Fade Dana's crazy cool helmets, as photographed by Del May

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling fans like to embrace the allure of cyberpunk glam, and admirers of Queen Amidala’s post-Mongolian wigs and headdresses take that up a notch or two higher, but in Second Life® we have the bejeweled and horned helmets designed by Fade Dana to go gaga over.





While helmets with horns were worn as far back as the Iron Age - and not by the Vikings as often presumed - photographer Del May has done a brilliant job of showcasing Fade's virtual imaginings, which can be acquired at her Hat Mechanic shops by teleporting here or here.

Obsessed with Kubrick - In virtual worlds, your passions can materialize

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

UPDATE! The Kubrick Rooms have a new home. Teleport directly from here.

With a name like Rumpledink Robiani and a somewhat scruffy but nevertheless Hellenistic avatar to match (high forehead, tousled hair and piercing eyes), I already expected more than the regular fare from the character whose Second Life® installation I had just visited thanks to a tip from Impossible IRL'er Esther Shim. What I did know is that the person behind Rumpledink is obsessed with film, and in particular, the cinema of one director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor: Stanley Kubrick.


Rumpledink’s avatar, immortalized and illustrated by in and off-world artist four Yip

Now, I know a thing or two about film having been nearly as preoccupied with it as I am now with virtual worlds, but Rumpledink’s ardor easily exceeds mine. This born and bred Brit really knows his stuff and he’s made it possible for you to learn more about his idol with his meticulous creation and tribute to Kubrick’s films, the Kubrick Rooms (teleport directly from here).



I'm sure I didn't catch all the tributes and hints of your Kubrick Rooms. The orange bathroom… it is at the hotel (The Shining)? I'm not real good with horror.

Rumpledink: Yes, I'm the same. I'm not a big horror fan, but love Kubrick. Great scene. It is when he goes back in time and meets the caretaker, Delbert Grady. Grady spills a drink on Nicholson and takes him into the bathroom to clean up. He tells him "No, you are the caretaker here. You always have been."



Have you seen "The Killing" - an early black and white Kubrick flic? (I thought surely I’d stumped him)

Rumpledink: Yes, and will be showing it at my little Redrum cinema soon :) I’ve got a load of his early shorts, too.
...

Indeed! It also seems that Rumpledink is not the only Kubrick fan on the grid. He and Violet Morellet were chatting one day and discovered that both of them were constructing a tribute to "A Clockwork Orange’s" more than zany Korova Milk Bar, where the milk served there is laced with drugs.


Violet and Rumpledink have thoughtfully provided animations on site so that you may become a coffee table. While researching for this post, I learned that there is a real Korova Milk Bar in White Plains, NY – This shot by Rumpledink

Rumpledink: She was going to stop making hers. I said, “No, finish and add with all my other rooms.”

What were the odds that you would both be doing it… and meet?

Rumpledink: I know… right! And the freaky thing was they (the rooms) were the same… the way we were building it.


Say hi to HAL and the Eva pod in the 2001 A Space Odyssey room

The centerpiece of the installation is the War Room from Kubrick’s 1964 insanely strange comedy "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," featuring Peter Sellers in three distinctly different roles.





I learned a few days ago that Rumpledink is going to lose the land the Kubrick Rooms sit on, so if you have 1,000 prims to spare and love Kubrick, here’s your chance to rescue one of the better virtual tributes we’ve come across.

Anatomia - Alpha Auer's 3D anatomical drawings of a different sort

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

For – like forever – when I thought of the human body, it was always in the context of Gray’s Anatomy, the classic textbook developed by British anatomist and illustrator Henry Gray, or Leonardo’s studies of the human skeleton. The yucky factor was zero and none of it, from my POV, was related to me or my body. Like a flood taking place in some remote village in China, it was something that was happening somewhere else.




This photo of the Anatomia installation by Alpha Auer

Now Alpha Auer (aka Elif Ayiter), my co-blogger here and creator of the ground-breaking Syncretia sim in Second Life® (see here and here and here), and also Body Parts, has come up with another way to look at our bodies. In essence, she’s turned us inside out and fanned out our musculature and appendages in a way that barely resembles the real human bodies that are on display in the world-touring exhibit Bodies, inviting many new questions about our self-schema.





Teleport to Anatomia from here and "buy" the outfit that is offered there. Put it on and become a part of the installation. Then you might understand that Alpha doesn't want the visitor to "have illusions of grandeur regarding her elevated status as a human, or indeed even an animal or mammal. I want her to be vulnerable, perishable, impure. I want her to gaze upon something other than her - in its cleanliness, its shiny surfaces, its clean bright lines, its mechanical perfection." In fact, Alpha has added the horns of a demon, as well as botanical growths.



