Reflect On This: Dactyls Are Dharma,Too

Reblogged from Digital Rabbit Hole:

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Where to begin?
I will not make this post too long or long-winded..I really just invite you to scroll down and see the YouTube at the bottom hopefully in HD and Full screen.
I use this little creation as another perfect example of crazy creatives getting together to produce a few minutes of visual and vocal insanity. As those who read my blog regularly know, one of the things I most love about our Second Life, is the possibility to collaborate on artistic projects.

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Y'all know how shy I am and reluctant to blow my own horn :) but I can't resist passing this along. I did National Poetry Writing Month in my RL weblog (maybe I should post them all here too!), and shared some of the results (one poem a day for a month) with a few SL friends. Karima Hoisan (see prior post) liked the rhythm in one of them, and to my enormous surprise she and her frequent collaborator Nat made this extremely neat machinima around it. From little nuts do mighty oak trees grow! :)

Paths through virtuality

So a bag-zillion years ago I weblogged (probably more than once) about an interconnected random adventure in SL, where a friend and I landed in some cool place after skydiving, looked up the picks of the creator of some neat object there, went to their store or something, and so on through various hours worth of fun randomness.

It’s been too long since I went nude skydiving :) but I still have these kinda small adventures all the time, I just don’t weblogify about them as much, because I don’t weblogify about anything as much, because I am lazy person.

But here’s one!

As extremely long-time readers will know, one of my very early living places in SL was a little shack on the PIER sim (which I found in turn from making friends with a bartender at The Elbow Room, which stretches the story back just about to my first months in SL I think), and when that sim shut down I started renting a room in Extropia.

Eventually the Extropians redesigned the sim and didn’t have those little rental rooms available anymore, but I stayed in the Extropians group because it was interesting, and after awhile I started to notice cross-posting in the Extropians group from the Dakini Land / Western Geisha / Companion’s Guild group, see for instance this probably-related video.

I visited the Dakini Land sim somewhere in there, but as I recall I was heavily RL-distracted at the time, and couldn’t really figure out what it was. Then I got a notice about (I think it was) some graduation ceremonies that were going on there, and there was going to be dancing and music and poetry-reading and stuff, so I went, and it was a good time, and the people were very friendly and interesting.

(I eventually did figure out a little of what was going on, which led me to start watching old episodes of “Firefly” on Netflix, where I was by coincidence already watching old episodes of Buffy; everything connects!)

Probably the performance that struck me most at that ceremony was a live on-voice reading of original poetry by Karima Hoisan. I took her picture and gave her a copy (as I am constantly doing, which is one reason my friends list is so absurdly large), and she looked at my profile and saw a Pick there from New Toulouse, which I had added to replace a Burn2 pick when Burn2 ended, and having connections with New Toulouse herself, she IMd, me and we talked, and continued talking now and then thereafter.

Eventually she and frequent collaborator Natascha Randt were working on this machinima about scripting, and I happened to have a script that fit into it nicely, with the result that some of my LSL code ended up in a machinima, which was extremely cool. (Note that it’s not a dry and geeky machinima, either; you must watch it if you haven’t, it is amazing.)

And then later on, looking around at random things on the web as I constantly do, I came across Karima’s machinima series “The Two”, and realized that I had randomly watched an episode from the middle of it somewhere many months before, but not had enough focus to figure out its context or anything.

Ms. Hoisan wisely suggested that if I wanted the full effect I should first read / listen to / experience her “Colored Dreams” pieces first, and then “The Two” in order.

So I did that, and now at the end of this particular branch of the chain of causality (rather than, say, the one that includes having a lovely tea ceremony on a satellite), I am highly recommending to you my readers that you experience both in that order also:

The Colored Dreams (page one page older to start at the start of Part One)

and

The Two (Also page back one to start at the start)

Don’t expect to consume them all in one sitting :) I found that I wanted to stop for hours or days in between just to sort of let it all sink in. It’s hard to describe or characterize; might be called fantasy or even SF, or a series or dreams, or meditations on the human condition and the nature of power and love and trust, or lots of other things. But really, like all good art, it tends to slip away from any words that you try to tie it up in.

And if you’d like to hear the artist live :) she will be doing another reading this very tomorrow, and I recommend that also, and so we tie the story up to the present day.

