Selavy Oh's "Der Schauer" and Oberon Onmura's "Wave Fields"

I'm badly behind on blogging, which is a pity, since there have been some excellent builds recently. Unfortunately Haveit Neox's Second Libations is gone already; its destruction was quite a spectacle, I took lots of photos, and maybe I'll get around to posting them sometime.

But there are several builds currently on view that I've been telling friends about, and it's time I blogged them. I'll talk about two in this post, and try to get to some others later. I wish I could discuss them in more detail ... ah well.

Selavy Oh, Der Schauer at LEA24

In Der Schauer (The Shower, as in rain shower), Selavy brings together many of the strands she's been working on over recent years. She has also taken advantage of the new option of putting a windlight setting into an entire region so the sky is gray in all viewers, not just Phoenix and Firestorm (be sure you have the environment editor set to the default). In her blog post, she writes that "this installation has no static elements, everything is growing, falling, changing." By "everything," she means everything, and some things change in response to your own activities. Near the landing point there's a cloud of small cubes swirling around, leaving white trails behind them, occasionally bumping into each other, and sometimes changing color (you must have shadows on in order to see this, although you may find that it kills anti-alias). Larger cubes slowly shoot through the sky as well, leaving cubes behind them, bouncing on objects or the ground and taking off again. On some cubes, images flash on the surface. White towers like needles rise up from the ground, and occasionally collapse down again, making a clatter as pieces hit the ground; if you bump into or land on top of one of the towers, it will collapse immediately. Large sticks scattered about in piles will move if you bump into them. large circles of light form in the water and slowly disappear again. Step into the water, and land forms under your feet; land slowly changes on its own as well, so that if you return to the landing point it may have a different shape. Selavy also has two bots: Positive Hinterland stands motionless near the middle of the sim -- I've seen her get buried by the land -- while Negative Overland wanders aimlessly about the sim. (I'm not certain, but I think these bots are needed for terraforming operations, and when Negative bumps into things or walks onto the water, she'll alter the setting.) Along a circular perimeter there are occasional aurora borealis effects as well. Der Schauer is the ultimate expression of Heraclitus's dictum, "You can never step into the same river twice."

(Click images to enlarge)

Oberon Onmura, Wave Fields at LEA20

Oberon's build is all about motion too, but following his typical style, it takes a minimalist approach. He has split his sim into quadrants, each populated with a field of cubes floating above water, halfway into a large colored translucent screen. In each quadrant, one more or less random cube begins turning like a wheel. The ones next to it pick up this motion, and then the ones next to them, creating a diamond-shaped wave of movement across the quadrant, highlighted by the color sides that the cubes acquire when they start in motion (an interaction of the shaded cover over the quadrant, the black bottom side of the cube, and the angle of sunlight). Sometimes two cubes in different parts of the quadrant start turning one shortly after the other. Sometimes the wave stops at the quadrant's border; occasionally a wave passes through the border into the next quadrant; at other times; once in a while two waves interfere with each other. As the cubes turn, they stir up spray from the water, giving the waves' movement the sense of intense physical force. Once in a while, a field of cubes is switched off -- the cubes become translucent, shake out of their moorings, and in a thick mist of spray they sink to the bottom and disappear. The quadrant is repopulated with cubes in a different manner within each quadrant: methodically dropped from a dispenser in the air, emerging from below, randomly appearing and falling into place, or tumbling out from a jumbled flying mass.

(Click images to enlarge)

Although both Oberon's Wave Fields and Selavy's Der Schauer pivot around the concept of change, the two installations also contrast. On the one hand, Der Schauer is primarily oriented around randomness and arbitrariness; Wave Fields, on the other hand, begins with the seed of a random cube launching into motion, and sometimes quadrants are refilled in an arbitrary way, but its focus ultimately falls on the powerful yet orderly expansion of waves until they crash into their borders. You need to meander about Der Schauer in order to discover its many elements; Wave Fields, however, calls for stillness and observation, even meditation -- in fact Oberon provides a tower where one can take a seat scripted with camera control, giving you a perfect view of the wave patterns. These are two of the many "must see" installations currently on view.

Machinima of Eupa's build at Split Screen

Eupalinos Ugajin created a brief machinima of his build at Split Screen, "D'ailleurs grâce au Soleil l'herbe est plus..." -- last day to see it is 31 Dec!



Direct link on Vimeo here.

Misprint Thursday's "Digital Glove" receives the overall First Prize at UWA; Hypatia Pickens for "Love Prayer"

Misprint Thursday's "Digital Glove" received the overall First Prize for the University of Western Australia's year-long 3D Open Art Challenge! I'm truly excited for her, and proud that Split Screen was able to host it for three months so more people could see this fascinating and groundbreaking work. Congratulations, Mis!