On her blog, Alpha explains,"I have tried to deliberately make the dweller of the exhibit un-clean… Not the pristine, sharp black and white image assembly, with the odd spot of clean bright color here and there, but something mussed up with organic textures, layered and superimposed with elements that seem confusing and out of sync. The avatar of Anatomia is quite fragile: This is not a perfect, unbreakable machine, a thing rendered to help us gain insight into the workings of a superlative system. But rather a black and yellow mass - the colors of when things go bad in our bodies. Not the red of living blood but the low saturation of decay."

A real life "sim"

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

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.

Via Vincent Wilkie and Black Eiffel

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.

(Virtual) Prostheses!!!

Posted by Alpha Auer ;-)...

Despair not, all ye elderly avatars! At the point where virtual muscle gives over to flab the resourceful amongst us turn to prostheses! And what a selection there is to be found in our oh so eternally youthful virtual world! I maintain that even the most fastidious of cyborgs will have very little to moan about in this department...
...



Primtronics, the joint venture of Skalli McMillan and CJoke Oh is an emporium on which I have previously posted voraciously, so brilliant do I find their output. And when it comes to spare body parts Primtronics is an establishment not too easily outdone, as these chrome arm and leg attachments with built in machinery will easily attest to.
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I am told that incubating mothers need to be particularly vigilant against griefers. The Grim Bros incubator can be combined with watchful eye attachments by Primtronics for a maternal while yet stylish look!
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And when one's own skinny arms are no longer up to the task of hefting heavy objects one simply puts on these power limbs: These robotic (animated) cyberarms, again by Primtronics, come in both an industrial as well as a chrome finish for a variety of occasions from casual to dressy.
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Lucia Cyr's arm and leg prostheses can be found at her store Losthaven and these are certainly amongst some of the finest in Second Life®. However... And yes, I have already mentioned this little drawback on my Flickr ages ago, but one can never really overdo it with precautionary advice whilst dishing out shopping tips: Do not even think that these will get you out of exercising; if anything you will need to spend more time on that odious contraption known as the treadmill: Prolonged periods of inactivity tend to bring on a most unsightly accumulation of rust!!!
...



Always a favorite, the Prosthetic Spine, for that extra little bit of support for severe cases of virtual sciatica and lumbago - this one comes from cutea Benelli at Grim Bros., combined with yet another most useful head appendage from the same establishment. Could be my imagination entirely I suppose, but the external neural transmitters really do seem to convey the brain juices most efficiently - far better than my built in ones anyway...
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Finally! A garment which does my clockwork brain justice, designed by none other than cutea Benelli comes from Grim Bros.: The automatic peacock dress. Quite needless to add, the brain is the "brainchild" of Pandora Wrigglesworth.
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And speaking of brains, The Cortech Brain Jar by Total Chastity is the essential accessory of all avatars that like to air out the gray matter from time to time. Works even better than Gingko Biloba, I find: Simply wear for an hour a week, preferably outdoors... Sudoku is all very well and good in its way, but not a patch on a nice northerly breeze blowing through all of those dust ridden crevices!
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Failing eyesight... It does come to us all in the end, doesn't it? And while in Real Life there are of course the wonders of Laser interventions, virtual ophthalmology offers a far more elegant solution: Goggles!

Top left, Thomus Keen (Steampowered Nuts); top right, Disembodied Hand (Defectiva); bottom left, my favorite ones by Torus Heliosense, these are scripted to set your hair on fire should you desire to do so! (Unfortunately no location seems to be available for Torus Heliosense at this time). And finally bottom right, Primtronics strikes yet again!
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And in the end, when hearing loss finally creeps up, one can always find solace in cutea Benelli's hearing aid, available at Grim Bros., enhanced with bells, trumpets, car horns, gauges and whistles. And if that doesn't work - trust me, nothing ever will!
;-)
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Credit also goes to Laynie Link, whose helicopter and tower hair I have worn for some of these shots. These were pieces which Ms. Link was distributing as freebies during the hair fair. Her store at Hairspray however, carries a far more conservative, Real Life-like line these days. Maybe we can entreat her to design some more towers and helicopters?
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May you all have many healthy days ahead of you in your long virtual lives! The amazing cyborg paraphernalia to be found in Second Life, of which I have shown only a very very small personal selection can of course be enjoyed by all avatars of all sizes, shapes, descriptions and age groups. So, enjoy my friends, enjoy...

Juria's very, very mixed realities

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

In Second Life®, Juria Yoshikawa is the odd looking woman who took the grid by storm with her colorful abstract kinetic art for three seasons and then abruptly disappeared for several months, because - in Real Life - Juria is the male 40 year old Lance Shields, a Tokyo-based multimedia artist and creative strategist at a global marketing company who has been all but consumed with his job + working on an MBA.

Now Juria is coming out of from under her textbooks, thanks to a retrospective show sponsored by Atlanta's Kennesaw State University in Second Life (teleport directly from here), and a first... a showing of her work in Real Life.



