A machinima on "Acquarella"

With Actor has made a machinima of Alizarin's "Acquarella":



Thanks, With!

Honour McMillan on "Acquarella" and "Adagio"

Honour McMillan has written a good post on the current show at Split Screen, Alizarin Goldflake's "Acquarella" and Blue Tsuki's "Adagio."

Machinima on "Acquarella" and "Adagio"

Kara Trapdoor has made a short machinima on "Acquarella" and "Adagio". Take a look!

Alizarin Goldflake and Blue Tsuki at Split Screen through April

During April, Split Screen hosts installations by Alizarin Goldflake and Blue Tsuki. Sometimes the works created at Split Screen are large sculptures.  Both of the builds this time are immersive environments, using local sound, windlight, and the full space. Alizarin's is narrative, Blue's more conceptual.

Alizarin's piece is Acquarella: After the Apocalypse. Acquarella is a fable that started its life in a conversation Ali had with White Lebed, which led to a machinima that Alizarin and others created. She later developed it into immersive builds in InWorldz (another virtual world, based on OpenSim, where an increasing number of SL artists have been working). The installation at Split Screen is a version of her work in Inworldz, which few in Second Life have seen. She presents the first two episodes, "Disaster!" and "Perfection." The entire fable is told in a notecard available at the installation.

Alizarin Goldflake, Acquarella: After the Apocalypse

Blue describes his build, Adagio, as a vision and a meditation. His notecard includes a poem:

Our dust pours from singing urns
floating into a common sea
windmills churn
pumping that essence
into a fiery ether

Urns are born from the flowers in the water and float into the sky. Windmills turn and occasionally send waves through the water or bubbles upward. Music like windchimes plays. Ribbons of light wind their way through the air.

Blue Tsuki, Adagio

Both builds have recommended sky settings.  For Alizarin's, please use midnight. For Blue's, set to 7:05 PM if possible; otherwise 6:00 PM (sunset) is fine. Phoenix and Firestorm should see these settings come into effect automatically. Turn sound up, because they have rich soundscapes as well.

There are already a few blog posts about the builds:

Quan Lavender on Acquarella and Adagio
Alizarin on her own blog

The installations are located in a new way.  Previously, each artist built on separate parcels. This time, Blue has the entire ground level, and Alizarin's fills a sky level. The landing point is a sky platform with teleports to each build. As it happens, this will be the pattern for the next couple of shows at Split Screen. It's experiment time!

Linden Labs to Third Party Viewers: "Get Lost"

This just in from Linden Labs: they've changed their Third Party Viewer policy. They claim that some of the changes have to do with privacy (I'm not convinced they're legitimate privacy issues, but OK). But one change has nothing to do with privacy -- it's strictly intended to squash innovation:

2.k: You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

LL will break many of TPV features in the next few days. So goodbye region windlights until LL's own viewer gets that feature ... if it ever does. Region windlights were an extraordinary boon to the arts community. [EDIT: see discussion in comments.]

The announcement adds,

We encourage Third Party Developers to continue innovating with unique user interfaces, niche features, and ways of interacting with the virtual world, and we look forward to working in partnership with developers on ideas they have for new or improved shared experiences for all of Second Life. We want to incorporate more innovative new features into Second Life to improve the experience for all users, and we encourage TPV developers to submit proposals through our standard process.

Yeah, right. It's horseshit. Basically all TPVs are allowed to do is tinker with the user interface and a couple of other things.  And as I read it, if the TPV developers come up with ideas, basically they have to work for Linden Labs for free.

See the Phoenix announcement for more.

Honour McMillan on Split Screen, also photos

Honour McMillan has written an excellent post on shellina's and Pinkpink's installations at Split Screen ... which is a good thing for me, given my continuing inability to find time to write my own blog post on them.

But at least now I have a few pictures:

shellina Winkler: Apocalypse 2012: Who's Afraid of the End of the World?

Pinkpink Sorbet: Lots of Nybbles

shellina Winkler and Pinkpink Sorbet at Split Screen During February

During February, Split Screen  is hosting shellina Winkler's "Apocalypse 2012: Who's Afraid of the End of the World?" and Pinkpink Sorbet's "Lots of Nibbles." I have no time to blog right now, but Quan Lavender wrote two excellent posts so read them instead!

Post on shellina
Post on Pinkpink

Here's the SLURL to the entrance.