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.

Doomed in the Skies: INSILICO

Posted by Alpha Auer ;-)

The creator of INSILICO, Skills Hak tells us that: "... this is a dark, futuristic metropolis; slowly floating several thousand meters high above the clouds. One of many cities, serving as the last of airborne asylums for the small extant human population since the earth has been flooded. Each of them is connected to its own reactor farm on the bottom of the sea. Water gets split into oxygen and hydrogen using solar energy and is then converted back into energy and water up in the city. Furthermore, there are giant solar panels in the earth's orbit, blocking the sunlight. (And I do hope this all makes sense.. I'm still working on it... :)



Surrounded by huge megaprim skyscrapers the citizens fight against the smog, new kinds of viruses and high tech-tech-packed gang members. Crime rate is high and several security groups and affiliated concerns in the weapon industry went corrupt. There are many kinds of new cyber crimes and terror..."

The city, rezzed 3600 meters in the skies of Second Life®, is startling. Not that I have not seen my share of cyberpunk sims before. Indeed I have. My favorite used to be Nexus Prime, by Ready Jack from the Tyrell Corporation, in its heyday. The thing that made Nexus Prime special was, of course, the usage of vertical space as spatial metaphor, where due to the many phantom sidewalks you could not help falling down to your doom through progressive levels of urban poverty and decay until you ended up in the very bowels, the sewers of the city. Skills Hak, achieves narrative not through a single spatial metaphor as was the case with Nexus Prime but rather through a carefully orchestrated range of visual and audio elements, that converge to create an extraordinary feeling of the very concept of "city" - of urban density, of doom, of pollution, of claustrophobia - and yet you want to stay and become involved - so powerful is the pull of INSILICO.




Mermaids as Service Bots, in the underwater themed luxurious 7 Seas Restaurant (above, photograph courtesy of Skills Hak), a view of the city skyline foregrounded by the neon sign of the 7 Seas Restaurant (below).

And indeed the city is teeming with life: Shops doing brisk business fill the central mall, green dots on the map abound. Not to mention the Blue Ant Bar which, Skills told me, is the place to meet the glitterati of Second Life today.

"The sim started as a little store for my own products, an abstract futuristic build in a huge, bright white, seemingly endless room, insipired by movies such as "Nothing" or "Matrix". Pieces of that still exist today and are part of the city - concealed inside the cureent textured and dark design system.


The Early days of Insilico. Photograph courtesy of Skills Hak.

Soon I started building and renting out some more shops for friends and made places to socialize such as the blue ant bar, which started as just a sofa on a platform. I just kept adding prims here and there and soon it began to feel like a naturally grown city. Although I started out with the minimalistic approach in time I decided to make the content as realistic as possible. Thus, a dense atmosphere was created by adding air traffic, a rich sound scenery, huge video screens and maintenance bots working on buildings.

I built INSILICO the way I see a city of the future. I would have made it in far more realistic proportions if I could have done so, bigger and also much higher... So high, in fact, that you would not be able to see the end, but that sadly doesn't work with Second Life's prim counts and drawing distance limits."

The two sims are inside huge megaprims, blocking the sunlight and creating a horizon out of giant buildings in a ring around the actual city so that the overall effect is a footprint of 16 sims. I was quite surprised when Skills wrote that the city had evolved in an emergent manner, with no prior planning as such. Indeed I felt that I had to double check on this, so I asked her again during a conversation in-world: The city seems to have evolved quite symmetrically despite its emergence, clustering around the long and narrow, multilevel commercial center, bringing in mind yet another symmetrically emergent construct, the Topkapi Palace in my home town; on which I actually conducted some research a while ago.




The Fight Club: A converted Buddhist Temple...


"Breathe"... A subtle Red Cross signifies the importance of this pagoda filled with sickly strange greenery...

Skills Hak is a mistress of the narrative: The usage of metaphor in the Buddhist Temple converted into a Fight Club, as well as in the "Breathe" facility, filled to choking with green but nonetheless somehow sickly looking foliage manages to convey a level of desperation and clamoring for survival that simply had me breathless with anxiety. Small wonder this, since Ms. Hak is in fact a successful Graphic Designer in Real Life who describes her design practice as follows:

"My Real Life design practice does affect my in-world design, since I have the same feelings about quality, efficiency and functionality and a love for detail in both places. But only in Second Life I can combine all of my strong points, which is basically my experience in diverse fields such as audio production, graphic design, programming and so on.




Ms. Hak's expertise as a Graphic Designer makes itself felt in details such as these video screens throughout the sim.

It is hard finding interesting projects in Real Life where I can play all of those cards and if I can't, I tend to get bored very quickly and it all ends up being just work - and not fun any more. I enjoy working on high end flash websites with all of their aspects of multimedia, but also on hardcore Graphic Design projects, such as logo design and corporate identities for interesting brands."

Insilico, which was rezzed in May of 2008 and built within a matter of weeks, can be visited by teleporting directly from here. More information on the doomed city can be obtained from the dedicated blog, http://insilico.ning.com/ and more images of Insilico can be seen on the Insilico Flickr Group page, to which I shall be adding my own meagre bunch in due course as well.