While Juria works on a scale larger than conventional gallery work because she is interested in people experiencing the work in a physical way - flying through them, riding on them and socializing within the art - her creations will be shown and sold via FLART (flat art) during the Boston Cyber Arts Festival at Jeff Lipsky's (aka Filthy Fluno in SL - Yes, the one who was featured in last month's New York Times) CounterpART Gallery April 23 thru May 10.

See also:

* Haute on the grid... Being dOts - Machinimator and artist Evo Szuyuan captured the experience on video
Seeing Spots, Being Dots (Dance of Mayhem Plus Homogeneity) from Juria Yoshikawa on Vimeo.

* The Hall of Twisty Smears... Rezzed

* Memespelunk - Second Life through Juria Yoshikawa's eyes: Expect the unexpected

Blue Mars limited Beta to begin in June

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Blue Mars, the upcoming virtual world that will use the bleeding-edge game engine CryEngine2, is slated to begin its limited Beta testing in June, according to Jim Sink, Avatar Reality's vp.



The virtual worlds community is concerned that Blue Mars has been built for systems running Vista (!) and that only select developers will be able to create content in-world, but we are hoping against hope that we will be able to persuade them to make some significant changes before launch.

If a picture tells a thousand stories, what does the new Koinup slide show do for us?

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Our friend and partner at Koinup, Pierluigi Casolari is a darn good listener and community builder. Earlier this week, I DM'ed him via Twitter, asking if we could create and post slide shows on our blogs. This morning he DM'ed back to say that he and his wizard tech team had whipped up a widget just for us. All you have to do is set up the slide show with your own pics in Koinup and then go to "share this" for two dozen options. Now I can show you - all at once - my Bond-ish pics taken at Juria Yoshikawa's retrospective, presented by Atlanta, Georgia's Kennesaw State University (teleport directly from here).


Koinup is an inclusive social networking site for all Virtual Worlds that permits storage and sharing of imagery: photography, Machinima, and "storyboards." 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.

How can we explain what you are missing?

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Avatars often grapple with how to demonstrate what it is that appeals to us so much about art, architecture and fashion in Second Life®, to people who will not or cannot log in. It's a dilemma akin to sharing a new color or flavor, because the immersive qualities of the 3D experience cannot be conveyed in words or even via film, given its flatness. So we take photographs. We create machinima. And we talk and talk and blog and twitter. Still, you are left out until you decide to take the plunge and devote sufficient time to learn how to move your camera and your avatar around.

I recently spent a pleasant hour chatting with a journalist about my own appraisal of content creation in virtual worlds, and while I'm an evangelist and like to think myself persuasive, I was unable to secure his interest in joining me to have a look with his own eyes. Still, we'll keep trying, and experienced early adopters that we are (remember when we tried to tell you about something called the Internet?), we know we will win in the end.

In the meantime, despite its 2 dimensional limitations, we'll blog about the experience with you however we can, sharing machinima like this stunner by artist Lyric Lundquist...

Be sure to click the HD button for higher quality transmission


... or Sepp Schimmer's inaugural video, featuring Bryn Oh's Immersiva and GutterBlood Spoonhammer's Error sims.*

Be sure to click the HD button for higher quality transmission


* A sim is a simulator and virtual region hosted by a single server CPU. You real-life folks call it an "island."

Hasta la vista...

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.

The Hall of Wonders; wherein Escher meets Hogwarts

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

I love roaming the sandboxes, watching people's imaginations materialize into three-dimensional objects and places that can be shared with others. Yesterday, I discovered an intriguing work-in-progress that holds much promise for virtual world newbies.

"I grew up with books of Escher all around, as my brother was into him. The first picture I drew with shading was an Escher-like image of a well, so when I thought of what kind of space I could introduce to Second Life® to make people want to explore in different ways, the first thing I thought of was Escher."

So said Second Life resident and 3D artist Colin Fizgig who's been busy at the IBM sandbox (teleport directly from here), building the Hall of Wonders, a highly unusual edifice that will later be used as an IBM learning site. Perspective is at play here, as Colin is introducing unusual vanishing points and forcing us to reconsider what is "up," and what is "down."


The main building brings the tricky stairs at Hogwarts to mind

"The effect I'm going for is a seamless transition from a narrow tower on a cliff, to going through the front door and being in a small room... then going into a huge hall and going down instead of up. Sort of warp their idea of space," explained Colin when I spoke with him this morning.


The Tower is still under construction in the sandbox

The exterior of the building is angular, with numerous front doors. "It is designed to make people uncomfortable in normal WASD movement, so they learn to do camming (use their camera), teleports, and just explore by clicking," added Colin.



Visitors to the Hall of Wonders will be gifted with a HUD that will hint at the building's story lines and what happens to the characters there, including the inventor, the guard and his girlfriend.


The HUD visitors will wear, featured here with the image of the "inventor" (actually Colin's avatar). Photo provided by Colin Fizgig (click to see large)

I'll post the slurl once the Hall of Wonders has been completed and installed at its destination point.