Many thanks to Qarl Linden who - in comments to my previous post regarding the 2nd anniversary of the Big Prim Problem - suggested that Linden Lab might compromise and consider making scalable megaprims available on Estate land. To that end, I asked my JIRA-savvy friend Dirk Talamasca to create such a proposal for us, thereby enabling everyone to have their say on this potential new feature... and HERE it is. Please go vote!
To vote on a JIRA issue, log in with your first and last Second Life names, enter your Second Life password - don't worry, the JIRA belongs to Second Life - and then look in the left hand column for voting options.
Second Life® artist and creator AM Radio thinks that this aerial image of Venice looks astonishingly like an average parcel rental island, and we agree.
By the way, if you haven't already, you may want to drop by AM's Flickr stream and check out the sketches he's been posting. Seeing them helps me to understand how he's "fathered" the Far Away, Husk, the Refuge and the Expansion, and Beneath the Tree that Died, among other installations.
In the beginning, there was landscape art. It is believed that it had its debut in Çatalhöyük, Southern Turkey about 10,000 years ago with this image of an erupting volcano…
…and then worked its way over the millenniums onto the prized walls of galleries, museums, and the homes of the fortunate few.
That was the status quo until…
The late 1960’s
In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.00. The National Debt was $286 Billion. The life expectancy for males was 66.6 years and emergency living quarters had to be set up in hotels and trailer camps for the estimated 850,000 boomers entering college.
The counter-culture seeded by the opposition to the Vietnam War and led by baby-boomer Berkeley radicals in VW buses and Black Panthers with raised fists and Timothy Leary fueled by an odd combination of higher education and psychedelics and braless women using the pill and hippies with their noses buried in the Whole Earth Catalog and a rock movement that changed music forever…
… ushered in a growing and surprisingly organized attack on the “system.” Any system. Defiance was the norm and damn the conventions.
By now you are asking yourself… where is she going with all this and how could it possibly be related to art in virtual worlds? It is imperative that I share this background with you to put things in context, for even in Second Life we cannot ignore the fact that we are influenced by all that has preceded us.
Art felt the impact of those socio-political conditions in a very, very big way
Back in the late 60’s, a handful of American artists in their 20s rebelled against the very idea of representing landscapes, electing instead to work directly with them (think Gaia Hypothesis). Moreover, they washed their hands of the confines of the gallery space and even the Capitalistic notion of selling their art, and began to alter the shapes of deserts and mountains by moving massive quantities of earth, rock and vegetation on a grand scale to make the environment their studio.
This is not an enterprise to be taken lightly. Generally speaking, it is costly, lonely work that takes a long, long time to do. It helped that a number of foundations were beginning to seriously fund art and willing to back up these “visionaries.” And then there were all those vast expanses of land in states like Nevada and Utah and Texas - seemingly inexhaustible reserves at the time - with all kinds of geological seductions already built in, not to mention alluringly cheap land prices.
How large? Let’s just say that sometimes this Land Art or Earth Art is so colossal that it isn’t apparent to the casual observer on the ground, and then it is often referred to as Aerial Art.
In 1970, Robert Smithson created the 1,500 foot long Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, using mud, rocks and salt crystal. Because of the tides, it is not always visible.
Consider Michael Heizer who has been working on his “City” installation in the Nevada desert for over 35 years and doesn’t expect to finish for another 8 years. See the New York Times’2005 audio slide show (refer to the side bar) of Heizer’s work-in-progress, and another story on his Double Negative project.
The Roden Crater finally got underway in 1979 when artist James Turrell was able to purchase a two-mile-wide crater in Arizona with grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dia Art Foundation and others, and begin redistributing tons of earth to give it shape. His story is well documented in this New York Times’ 2007 article.
The 400,000 year old Roden Crater is slated to open its doors to the public in 2011
While economies of scale in Land Art are paramount in Real Life, creating art on a very grand scale is nowhere near as problematic in virtual worlds. In Second Life® and on OpenSim grids, residents are magically empowered with land-altering – though quite indelicate - tools that enable them to instantly raise, lower, and sculpt the ground up to ± 100 meters, depending on the estate.
Terraforming, the ability to intentionally transform surface topography, atmosphere, temperature or ecology, is not unique to science fiction or even science (where it is primarily called planetary engineering).
