Anything you imagine is possible - Revisiting photographer Ashanti Leshelle

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Berlin artist Ashanti Leshelle embraces the notion that anything you imagine is possible in the virtual world of Second Life®. Ash creates and assembles scenes three-dimensionally in-world, as well as her own Windlight settings (a bit like adding a special filter to your camera), and then photographs them. Post-production is minimal.


Types


traveler


cuuuarp


The passenger

Stop by her Flickr stream and have a look.

An Airborne Leviathan?

Posted by Alpha Auer

Half seal, half whale - or maybe some other mythical hybrid creature which emanated from archetypes residing within the imagination of Feri Beckenbauer, looms over the sky of the sim Beckenbach.


This is a really wonderful structure housing a shop of fantasy/cyberpunk apparel beautiful enough to make me drool over most of that I saw on display.


While seeming to be ominously hermetic from the outside, the construct turned out to be surprisingly spacious and un-claustrophobic once inside due to the split ceiling.


Very beautiful, 3D display of merchandise. Why don't more apparel designers do this I wonder?


A gaggle of birdlike annexes follow the creature... Claws made out of giant propellers, a befitting entourage...

Creative output, the roots of which lies in archetypes has always held a particular fascination for me. Indeed, as Joseph Campbell has already shown us in his studies, sometimes I wonder whether our human imagination, bound as it is in a collective subconscious which seems to have spun the same myths over and over again regardless of geographic and chronological dispersion, can ever fully step outside of what is archetypally relevant. And when it comes to the generation of a true act of imagination, as Feri Beckenbauer's wondrous creature shop seems to me to be, I cannot help but start thinking very much along these lines:

Despite its airborne quality this creature has predominantly aquatic attributes, such as fins rather than wings. Consequently it reminds me of Leviathan, the Biblical sea creature which has become synonymous with any large sea monster. In Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick the term Leviathan refers to great whales. Partly due to this influence, Leviathan has come to be associated by many with the sperm whale. There is Walt Disney's depiction of Pinocchio's being swallowed by Monstro, a sperm whale and then of course there is the story of Jonah who is miraculously saved from the consequences of a sea accident by being swallowed by a whale where he spent three days and three nights, at the end of which, following God's orders, the creature vomited him out at the shore. And then of course there are all the numerous references to Leviathan ranging from Milton's Paradise Lost, where the creature is symbolic of Satan, to the words of Puck in Shakespeare's Midsummernights Dream.

For me, humanity bypassed a huge opportunity of self exploration through the means of visual creativity when it took a wrong turning on the path during the mid 20th century, choosing the follow the route of realistic rendition in Surrealist art. True, there did remain the odd hardcore contentual surrealist like Max Ernst, but for the large part the display of craftsmanship took over from the investigation of archetypal subconscious content, resulting in a mass of maudlin and trite, if not borderline sentimental output gathered under the heading of Surrealism. And now, here in Second Life®, I am daring to hope that this past error may be rectified. Maybe not so much in the form of "high art", although there is some hopeful evidence of that as well, but certainly in the emergence of design output that truly seems to be looking at archetypal content which is usable - making the whole self-investigative adventure even more dramatic, even more immediately accessible and powerful. We do not merely look at archetypes, we become immersed, in fact we become archetypal characters ourselves.

Feri Beckenbauer's giant airborne hybrid creature would seem to me to constitute a primary example to this. Unselfconscious imagination, yet ever so subtly evoking a millennia old, ever present, omnipotent archetype?

Wow!

You can teleport to see the creature shop housing Beckenbauer Productions directly from here.

AM Radio's tree, reloaded

Years ago, Second Life® artist AM Radio created a digital illustration of a dead tree suspended in mid-air that he later realized in 3D for Burning Life, working within the confines imposed by the virtual Playa.


AM's Burning Life contribution, the first "Beneath the Tree that Died"

Now and through January 1, 2009, the University of Kentucky and its curator - an artist and contributor to this blog - Tezcatlipoca Bisiani, have provided him with a 256 square meter canvas on the virtual campus to recreate Beneath the Tree that Died .


The original illustration can be found on one end of a country road, surrounded by a grouping of open umbrellas which are set to "physical" and can therefore be tumbled around like sagebrush by visitors to the installation. Click to see large

AM appreciates a vast expanse that invites solitude; this much I know from visiting each of his virtual art works. The immersive environments he creates are intimate despite the apparent immensity of the space they occupy: panoramic and seemingly endless pastures or meadows surrounded by lines of trees that are far, far away. Nature is the perennial headliner and often one can sense the cycles of life, for while a field of wheat may be waiting to be harvested, the rusty carcass of an old train engine sits exhausted in its midst.

He succeeds where most others fail when it comes to enabling us to suspend belief, for while we never quite forget that we are logged into a virtual environment, the sensation is as close as I've experienced to "inhabiting" a work of art, largely because everything is executed with technical skill, taking the medium as far as it can apparently go; not quite a copy world and yet...

Hyperreal scenes then give way to the surreal as he introduces unexpected elements: violins floating in an icy pond, dozens of hammers suspended in mid-air, animations that make it possible for the visitor to hover gently over - but always near - the mise en scène.

