Bryn Oh's steampunk alphabet

Those of us who inhabit Second Life® are fortunate to count humorist Crap Mariner in our midst. If you follow his activities as I do, you will enjoy an ongoing, hardly perfect, but always off-beat chronicle of his adventures and reviews of the people and places he encounters. He is also one of the most prolific machinimators on the grid... case in point, yesterday he produced 31 (THIRTY ONE!) videos centered around the 26 letters in the alphabet featured in Bryn Oh's Gashlycrumb Tinies (by Edward Gorey) exhibit at arcspace (teleport directly from here). One video for each of the letters, two introductions, an interlude, a finale, and a gimme take on one of Bryn's steampunk bugs. For the series, he elected to appear as a cigar-smoking Angel of Death who won't apologize to the Tinies for his second-hand smoke.

All of his videos open with "Another stupid video by Crap Mariner," and nearly always include his signature phrase, "that's disgusting."





Photograph of Crap Mariner by... Crap Mariner!

Edward Gorey's alphabet gets Steampunk'd

A few weeks ago, architect and publisher KK Jewell (aka Kirsten Kiser) and her arcspace were in the middle of sponsoring an international competition within Second Life® for the design of an eco-friendly community, together with ecolandnow.com, and in collaboration with the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR). Then the May 12 Sichuan earthquake in China struck, killing over 69,000 people and forcing the re-prioritization of resources and time for millions.

While there will be a greater need than ever before for the bamboo structures that the competition is striving to foster, the project is on hold now until China can come to grips with its situation. KK began looking for a good project to take on in the meantime.

Not too long before that, I kept finding five or six extraordinary shadow boxes at a time by Bryn Oh at the IBM and Rezzable sandboxes, featuring her take on Edward Gorey's alphabet, or as it is officially known: The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

These rhyming and macabre couplets, accompanied by outrageous - and hilarious - illustrations of children being killed in a myriad of ways (as many as there are letters in the alphabet) were seriously controversial at the time of their publication, but children the world over clamor for Gorey's works today.


H is for Hector done in by a thug

Amy Benfer at Salon.com aptly described Gorey in a spicey and fun-to-read article, saying, "no one sheds light on darkness from quite the same perspective as this Cape Cod specialist in morbid, fine-lined jocularity."


M is for Maud who was swept out to sea

But now we have Bryn to make us grin sheepishly over such notions as "L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks," rendered in her signature Steampunk style, and thanks to KK Jewell and arcspace, we can see all twenty-six of the shadowboxes rezzed together in one place at an arcspace show that opened today. And what an assembly it is!


This clever spiral layout combines terraforming with train tracks, and yes, I am still playing with Torley's Windlight presets (they are addictive!)

Says Bryn, a professional oil-painter from Toronto, Canada, "Its actually quite fun to try and create a sound compostion in a 3D environment where everything can be viewed from every angle. How to lead the viewer around the composition and how to discourage focus on certain areas are both challenges not found to the same degree in a relatively flat oil painting which is generally viewed from one angle."

Teleport directly from here.

Roald Dahl feast at Relay for Life

Combine two of our best loved stories for children (and grown-ups, too!) by Roald Dahl with some of Second Life's® most accomplished content creators, and you have magic.

Orchestrated by PatriciaAnne Daviau, two stories unfold: James and the Giant Peach, with little boy James, trees and a big juicy peach by brilliant 3D modeler Colin Fizgig, fantastical insects by Madcow Cosmos, Cloud Insoo's perfect seagulls, and LittleToe Bartlett's fanciful textures...




... and a Willy Wonka factory by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani, complete with a candy cane forest by PatriciaAnne Daviau, strange plants by Tezcatlipoca and robotic creatures by Bryn Oh.





There is so much to see and do this weekend at the Second Life® Relay for Life (RFL) event. More than 80 teams have come together to create an experience with the goal of raising $125,000 US.

Teleport directly from here.

Introducing Eln Alter

AM Radio wrote... "Look up Eln Alter. Check out the house there. Wild." Of course, I did.