So! That’s my path through virtual space for today. Now I will go and find some more. Or maybe I will take a nap…

Fishing, Shopping, and Art

I have been doing lots of things, just not weblogging about them. :) I did some tiny bit of the Twisted Hunt, and Steam Hunt 8, and I’ve been building some houses for fun. Might even put some of them up on the Marketplace or in a store or something. But that’s for another post. :)

This one is about fishing while shopping! And Art!

That is me fishing! While shopping! Or actually while waiting to see if any Ds will come up on the lucky boards. As it says under the picture on Flickr, Sn@tch is one of my favorite guilty pleasures in SL. It’s a big sprawling clothing store, not high couture in the slightest, a bit punky and trashy, but a huge variety, much of which I love (I have to ration my trips to the outlet annex for the sake of my clothing budget).

AND they have this great Game Room with lucky boards and mobvends and gatches, and a 7Seas fishing pool where you can catch not only the usual 7Seas fish and stuff, but also parts of special Sn@tch outfits. A great place to just veg out in consumer mode.

And where but SL could you fish casually while waiting for your letter to come up in a clothing store?

:)

Then less rabid-consumery, here is a great short film about Gracie Kendal and her RL self and their art: A Comfortable Skin. Definitely worth watching!
 

And that is all for now, off to fiddle with houses more.

Horns on the street in Costa Rica

So I still don’t use voice to speak of (haha!) in Second Life, for pretty much all of the reasons I gave so long ago; but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, and when good things happen I do like to mention them.

The other night I was hanging about as usual, and some of us were on voice and some weren’t (which is always an interesting dynamic), and gradually noticed this sound of distant music.

“There’s someone playing a horn out in the street outside my window, can you hear that?” someone said; someone who happens to be physically RL-located in Costa Rica, which is a place far away from here.

“Yes!’ We could indeed.

And that was extremely neat.

I took a little online survey about SL the other day, and the first question was like “What do you primarily use Second Life for?”, and the possible answers were things like education and training and business networking, and buying and selling, building and scripting, and stuff like that. I had to check “other (specify)” just to write in “social interaction”.

If the second thing hadn’t happened before the first thing, maybe I would have written “listening to the horn from the street in Costa Rica”.

(This is why I’ve said in various places that virtual worlds will be important for business not primarily because they are directly useful for business, but because they will revolutionize the way we live, the ways we interact, and that means big changes to revenue streams, and that means business.)

But business aside, this is the kind of thing I love about SL; lying around writing scripts into parts of the world that didn’t used to do anything, watching fireworks on demand, sitting listening to live music and browsing the audience’s profiles, and talking to friends I’ve never met, hearing in the background of their voices the sound of horns on the street in Costa Rica…

became a blur, because they moved so fast…

Here is a machinima (machinema?) of a poem by v talented friend Karima.
 

 
I am happy to brag :) that I contributed in a tiny way by providing scripted examples of ways to make papers sort of blow around, one of which ended up in the video. Yay me!

Nat (the videographer and cat) and Karima (the poet and voice) do all various neat things; you should “check them out”.

SL Auction; Belle Harbor Yacht Club build fundraiser for Belle Harbor Victims of hurricane Sandy

Mostly a pointer to this item on friend RJ’s weblog:

It was just in April that I was building a new discovery, the lovely Belle Harbor Yacht Club (1914) is a quintessential example of a private yacht club during the golden age of sail’s twilight. Below is a picture of the yacht club in Second Life, and a gallery of the yacht club as it looks today. The trouble with Real Life is the real weather that came with the storm this October. Sandy has changed a lot of lives, including those close to me. You can see more pics on my facebook gallery. An auction of this never-sold item is raising funds for the victims of this storm. The auction will be taking place for three days, at this location, bids will be taken, all proceeds will go to victim relief in the Rockaways. Winning bid takes home the Yacht Club Build on Nov. 23, at 3pm ET. Thank you everyone for donating!

Pictures and stuff on original post. A good cause!

Objectification ain’t the half of it…

So there’s this Single Frame Stories thing, which has a weblog and a flickr group and everything, and once a week they post a Prompt, like “grave mistake” or “depth perception” or (this week) “objectification”, and everyone (well, not everyone, but…) either emails their pictures or posts them to the flickr group, and the picture is allowed to have One Standard Tweet’s Worth of text along with it, and they all go up on the weblog for everyone to admire, and there’s no lame “voting” or “winners” or anything (I don’t think), they are just there.