In Second Life®, terraforming land is a skill that looks easy to do, but frequently results in unrealistic and poor duplicates of mountains, lakes and canyons. In this video tutorial by Second Life’s Resident Enlightenment Manager, Torley Linden instructs us on how to work the user interface to "terra":
Introducing Comet Morigi – A Terra Painter in Second Life
Japanese artist Comet Morigi became known to me when I came across one of her works quite by accident: an immense curtain-like particle effect that is driven by the sim’s wind (teleport directly from here).
To see all of Comet’s work to best effect, you must set your graphics preferences to render (see) the highest draw distance and particles, though do remember to lower them back afterwards as this decreases your system’s performance
Comet teleported me to see her newest particle work - a creation she'd been tweaking for two weeks - explaining that her idea was the visualization of a sim-wide wind stream, maxing out the wind map. The red squares indicate each point of the clouds' density. Its purpose: to research the wind stream in a sim.
I don’t often comment on human-like avatars, but Comet’s seemed almost Brazilian, sporting tan lines and a gold lamé dress and shoes, as well as a highly expressive talking animation that gestures as she types. This is unusual for Japanese-created avatars. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find any aspect of Comet and her avatar that didn't strike me as unusual when taking her in as a whole. But back to the art, and her comments...
Comet: In-world, everything is made of pictures. The ground and the sky, every creature, house, clothes, our bodies… everything. You terrain-edit as if you are painting with a brush on the ground. The in-world is NOT the opposite of Real Life but rather a type of Real Life. Why don't you say “OutWorld” instead of Real Life (RL)?
This OutWorld-InWorld notion preoccupies Comet considerably. My associates and I often refer to Real Life as "off-world" but that isn't what is at stake here. In Comet's view, the two "worlds" are distinguishable only as types of the Real reality.
Comet asks: "What is InSide/OutSide?"
Inside and looking out from Comet's Galleria OVERFOTO (teleport directly from here)
Comet: Here at OVERFOTO, I am working directly on the geological conformation of the natural-virtual environment, transfiguring its composition and changing its original morphological features through a land-art operation that translates the same space - which normally hosts an exhibition - into a piece of art in all respects.
Treating nature as a raw material and the means for the creative process... the concept of manipulating terrain as a large scale three-dimensional sculptable object... these are ideas that Comet wears like a second skin. At another location, her composition features knobby, rugged land portruding through translucent planes.
Given that most Land Art works are site-specific and often ephemeral in nature, they cannot be marketed in traditional ways. The original work is seldom saleable, but derivates such as photographs and sketches are easier to share and duplicate. Comet has created these panels of previous works, which are available at her gallery/studio (teleport directly from here).
Patterns of land and water land forms look natural, but the relief map is abstraction.
Admirers of Comet's work are intense in their appreciation. Art collector Eddie Gotter has given her a sim to work with - Art Art - for example, and collects images of all her art. She is experimenting there now with mega flexi tubes and wind elements.
Meanwhile, she is hoping to find a sponsor for her Sunken Museum, an installation she did for the Arena group that no longer remains. The steep-sided gorge is a dramatic display that - once again - few visitors understand as art.
Upon arrival at the Sunken Museum, I was informed that the whole sim environment was the art, anything below the clouds and even underwater. "She has sunken the museum INTO her environment work. That is a work NOT IN the museum."
Could all or most of this be realized in Real Life? Yes, I think so. But consider the hoops that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have to go through for each of their monumental projects, whether urban or rural. When asked a few years ago about their Over the River project, slated for completion in 2012 or later, here was their response:
"Right now, an environmental impact report is being prepared. It will be a big book of over 250 pages. It is done by a company in Colorado, which has been chosen by the local government of the Arkansas River, but at our expense. We get the bills. They have been working on it for over two years now and we have already spent more than $250,000, just for the environmental impact study. When that will be ready as a draft, it will be distributed to all the public places along the route of the project, like the post office, the city halls, the schools, so that the public can look at it. And some of those who are against would say, “Ah, you forgot about the butterflies, what about those butterflies?” Then the engineers who have prepared it will answer, “If you look at page 257, you will see that we are talking about the butterflies.” That’s just an example. If we have indeed forgotten something, which might happen, since this is only a draft there is time to correct it and say that no alligator will be endangered, for instance."
In fact, I think Christo, Jeanne-Claude and other Land Artists would be well served if they used virtual worlds as their sketchbooks.
Today, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.
Ada Lovelace was one of the world's first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.
I elected to write about Comet Morigi and her work with Land Art/particles on Ada Lovelace Day because, with her art, she is stretching the boundaries of technology and by doing so, encouraging others to make new and previously impossible uses of it.
