Ramblings - Nessuno Myoo, Romy Nayer and Ux Hax, and Sadness

By far the most interesting exhibition I've seen this week is Nessuno Myoo's 'Tales in the Shadows' dedicated to four of the masters of horror fiction.
Nessuno is a brilliant builder, but also a brilliant artist who is able to make work that stirs your soul. There's something horrific here that you can't quite describe, but we are both drawn to and repelled by it, both comfortable and uncomfortable.
Perfect capture of the atmosphere of the four horror works that inspired the build:The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Nessuno is a master of creating textures with beautiful, rich patina, and another work with simliar use of textures with rich patina that I saw this week was Romy Nayer and Uz Hax' full sim build at LEA.

This is an interactive piece executed very well with excellent building skills, texturing and scripting. It takes quite a while to rez, but is well worth the wait.
There's touches of humour and more serious meaning and a sort of ethereal feel to the build that fits well with the theme of chosing your own destiny and choices we make.

At times there's also a reminisence of AM's work, which I miss very much in Second Life.
Thinking of AM leads me to be very thankful to have experienced six years of looking at wonderful virtual works like these. Work that has inspired, challenged, and added to my bank of visual memories, much of which has now disappeared into the ether.
Alizarin Goldflake has summed up the sadness we all feel at the disintegration of some of the best galleries in Second Life.These are organisations and people who have encouraged, faciltitated, and worked very hard to have brought us to this place where we can experience work of the sort of quality, strength and sophistication written about above. They have been the parents that have allowed virtual art to thrive, and it is sad to see them gone or struggling to survive.

Ramblings - two best shows this week

I've been going through new and old footage from Second Life and Inworldz, making machinima and having a lovely time revisiting exhibitions fromm the past.

This week in Second Life I visited Shellina Winkler's latest exhibition at Aneli's Gallery. Shellina is one of six artists currently exhibiting in the gallery. The owner Aneli Abeyanti is working hard to show new and interesting work and develop a following for the gallery. For me Shellina's work was by far the best in the show, but of course it's well known I like her work a lot, and the rest is well worth seeing too.

Everyone seems to be going black and white at the moment (including me) and Shellina's small sculptural works without colour resonate with her usual sophisticated and restrained approach and are a joy for anyone interested in graphic design to photograph (and see).

One of the other interesting shows I saw this week was Ultraviolet Alter's 'Mind Pageant' at torno Kohime Foundation. I'm a sucker for anything that inlcudes text, but there's also a fine feeling of colour and movement to this exhibition. Worth spending some time exploring.

I've done a short machinima of Ultraviolet's installation here.

Asmita Duranjaya at UWA

It took three tries for me to finally find my way into Asmita Duranjaya’s build at UWA.
The full sim show UWA Sky Series, Between Orient and Occident, is 3 different takes on a single theme, rather than a collaborative work, and so far I have looked at Asmita’s section, as well as becoming hopelessly lost and confused when I stumbled into Chapter’s section by mistake. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lost touch with things, or am particularly dense, but I am not enchanted by puzzles and quests and artifices that make finding your way around more complicated than it might otherwise be. I came to see some art……..and I found the puzzle aspect a disconcerting sideline.
I’ve been to quite a few exhibitions where there’s a plethora of explanation or instruction, HUDs that block your view, barriers to movement, complicated pathways, and more. I don’t much like it – I immediately bridle when someone tries to control my viewing experience like this.

In Asmita’s exhibition there is purpose in the sequential and controlled nature of the experience. While the building skills and graphics in the exhibition are not always excellent, like most of her work this installation has a strong intellectual foundation and its roots are in the narrative rather than the purely visual. Her preference for using books as a means of communication fits with her academic background, her desire to inform and educate, and the strong story telling element in her work. The visuals are perhaps the weakest element, at their strongest when they are used as illustrative tableaux - a format in which Asmita excels.

While I can’t say I admired all of the build, I do very much admire the serious and intellectual approach Asmita takes to making her work. It is a pleasure to see an artist whose desire is to make and communicate something meaningful and full of thought. One can feeel and appreciate the time, effort, knowledge and questioning behind the build, the sort of strong foundation that is missing in many works of virtual 'art'.

In the cityscape I think she comes closest to integrating the visual and narrative experience into a coherent and very pleasing whole, and this is the part of the build I liked most.

For those who’d like more information, Thirza and others have written at length about the build.

My advice in viewing the work is to surrender to Asmita’s control via the HUD and various interactive elements. That is really how you see the exhibition, not just by looking at the build. By doing so you take full advantage of the powerful intellectual base in the build.

Imagination

'Imagination' is the name of the new sim I am working on in Inworldz thanks to the generosity of Jeri Rahja who seems to be determined to singelhandedly make a difference for artists in this new virtual frontier.
At this stage I have no idea what might come of it, just that it's both exciting and a bit scary to now be expected to produce something/anything worthwhile.
Later in the year I'll be using my own sim for a real life project introducing some local high school students to the joys of making art in virtual worlds, so this is a great bonus to have another sim to play with to make my own art.
The bean bags are out for anyone who wants to visit, but nothing much is happening yet.