AM has also created the hat and umbrella for the Mary Poppins avatar. This isn't surprising given that his own avatar is somewhat of a male version of the same: seemingly conventional and yet quite extraordinary, as dragonflies cling to him and he is often carrying a load of sticks on his back.

And then there is always a radio. It's the first thing you hear when you arrive at the University of Kentucky's island.

Beneath the Tree that Died

The elements of Beneath the Tree that Died are few, but not spartan. There is the original illustration surrounded by umbrellas on one end of a New England parkway. Further along, a large dead tree with its roots intact is suspended above that same country road, and a 1948 Plymouth is nearly beneath it, not quite aligned with the roadway. In fact it is crossing the line. Something may be amiss.


Turn your media on and you will note that the texture on the ground megaprim is code-generated. An algorithm will begin running in Javascript on your computer. Each person sees a different pattern and the design evolves. Hit Stop and Play and you will see a different design

Just beneath the tree and also on the road, a telegram...


This photograph by AM Radio. Click to see large

When asked what his art meant during a preview of the new show, he replied: "I think it means what you bring to it. Here I have my story. Things that are precious to me. Moments in my life, a tree, a car, the weather station my grandfather always listened to. This is simply me, my most inner thoughts and dreams and feelings. What it means, I suppose is what you bring to it, your own story. Here is a narrative that can only be complete when you view the work and react to it."

Second Life has a one-year old client-side feature called Windlight - a lighting and rendering system - that enables its residents to set atmospheric conditions such as the times of day or night. Several users have created "presets," which make it possible to share specific sky and water palettes with others. Soon after Windlight was introduced, AM created a mustardy preset called Nostalgia that is utilized today by many photographers within virtual worlds. In the past, all of AM's installations have not only invited the use of Windlight, but often benefited from it. Beneath the Tree that Died thrives exceptionally in the default atmospheric setting, or as AM puts it, "It likes the time of day."


This photograph by AM Radio. Visitors can change the color of the car by touching it.

"Beneath the Tree that Died," can be accessed by teleporting here, and touching a red door.



See also:

* At the root of the matter
* AM Radio and Miki Gymnast collaborate - Two distinct art languages converse
* Become practically perfect in every way
* The safety of spaces
* Photo restoration via Second Life
* Second Lifers' love of wheat
* Pixelated wheat buys real cows for families struggling against poverty and hunger
* The wheat field... has a secret

Voodoo Shilton melts clocks in a 3D world

I just bet that more than a few of you have stopped to think how much Salvador Dali would have enjoyed Second Life®...

There's Gary Kohime and Izikael Novi who were inspired by his Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) to create their own Unconsious Crucifixion - Dark Night of the Soul for the Garden of NPIRL Delights last spring.

Now Voodoo Shilton's rendition of Dali's "La Persistencia de Memoria" [1931] (The Persistence of Memory) is visitable by teleporting directly from here.



Says Voodoo, "I've long been a fan of surrealist artists (M. C. Escher and Salvador Dali in particular) and thought a Second Life interpretation of Dali's classic was long overdue. For me the melting watches are a metaphor for the relativity of time and space, a relatively new concept at the time of Dali's work. The artwork as a dream allegory combines new understandings of the universe with the mystical personal experience of the individual. It was a landmark, mind-broadening artwork for its time that asks us to reconsider assumptions about reality and existence."

Oh! Thanks to Voodoo, I realized last night that Dali placed a poseball in his painting. It's right there, I swear!

The birds by Nonnatus Korhonen

Photography by Kean Kelly

They are other-wordly and a bit unsettling, in a cute sort of way. They reside where giant strawberries are found. Flocks of them chase visitors, but they won't allow themselves to be caught. They are the birds by Sydney-based Nonnatus Korhonen (aka Andrew Burrell), created for the Garden of NPIRL Delights (teleport directly from here).


Kean waits for them to come to her


Kean works to establish trust in them

Ashanti LeShelle's surreal imagery continues to delight

She is clever and creative, but she is also flawless in her execution of fanciful images that invite fresh thinking. Ashanti LeShelle's work has already graced these pages here and here, but this is the first time we introduce you to her pig series. You can click on the photographs to see them larger.


"Floating"


Stopover


"Alien"

Where the carp fly

Ever since I discovered her work a few weeks ago, Ashanti LeShelle's Flickr stream of photographs has become a destination for me.


Ashanti's "Carp" - All rights reserved

Ashanti uses the freeware ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 to post-process her work.

You can see her work and that of many other gifted photographers in the following Not Possible IRL Flickr group pools:
* Not Possible IRL Content Creation
* Avatars Not Possible IRL*
* Situations Not Possible IRL

Join us! Add your own masterpieces to these pools, but please do read the group rules and descriptors first.

Ashanti LeShelle's photography articulates her dreams and jump-starts our imagination

Berliner Ashanti LeShelle is polite and reserved in her interactions with others, but her photography tells us so much more.


The FlyBy by Ashanti

Using freeware to post-process her photographs and Second Life as her platform, Ashanti at once loses her self containment and pierces our dazed reality, inviting us to explore her mind and her dreams in ways that surely would have delighted André Breton.


Ashanti dangles from Light Waves' sculpty Ballerina's fingers in "Aversion"

Increasingly, Second Lifers are using the metaverse as a tool for self-discovery and projection of their inner world, with new dimensions of depth. In this regard, Ashanti is leading the pack.