The little steampunk mermaid, and pixie and Cinderella

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Update! ZOMG, gender adjustment time. I mistakenly believed that Onakagoo was a woman when I wrote this post, so I've gone ahead and corrected all the she/hers-isms. Sheesh.

Steampunk, highly detailed and hot hot hot, I give you the flying avatars by Japanese Onakagoo Epin (rez: 11/22/2006), available at his 109 Prims Circus fantasy store in the sky.

Capturing avatars in steampunk flying cages is a running theme with Onakagoo. Take his Flying Little Mermaid avatar, complete with a steampunk tail and breastplate, as well his own submersible.


Shown here with Vampire Mermaid hair by 3star Tyne (teleport directly from here)


Note how the avatar is anchored firmly to the interior of the submersible


Mercifully, Onakagoo has also provided a shatter-glass box on the side of the submersible with a pair of prosthetic legs, should the mermaid in you decide to go walking

The Flying Little Pixie is caught inside an hourglass-shaped lamp, but the crystal has shattered, making room for her lacey steampunk wings.



You can detach the flying cage and go about your pixie business wearing the mechanical (but nevertheless dainty) outfit Onakagoo provides you with.



In lieu of a heart, Onakagoo appointed the pixie with a bell...


You can ring my bell

Finally, the Flying Little Cinderella isn't really an avatar, but an attachment you wear... a whirring, rusty steampunk carriage. Talk about making an appearance (or disappearance come the stroke of midnite) at parties!


I'm wearing Eshi Otawara's latest: the POPI outfit, complete with a giant poppy hat and dangerous hat pins


Housed within a sphere megaprim, the 109 Prims Circus store is its own environment and worthy of a visit whether you purchase anything or not. Teleport directly from here.

Many thanks to Poulep[Oh]ndeuse who's fabulous Flickr stream I follow. It was she who guided me to Onakagoo and his latest magic.

Land Art in Second Life – A historical perspective and an introduction to virtual artist Comet Morigi

Posted by Bettina Tizzy


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.


Photo by N*A*UTILUS

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.

O Tannen Bomb, O Tannen Bomb... A friendly Christmas assault

Merry Christmas, y'all! - Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Jopsy Pendragon cannot resist the impulse to create, and he's had many irons on the fire lately, especially since he expanded the Particle Laboratory and put his ingenious Porgon 1800 (the Particle Organ) on the market.

When it comes to Jopsy, I've come to expect vivid, brilliant particles dancing in the air to music, or self-guided tutorials on how to make them as well as the best particle textures on the grid. But he's not above having a little fun with us!



The Tannen Bomb is a bit of merriment Jopsy started to make on a lark three years ago, and finally got around to finishing on Wednesday. It's a short-lived build, so make your way over there in the next few days, and take advantage of the temporary lift on forced teleports at Teal, too, (teleport directly from here).

In a nutshell... well, nah, I'm not going to tell you exactly what happens. Just go with friends, launch the Tannen Bomb... and let it surprise you.




In this shot, I'm wearing American resident Eshi Otawara's Christmas Edition Smokey Tux dress, and soror Nishi's splendid mistletoe antlers

I am still plagued by that snapshot bug, so I appreciate Jopsy's help with pics.

My basic OpenSim Travel Kit

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

While living in California, I put together a backpack filled with all kinds of emergency supplies to get me through a bad earthquake. There were Powerbars, a flashlight, a hand-cranked radio, a first-aid kit, some single dollar bills, etc. I tossed it into the trunk of my car and figured it would be with me at most times. In fact, I've given backpacks such as these to all my closest friends and loved ones in California as gifts. I usually tuck in a deck of cards, a pencil and notepad and sometimes a funny book. Even a yoyo!

Most of us have a little travel kit for toiletries, and frequent international travelers take that a few steps further: noise-cancelling headphones, jet lag meds, adapters, converters, a cozy pair of socks... you get my drift.

Nowadays, I am more in need of a kit for the virtual traveler, and these are especially important - and appreciated - if you are not a builder or a scripter.

These are all things I carry with me as I travel from one OpenSim to another...