Happy New Year Ponderings

Happy New Year to all my virtual and not so virtual friends.
When I look back over the year there’s been a lot of changes, a lot of things lost from Second Life, a shifting of the sands, a change in the focus of the world, and a realignment of the art and creativity sector.

I try to stay away from the rumour mills and just use what I can, but for the first time this year changes in virtual worlds have made me question how I can best enjoy my involvment. The biggest of these changes for me was the establishment of LEA, which made it less attractive and less viable for individual artists and galleries to maintain a presence in Second Life. The corporatization and commodification of creativity is nothing new, but for me it marked the end of an era.

Many galleries have closed in Second Life, including my own, and while this possibly has as much to do with the economic climate as anything else, for me, and others, finances weren’t the driving factor.

It’s been a year of personal decisions ….scaling down my commitment to land in Second Life and buying a sim in Inworldz being the two big ones. The availability of a cheaper and viable alternative to Second Life for artists and creative has been a driving factor in the success of alternative worlds like Inworldz.

I think small is beautiful (and manageable) and I’m pleased that these new worlds still have the sense of experimentation, raw settlement and cooperation that made Second Life an exciting place to be six years ago. Unfortunately, Linden Lab, as a larger organization, has been forced to go for lowest common demonimator, impersonal and corporate solutions for its user base, with the result that much that differentiated it from the real world has been lost.

I was over looking at Lanes List a few days ago and thought about our need to celebrate the survivors, things that have been constant over the years, those who have continued to make quiet contributions to the development of virtual world art. And there are many – like pirats, Nordan, and Rose, Arte Libera, Sasun, and………..all those artists and places we love.

Soror recently blogged about a couple of things that are pertinent to the continued development of virtual world art.

First, crossovers between the real and the virtual are becoming more and more common and real life audiences have become more accepting of and interested in virtual art. As someone who has integrated the virtual into my real life art practice from the start I can see this shift becoming stronger and stronger, and as Soror has suggested, perhaps we need to be documenting and capturing these crossover opportunities.

Second, Soror also suggested there’s a need for ‘naming’, for a category to embrace what virtual world artists do. We have ‘grown up’ there are artists doing the most amazing things, who have now had a longish career in virtual art, and perhaps it’s time we recognized that we, as the pioneers might need to develop a cohesive approach to what we do that can be recognized by real world curators and historians. Miso has pointed out in her comments just how broad this field is and how finding a name might be the trickiest part.

So….thank you everyone who has brought me joy and smiles and inspiration over 2011. I am continually amazed by the creativity of my fellow artists in virtual worlds, and I look forward to more in 2012.

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Having written about a lot of other builds currently showing at pirats it's time to post about my own installation 'Who Has Seen the Wind?'.
As always Newbab and Merlina have been very accommodating and patient, allowing me to take up much more space than I should with this build, and even demolishing one of their galleries so I could be moved a little not to crowd Nexuno. Thanks Newbab!

Although it's mid winter in the Northern Hemisphere here in Queensland, Australia it's the middle of hot, humid summer and the beginning of cyclone season when we watch the weather patterns and the skies. I started building 'Who Has Seen the Wind' on the first of our windy weather in November and couldn't get the lines of a childhood poem (by Christina Rossetti I think) out of my mind. The images around the build are 16 frame animations of the Australian native vegetation in a small park near my home.

I wanted to capture that edgy, unsettled feeling you get with warm winds and cloudy skies. The blurring of vision as the world moves and moves again.
Having been a sailor I thought of boats and synoptic charts and weather vanes..........and living in the tropics I remembered the long, boring hours of waiting when there's a cyclone watch.

I've done a machinma that you can see HERE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR4frPARO3s


Hope you enjoy it.

pirats - Friday Ramblings

Since it's the holiday season I'm doing a Friday gallery tour this week. I wandered over to pirats and there's more than enough there in this round of exhibitions to fill in a few hours. There's a heap of good stuff, especially Fuschia Nightfire's installation that makes a simple idea into something exceptional, and Robin Moore's strange domino build that has surprises everywhere you look.

My favourite was Blue Tsuki's piece (right and below). I haven't seen much of Blue's work in Second Life, but it always hits you right between the eyes. I remember the piece he did for the human rights exhibition and have used images of that build in real life presentations a few times to show how relevant and meaningful virtual art can be.

He's an excellent builder with a graphic sensibility that somehow clicks with me. Having found his work again I'm now going to try to find some more.

It was also good to see Alosio Congrejo's work again. It's a very complex and mulitfaceted piece. It could perhaps have been shown better in a separate space, as it's hard to get a good view from various angles.There's a lot to see in this piece and a lot of different approaches to making the work.

Last, but certainly not least, I spent some time in Trill Zapatero's interactive installation.
Trill has her own very distinctive style. Somehow I always get the feeling of being back in the sixties when I see her work. There's a strong retro element, and I guess her messages about caring, love and peace remind me of the bright dreams we had back then. This is a 'sweet' piece with warmth and fun and a graphic element that is zany and pure Trill. Go there to have some fun and a feel good time in a well built and well scripted piece.