The first 100 days as the commander of a company should be a time for absorbing information, discovering the strengths and weaknesses of the team, and putting all those puzzle pieces together. You became Linden Lab's CEO and adult supervisor in mid-March of this year, which would put you at about the 225 days mark, or 8 1/2 months.
225 days later, Mark Kingdon (aka M Linden), I'm disappointed in you. I was so optimistic about your arrival, too.
To make matters worse, the way I see it, Linden Lab owes me $950US + a reimbursement for my time.
Shall I just email the bill over to you? Oh, you don't know what I'm talking about? Well, come on down from your Ivory Tower, dear man, and let me catch you up on things.
Just one week before your arrival, Linden Lab introduced a new product called Openspaces. The official description of the product reads as follows, and there was no mention of special rules:
What is an Openspace?
An Openspace is a type of private island intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).
Back in those days, I was the care-free owner of a bit more than a quarter sim upon which Chakryn Forest (V2) sat. I had purchased that island land about 8 months before, and paid a creator several hundreds of dollars to make me the virtual forest of my dreams.
A few days after the Openspace announcement, my friend thomtrance Otoole offered me an Openspace to create a new, sim-wide forest. My only financial commitment was to pay tier... $75US a month. This was rather enticing, because at the time, I was paying $125 for about the same number of prims but not nearly as much land. I gratefully took him up on his very generous offer, and put Chakryn Forest up for auction.
Now then... by this time, the fever for Openspaces was gripping the Grid, and many people lost interest in buying regular island land or mainland. I don't mind telling you that it got so you couldn't give away regular island land, cause Openspace tier was just so much cheaper.
The forest and I got lucky. A dreamer and forest lover like me purchased my land and the forest for less than what I had paid for the land, but he promised to keep the forest intact and that, in my mind, made it a good deal.
By then, Openspace Chakryn was mine, and for two months I rolled up my sleeves and worked with Andrek Lowell and Eshi Otawara - two of the best creators in Second Life - to develop a rich and enchanting forest brimming with secrets and its own special lore. Because I value these creators and their time, I paid them for it and as generously as I could afford. Several hundreds of dollars later, and on July 15th, I proudly opened the new Chakryn Forest to the public for everyone's use and enjoyment.
Oh, I should mention that Andrek Lowell worked tirelessly for many extra hours to create the entire sim-wide forest with only 1,400 prims. Why? Because it was my plan to showcase great virtual art throughout the sim and I needed every last prim. He delivered, and just last month the art shows began with a great installation by Glyph Graves:
Music: Narayanam, performed by Suchita Parte Video: Bettina Tizzy
It made me proud to see the daily traffic numbers, which average 5,000. Now, was this hurting anyone? I don't think so, because Chakryn shares the server with at least three other Openspaces that I know of that hardly get any traffic at all.
Did I act with evil intent? Certainly not. In fact, all along I thought I was being an upright and conscientious citizen and providing Second Life®'s Residents with a park.
We will increase the monthly maintenance fee from USD$75 to USD$125 per month. This price increase will apply to all owners of Openspaces on January 1st as well as new purchases after that date. There will be no grandfathering of Openspace maintenance pricing."
That's $600US you want to bill ME extra, every year?! Why, not even George W. Bush is ... enough to pull a stunt like that: increasing our taxes by 67% for an 8 month old product!
Now over at GigaOM, Wagner James Au (aka Hamlet Au of New World Notes) has just published your statement in response to the outrage you are hearing after the stinging blow you have dealt us. Part of it reads...
“To be clear,” Kingdon continued, “this price adjustment affects only a portion of land in Second Life; it does not apply to private islands or regular mainland property. We made this change to ensure an optimal Second Life experience for all Residents.”
Um...
I can give you the actual breakdown for my bill in person, and at your convenience, but here is an overview: - Cost of developing Chakryn Forest (V2), which I never got back - Cost of tier for two months while Openspace Chakryn was in development - Cost of developing Openspace Chakryn (many hundreds of dollars) - My time (like Mastercard says... it is priceless)
Come down, come down from your Ivory Tower, dear man, and take stock of the situation.
If Second Life® has an aristocracy... meaning an elite group of people who act behind the scenes with an interest in benefiting the entire population, then Lumiere Noir is a true aristocrat. Yes, there are people who are perhaps better known... limelight-happy, if you will... but I've come to think that many of them reflect rather than generate light.