Bettina's Basic OpenSim Travel Kit:
- One script for personal radar
- Good freebie skin, such as Sezmra Svarog's Splendor skins
- One transparent texture (I forget where I got mine)
- A basic particle script (good for testing), such as Jopsy Pendragon's Barebones Particle script (thanks for posting it, Ordinal!), or Ama Omega's ExampleParticleScript
- Eye textures, such as Vint Falken's pretty, free, and very NPIRL creations for Valentine's day.
- Of course, Torley's funtastic textures!

What else should we pack in our virtual travel kits? Got any good links? What could I be doing better?

On my wish list:
- Portable prim hair
- My fave June Dion bodysuit (ARC friendly!)

Arrival tips:
- Friend a few folks right away
- Ask for LMs, where the sandbox is, and where the freebie area is
- Check out the map right away. Where are you? Make a Landmark!

What!?! Particles for all avatars? Even for those that cannot script?

Posted by Alpha Auer

If you are anything like me, that is completely in love with particle effects and yet incapable of scripting your way out of a paper bag, then Jopsy Pendragon has the solution for you... And what a solution! What a veritable virtual feast this is!



The Porgan 1800 Particle Organ, is a full featured particle generator console with big differences: A fully visually intuitive, three dimensional interface, which allows you to preview your effects in 3D, alerts you to over usage of system, warns you of potential mishaps and errors - all of it in an easy to understand, user friendly and visually appealing manner. Virtually every imaginable variable that goes into creating a particle effect, from colors to wind to age to particle count, can be fine tuned and adjusted through various levers, dials and pickers on the console. Furthermore this beauty of a generative tool lets you use your own alpha channeled tga files.

You can easily create up to three different particle effects combined together creating truly stunningly complex and sophisticated visual effects, superimposed upon one another. Then, with just one click the Porgan will rez a mod+copy+trans version of your combined effect! (or, if you prefer, it will print scripts too!)



The huge difference between this console and all the many particle generators that I have fumbled my way through and never ever gotten the hang of, is that Jopsy Pendragon has involved the factor of human visual memory as a cognitive aid within his design strategy, creating a remarkable interface through clearly individuated input devices, most of which reflect their inherent functionality in their iconography. So instead of rows upon rows of identical looking buttons, which are based upon the assumption that we already know what they stand for, what we a looking at; the Porgan 1800 presents us with an interface that allows us to differentiate visually and to memorize the look as well the location of individual commands. A remarkable design system - indeed one that it might behoove many a real life interface designer from cell phones to TV remote controls to take a really close look at and to learn from.

Well, immediately having purchased my personal console I am now a true convert. And have I been playing with it! In fact, so entrancing is this process that I stand here in dire danger of turning into a complete recluse in front of my wonderful Particle Organ, admiring effect upon effect that I release into the virtual air of my island. I will start rebuilding Syncretia pretty soon and right now it looks like as if there will be oh so many many particles in version 2.0...

Well done Jopsy! Well done indeed!
:-)

You can view, try and purchase The Porgan 1800 at the Particle Laboratory to where you can teleport directly from here.

Jopsy Pendragon to expand the Particle Laboratory

Jopsy Pendragon (aka John P. Crane, rezzed 1/15/04) believes that "It's good to mark the big days with friends and a little pomp =)" and that's precisely what he did last night during a very NPIRL ribbon-cutting ceremony to commemorate his acquisition of the sim "Slate," which borders the sim Ethereal Teal upon which his Particle Laboratory has sat (and grown) since 2004.


Friends assembled on either side of the ceremonial vortex to watch Jopsy cut the particle ribbon

The Particle Laboratory is the mecca for particle lovers and script learners in Second Life®, largely because of the seemingly exhaustive and excellent tutorials available there, as well as its intimate sandbox for "script tinkering." Teleport directly from here, and take the hot air balloon to any of the local destinations offered there. It is also the home of two of the best ongoing particle shows on the grid, including the Cloud Chateau where I got my first taste of particles.