Also Hypatia Pickens won the the Special Award for Human Heart for her machinima "Love Prayer," which is set partly in soror Nishi's "Boogaloo" at Split Screen in October. Congratulations to her as well!

Good commentary on Artee and Eupu's pieces by Honour McMillan

Insightful comments by Honour McMillan on the current show:

On Artée's Let These Facts Be Known: Gobsmacked in Second Life, Part One

On Eupa's D’ailleurs grace au soleil, l’herbe est plus: Gobsmacked in Second Life, Part Two

Thanks, Honour!

Happy Anniversary! with Artistide Despres and Eupalinos Ugajin at Split Screen in December

Artistide Despres and Eupalinos Ugajin are December's artists at Split Screen. As one might expect, their works contrast artistically as thoroughly as one can imagine!

Artée's Let These Facts Be Known brings the Occupy movement to Split Screen. Although it's not Artée's first political work in SL (for example, her Alea Fukishima concerns the nuclear disaster in Japan), it is a highly direct artistic response and I'm proud to have it as the first political artwork at Split Screen. The title is taken from the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, which presents a list of 23 realities of political and economic life in the US and often paralleled elsewhere, ranging from the foreclosure crisis to bailouts to the commodification of privacy to torture and more. The list, although lengthy, is far from complete (one of the Occupy movement's points). One thing a list doesn't easily show is how the realities behind these grievances are interconnected, and Occupy Wall Street's Arts and Culture Group has given the Declaration a visual representation that literally draws the connections among the grievances and beyond -- in many ways it is superior to the textual Declaration itself. You can see the drawing at the link above, and Artée uses it as the artistic, moral, metaphoric and physical foundation of her installation.

(Click photos to enlarge.)

Artée has not just quoted the Occupy declaration in her piece. As you walk around, you hear the sounds of protest. Not satisfied with the pleasant clouds supplied by the standard viewer settings, she has added smaller, darker clouds that dim the city and suggested a polluted earth. And then there are the buildings ... which don't simply represent a city. Artée exploits a bug in SL's implementation of transparency so that the skyscrapers seem to slip in and out of each other, far and near trade places, and as soon as one leaves the work's literal and ethical center, you are lost. This detail brings Let These Facts Be Known to surpass the blunt, pedestrian hammer of so much "committed" art and propels it into the realm occupied (sic!) by such works as Picasso's Guernica and Goya's The Third of May 1808. Artee's installation is as immersive as one can imagine: photos cannot do it justice.

In late October, when Miso Susanowa was planning to occupy the LEA sandbox (to the extent one can "occupy" in SL), she joked to me that she wanted to occupy Split Screen too. "Go for it!", I said, or words to that effect. It turns out I got my wish!

NOTE: this is a MESH build, so you will need to need to use a mesh-enabled viewer.

Eupa's D'ailleurs grace au Soleil... is ... well the first thing you'll notice is that it's enormous! You land at the top on a large disk with a sort of iris, jump down the enticing hole in the middle, and ... welcome to Eupa's world! Anyone who's visited his One Day My Cow Will Come -- and you have, haven't you? -- will recognize his characteristic loopy surrealism, his curious machines and objects that sometimes seem to have minds of their own. One occasionally sets off to terraform the place. Eupa's notecard has a "spoiler alert" section so I won't put spoilers here. One word of advice, be careful where you step or what you click on. Oh and don't bother Valdrade, he's concentrating on doing his job.

Be sure to check "Allow Media to auto-play when entering a region" in Preferences for this installation.

Let These Facts Be Known and D'ailleurs grace au Soleil will be showing at Split Screen through 31 Dec.

Will the real Salman Rushdie please stand up?

The New York Times reports that Salman Rushdie, who most people know by his pen name Salman Rushdie, had his Facebook page deactivated and reassigned to a certain Ahmed Rushdie, who happens to share Salman Rushdie's body and own his passport.

Within two hours, after a torrent of Tweets, Facebook reversed itself and allowed Salman Rushdie to be Salman Rushdie. It did not escape the present observer of irony that Twitter is quite comfortable with pseudonyms, so Facebook's "about Face" was particularly delicious.

Facebook could not be reached for comment, as its identity could not be verified under its cloud of corporate greed. All emails were forwarded to its nom de crime, "Mark Zuckerberg," who is not an actual human.

Machinima set partly in soror Nishi's "Boogaloo"

Hypatia Pickens created a machinima called "Love Prayer" set partly in soror Nishi's "Boogaloo." Hypatia wrote to me that she "turned [it] into a 'Tam Linn' tale of a fairy girl who longed for a human man and tried to take him away." Enjoy!

"Boogaloo" itself has now closed.  Stay tuned for the next installations, opening in December!


"Love Prayer," by Hypatia Pickens