He didn't invent the tools, but Lumiere (who's name means "light" in French) has single-handedly taught thousands upon thousands of Second Life's residents (and probably you, dear Reader) how to build via his Ivory Tower of Prims (teleport directly from here).
A model of the first Ivory Tower of Prims above; and below, the actual Tower The trouble with interviewing Lumiere Noir is that he is too good a conversationalist, and so our talks, which spread out over a number of days, strayed off to many unrelated and engrossing topics. To give you some idea, I have over 50 pages of logged conversations and notes! He is - at once - fascinating and fascinated with all worlds, both virtual and real, and well read, and curious as all get out.
Tell us about the man behind your avatar. Lumiere Noir: I'm Vince Frost, I live in Plano, Texas, which is close to Dallas. I'm an English-as-a-Second-Language teacher at a high school in Plano. I teach 12th graders world literature, and I've done that for about 11 years now. My background is in art, but I discovered teaching after I graduated. I love teaching.
What is your favorite book to share with them? Lumiere Noir: Pygmalion... I see them all as Eliza Doolittle! Their story is a little similar and language is what holds them back in this country, just as Eliza's accent holds her back, but I don't see myself as Henry Higgins! They are mostly Spanish speakers, from Central and South America, as well as a lot of Chinese. I specialize in the Chinese, and Mandarin is my second language. I mastered in art, and when I was about to graduate, I fell in with the Chinese community at my university. Through them, I got some connections, and went to Taiwan. I had planned to go for a year and learn the language and culture, and wound up staying almost four. I taught English to support myself and studied Chinese, and traveled a lot in Asia. This was between 1988 and 1991.
How did a man with this background end up in Second Life, on… Christmas eve! (Rez: 12/24/2003) Lumiere Noir: I came here via The Sims Online, which I liked but it was so limited, and later There.com. What I loved about that world is that there was so much to explore, but most of it was made by the creators of There. One could create things but it was expensive. I hated being nickel-and-dimed to death... How do you say that in the U.K.? I made several things in There, mostly clothes… very eccentric things. Then I started hearing about this place. I tried Second Life in early Beta but I'm afraid to say I hated it. It was just so awkward, so I stayed in There until late 2003.
You were in Second Life earlier then? Lumiere Noir: That was as a different avatar. SwenKong Wu I think... I can't remember the password :-) Probably no longer exists. (Note: It doesn’t). I was Swen_Wu_Kong in There, and Wu was available here at that time.
The Ivory Tower of Primitives today
How did the Ivory Tower of Prims come about? Lumiere Noir: I love to make things, and I love to teach. Making the Tower was a natural thing for me as a teacher. I taught myself to build, and my first impulse was to turn around and teach it to others, but I quickly found that I didn't like teaching in-world very much.
So you created the tutorials instead! Have you held anniversary parties at the Tower? Lumiere Noir: I have....I used to do a lot of things here. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I'm on to other projects at the moment. I tend to work on the Tower in the summers. It sort of lies fallow, except for maintenance work until the summer, and then I go through and add new things, and revise.
In an interview with Hamlet Au, back in June 2004, Lumiere described the Ivory Tower by saying, "[T]his is a user interface about a user interface. I like it when there are layers of reality and simulated reality that go in layers like this... I've interviewed a lot of master builders to get tips and tricks and experience and building methods that go beyond my own."
Lumiere Noir: It’s now pretty current, except it doesn't cover sculpties. That's okay with me on the whole because you have to learn about sculpties in conjunction with the 3D modeler you use and there's no way for me to cover all of them. Sculpties are a lot like scripting. It's best learned on the web. I can't cover Blender, Maya, Studio 3D Max and all the others :-)
Featuring a series of self-taught, self-paced lessons on how to build with prims, the Tower, is a lively place filled with newbies, doing what newbies do. Some are lost in concentration, while others are discovering gestures or editing their appearance.
It must take incredible patience to be Lumiere Noir. While standing at the Ivory Tower for about 20 minutes the other day, I was offered unsolicited, undiscussed friendship twice, and asked for help another three.
Earlier this month, Torley Linden made another one of his terrific videos, this time featuring a tour of the Ivory Tower of Prims and its sandbox.
Lumiere Noir: I got hooked on Second Life when I rezzed my first prim. Up until then I thought the world was interesting, but chaotic and a bit trashy. Then one day I accidentally rezzed a prim and I was amazed.
Accidentally? Lumiere Noir: Yes! I was trying to ride a motorcycle away, missed hitting “ride,” and hit “create” instead. Newbie me! I became so fascinated with that prim. I learned everything you can do with it. I think I still have it somewhere, but I did so many things with it, and began learning about scripting with it.