During his speech, Jopsy explained: "Khamon (Fate) has graciously offered to let me purchase Slate as space to expand into, while he takes Fate Gardens to a private region all his own. Teal and Slate have long had a peaceful history..." He went on, "One of the initial projects for Slate will be a sister Laboratory for the Particle lab... focused on Vehicles. =)"



As he cut the particle ribbon, Jopsy proclaimed: "I dub this... Ethereal Slate! The runner up name was "later slater" but that didn't sound as fae ;)"


Particles burst all around us

See also: Jopsy Pendragon's Particles

Grab your recycled shopping bag and head over to Sabine Stonebender's temporary store

October 6, 2008 update: Sabine has been hard at work rebuilding Zero Point. Her permanent store is now open for business (teleport directly from here).

On Thursday, Sabine Stonebender woke up to some dreadful news. Due to a billing error bug, her Zero Point, certainly one of the most admired and NPIRL sites on the grid, had vanished into some database limbo and gone from this...





... to this...



The situation has not yet been resolved. This is particularly painful because Zero Point, which housed her store and an important source of income for Sabine, is also gone. Effective immediately, Sabine has a temporary store and you are cordially invited to shop.

You might pick up an elegant Radiant Nebulae Chamber...



... and by all means, get yourself a proper telehub!



If dancing is your thing, you'll be needing a glamorous floor...


The Psycho Vinyl Dance Floor changes colors


For black tie dancing, I recommend this one prim marvel that brings the universe into your living room


Her lastest release is both a sculpture and a toy


He goes boom


Her dragon sculptures are considered the finest in Second Life®

And here's a sneak peak at something coming down the pipeline...


BIG guns... and if you are in the mood, the whole thing blows to pieces (literally)

Sabine's textures (I own a bunch!) are jewels in the hands of any builder, and there are numerous sculptures, skins, particle effects, vehicles and all sorts of toys, too.

Show the love, why don't you?

Chouchou gives us the Universe

Hot news for Chouchouholics, members of the near-fanatical in-world fan group dedicated to Chouchou, the musical group that only exists in Second Life®. Masami Kuramoto just advised me that juliet Heberle and arabesque Choche have a new song coming out, Eterna, and... a new club that reaches for the stars, called simply: Universe.


Photograph by Masami Kuramoto

Universe is not a place you can drop in and visit most times as it only exists during this delicious band's performances, and consists of wisps and whimsies and particle effects that are rezzed on the spot.

As stingy as I am with my limited in-world groups, I joined Chouchouholics for fear that I'll miss it all.

SynaesthAsia: a realtime jam that spans the globe, with visuals to knock your socks off

As backgrounds go, Tokyo-based Komuso Tokugawa's is rather unusual. For openers, this fellow received the Australian Sports Medal in 2000 in recognition of his contributions to the sport of parachuting. :o

He has a Masters in Music, a Masters in Technology Management, and a BSc in Mathematics/Computer Science. Komuso also practices Tai Chi, in addtion to skiing and rollerblading.

Somewhere in between all of this - and a boatload of other novel and significant activities we'll look into sometime soon - he finds the time to come in-world and, together with MoShang Zhao, put on the chillest events I'd never imagined possible.



Performing in real time for thirty lucky test subjects (thanks for the invite Jurin Juran!) from points all over the Eastern and Western spheres, with Komuso in Tokyo and MoShang in Taiwan, and utilizing the music collaboration software NINJAM, these two put on a landmark show.



Lumiere Noir made it in just in time to hear the first few chords... and that's when you know that your entire week is going to melt away and the journey has begun.


Jessica Qin, moi and Fau Ferdinand dissolve into the moment...

Beyond the dreamtrance sounds, Komuso's particles take center stage. It's all "delivered in a custom setting I designed along with my prototype Generative Visuals System I developed up from my bio/neuro feedback," Komuso explained. I'll be telling you more about that soon :D



Komuso invites you to get in the particles, and Hotspur O'Toole, who blogged about this event and even made his own Machinima there, dove straight in.


Guess who slipped in for the last couple of tunes?

This just in: Osprey Therian's machinima of that event...