Every now and then, a fresh and strikingly original creator hits our radar, so rich with possibilities! Such was the case of Bryn Oh and four Yip, and they certainly haven't disappointed. Notably, Eln rezzed on 11/1/2007. Such work and concepts are unexpected from someone so new to the grid.


Eln, wearing one of her avatars

Her little house serves as a shop. I'm particularly fond of the stilts that it sits on.





Inside, more whimsical items, many of them for sale.



On the ground beneath the house, Eln has also created a "museum," though she hasn't yet decided what it is about. Her vases there are indicative of an intriguing tangent I hope she'll continue to evolve.



Teleport to Eln's shop from here.
Teleport to Eln's Museum from here.

Garden freebies to die for... and yes, you have to go to heaven or hell for 'em

UPDATE - June 24, 2008: The Garden of NPIRL Delights has closed. Thanks to everyone who created it and to those who visited it, and special thanks to RightasRain Rimbaud and his team at Rezzable Productions for sponsoring it.

The Garden of NPIRL Delights will end on June 23rd, and several of the very gifted content creators have decided that their work should not disappear. Just look at what they are giving away! Hurry hurry!


DB Bailey's Purgatorio (Take everything home!) - slurl
Photograph by Ka Rasmuson


Eladrienne Laval & Kheph777 Enoch's Tower of Industrial Judgement (Steampunk Bosch Wings) - slurl
Photograph by Alpha Auer


Tezcatlipoca Bisiani's Laberinto de Mictlan (You get the prize - the puzzle box and the postcard!) - slurl


Bryn Oh's Steamgarden (Several items from her build! If you put the structure on your land, send her an IM and she will come and place the beetle and the carousel on it) - slurl


four Yip's Elevator Angels (everything! - touch the panels at the entrance to choose) - slurl
Photograph by Azwaldo Villota


Alpha Auer's The NPIRL Garden of Delights Public Baths- (Her monochromatic and health-inducing jellyfish!) slurl


Madcow Cosmos' Heterotroph (avatars) - slurl


Yoa Ogee's Happy Humans! (avatars) - slurl


Yeti Bing's Perfect Universal Companionship (avatar) - slurl
This video by Crap Mariner


Gore Suntzu's "Tame a Thorn" sculpture : (This beauty could be yours!) - slurl

Self-hypnosis and Bryn Oh's "Steamgarden"

The moment I saw this video, I thought of Bryn Oh and her clockwork sculptures. The next moment, I found myself gazing in a semi-hypnotic state. And the next moment, I thought surely I had self-hypnotized myself. Having trouble getting to sleep? Want to command yourself to do something you've been procrastinating on? Watch this!


As seen on Gizmodo via Brad Litwin via Boing Boing

But back to Bryn... Her "Steamgarden" installation at the Garden of NPIRL Delights (teleport directly from here), is inspired by the third panel of the triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Bosch - depicting Hell - and represents her view on the industrial dehumanization of society. As Bryn put it, "the intention was to create a mood of disquiet and anxiety mixed with elements of beauty."

In Real Life, Bryn is a professional oil painter living in Toronto, Canada.

In Second Life®, she has already made quite a name for herself, exhibiting her thoughtful creations throughout the grid. Her work still shows up (and delights the finders) in sandboxes, but you can see her current installations at the Museum of Natural History (teleport directly from here), the Swedish Resource Centre, Primtings (teleport directly from here), The Great Exhibition, SLMoCA (teleport directly from here), and of course, the Garden of NPIRL Delights.

She is also a resident artist at Caerleon Island (teleport directly from here), an important artist collective featuring the works of many other artists I admire, in addition to several of Bryn's important pieces and a fantastic underground installation she created.

Just look at the detail on the plaque of clockwork sculpture. The tiny bug is animated!



The "motor" of the clockwork piece is fired by the hard work of several insects.



Inside, a music box... You can open and close the wings.


Overview of Bryn Oh's "Steamgarden"