That same prim??? Lumiere Noir: Yes, for two weeks it was me and my prim! Not long after that I met Starax. We started about the same time, and we both worked in Morris, the greeting area at that time. We were friends and friendly rivals. We took very different directions over time, and don't talk as much as I'd like to, but he's one of my dearest friends here. He'll hate me for saying this, but under all that crust beats a heart of gold. The crust is there to protect it.
So you and Starax were working at Morris, and you were with this one poor prim… Lumiere Noir: Yes, I saw all these crazy things he was doing, and I was learning and experimenting. He'd build something, and sometimes I'd build my own and he'd get mad because at that time mine was better. Except maybe he did his in an hour and I'd spend a couple of weeks on mine. But he's really the genius of this place!
I was playing with architecture, virtual of course. My style was always pretty weird. The thing that always distresses me about this place is that we have so much available to us to create with, but most people seem to make the same everyday airplanes, cars and buildings. I realize that a lot of that has to do with comfort level. We like what's familiar, but we can do so much more.
The first dome for the Tower
The second dome
Lumiere Noir: Back then land was very cheap and I got all the land I could in one of the last landgrabs. The Lindens used to release land for a $1L per m2. I don't think there were more than 20 or 30 sims when I first arrived and, oddly enough, that seemed large. (I) got most of Natoma over time, and started getting land in Noyo. Noyo was a busy sim because it had a telehub - back when we had to travel telehub to telehub - so I first built the library there.
Do you pay tier for this land that the Tower sits on? Lumiere Noir: No, but I had the pleasure of paying a lot of money for a couple of years. The Lindens now sponsor it, and I'm very thankful for that.
As well they should! It would be a scandal otherwise. Lumiere Noir: I've never asked for contributions. Most of the people that use the place are newbies. Word got out that I'd only ever had two supporters in the history of the Tower, about the time I put up the new Tower, maybe two years ago. They posted that on forums, and people started contributing a lot. A while after that the Lindens became sponsors. I gave over all my land here in Natoma and they left me in control of it.
How closely do you work with the Lindens? An official FIC, huh? Lumiere Noir: Lol....screw the FIC and the anti FIC! I just do my work... hang out with close friends; I really don't care about the rest. Truthfully, (the Lindens) are like silent partners. I almost never hear a thing from them. I know they keep an eye on the place. I've got to tell you about my partner in crime here, Avi Arrow. She helps a ton with this place.
She never said a word about it! What is her role? Lumiere Noir: I don't see how I could do what I do without her. Avi heads up the group Ivory Tower Dwellers, which she keeps running smoothly, and they help us keep watch over it. I mostly keep my nose down and make things. I have my own way of looking (after) them, but Avi keeps it together.
“Lumiere is a dear and trusted friend - my best friend in here, really. I've known Lumi for 23 months, yet much of what I know about him, I've been told by others (usually in the form of how much Lumi had influenced them). Lumi is a very innovative builder, primarily through his modular building exercises at the Ivory Tower. He has helped many residents who have gone on to do great things in here... from architectural building to making avatar attachments. His legacy in-world is one of being generous and tirelessly fun.” – Avi Arrow
The Ivory Tower is just one of the many projects that Lumiere has up his sleeve. There are his mostly extra-terrestial vehicles, which you can read about here and here, and his Planet Mongo, a Flash Gordon-inspired sim which we'll be talking about again soon... and his avatars...
Join us in our quest to discover the best of Virtual Worlds
Experience - first-hand - the creations, ideas and innovations that are pushing the boundaries of what is real. No, we're not in Kansas anymore! Virtual worlds are where all the disciplines of art and technology combine to make for the most compelling and exciting adventure imaginable.
Blogger Bettina Tizzy
NPIRL founder - Madly, wildly embracing the impossible made possible in Virtual Worlds.
Blogger Alpha Auer
"I need a new clockwork brain!... Indeed, maybe two?"
Show me, I'll show you...
A central goal for us is to collect and distill what's really happening out there and pare down your options to the essence of what's cool, trendsetting and even groundbreaking, always within the context of Not Possible IRL. This is not intended as a calendar of events and our selections are, by necessity, subjective and opinionated. To learn more about the criteria for what is NPIRL, click here. If you'd like to share a landmark, notecard or hot tip of any nature with us, kindly share it with us in-world. We try to always credit the finder, too.
A great place to rez your art and have it critiqued by art critics.
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®