And I’d known this was going on because I admire botgirl and Whiskey Monday for (their hawt AVs, and) their enormous creativity, but I hadn’t been doing it myself because really it was good enough that other people were doing it, and I was busy leveling my DK’s Inscription skill and dancing in random Australian sims’ dance clubs, and similarly important things.

But then there was some popular demand from one of the very creative people who was doing it, and I am nothing if not a pushover, so…

My (first?) entry for this week, “Objectification ain’t the half of it”:

Best viewed larger, of course, and just what the heck is actually going on is left to the reader and/or viewer.

But there we are! I am pretty much pleased, and may do it again some decade. :)

Ooops, sry!

So personx (not eir real name) is a relatively young newborn who friended me randomly at some club, like newborns do, and IMs me equally randomly now and then.

I just thought this was funny…

[19:04] personx: teleport me
[19:04] personx: fast
[19:04] personx: i’m falling off a cliff
[19:05] Second Life: personx is offline.
[19:06] Dale (dale.innis): lol oops too late!
[19:06] Second Life: User not online – message will be stored and delivered later.

I should watch my IMs more carefully; you never know when a quick reply may be called for!

Karima@Poetry Reflections ~ Costa Rica Sims ~ Re-scehduled to Thursday May 3rd-1pmslt

Reblogged from Digital Rabbit Hole:

I want to cordially invite you to my upcoming reading this month, at Poetry Reflections on Costa Rica Sims of Dream Seeker Estates. Those who have attended before, know what a beautiful venue it is, a true Arabic Salon for poetry, and I promise you a full hour of my best poetry, music, and imagery combined. I will be reading for the first time, three new ones, that I hope you will enjoy.

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Live poetry readings highly recommended! This one is probably too early in the day for me, but I've heard Ms. Hoisan elsewhere, and she is Teh Awesomes... (Also: what does this "reblog" button actually do?)

More Pictures!

Okay, so the vehicle that I mentioned needs pictures.

(Some of the below don’t seem to have compressed wonderfully well; click through to flickr and press “L” or look at the larger sizes for perhaps better renders.)

That’s the Carmageddon Tank from L+N Signature Designs; I am standing smugly by it in the Hunt outfit from Cosmic Stream Designs and the Deconstructor part of The Machine from Radeon Automatic.

And then inside…

… and showing off the cannon, boom!

… and the machine guns (in the dark) pocketa-pocketa!

Of course it also flies…

… and rises up on its mechanical haunches for driving over lesser things in the twilight.

It also leaps up into the air (all of this controlled by buttons on a not overly huge HUD), but I’m not up to a video.

Okay, enough of that. :) Here are a couple of things from NS6 Engineering:

A cursed tower and a Cloudrider airship, both nice and free, and if they are a bit old-SL in style well that’s nice and nostalgic.

Relaxing in one of the plusher venues of the Hunt:

This one the Royal Thai Gallery (a lovely build, although I had some trouble figuring out just what they were selling, or displaying, where), but in general a delight of this hunt is the wide variety of places, all vaguely tied together by some variously fictionalized notions of Victoriana and technology and adventure.

Compare and contrast with, for instance, the Undertaker’s Parlor from Noctis:

(All 88 prims worth, not including the simple floor and wall prims that I threw up for photographing.)

Lots of things not directly in the Hunt, but still good finds. I’m always looking for more (cheap) bookcases in SL, and this Bookcase Loft from S&S Clockworks was a mere 4L!

(I don’t think I’ve opened the actual Hunt prize from there yet.)

Eventually I actually finished the Hunt! Still far from finishing opening all the packages, though…

Shortly after that, as I was vaguely considering trying to get back to the Rise cross-country from wherever I ended up, I noticed it was time for the Pre-release Party for 1000+ Avatars, Volume 2.

So I went and did that. :)

And a good time was had by all…

New Originalia show opening tomorrow

I got an invitation to, and then got confused about dates and so missed, a blog-o-sphere preview of tomorrow’s opening of a three-artist show on the Originalia sim. But I have snuck in :) between the preview and the opening, and can confidently recommend that you go.

(I notice that it’s currently an Editor’s Pick in the Official SL Destinations (which is possibly a bit premature since it doesn’t officially open until tomorrow, but hey), so it’s not like they’re going to be hard up publicity-wise, but still…)

Here is also Chestnut on the show.

Here is The Official Poster:

And the Announcing Notecard, lightly edited for weblogifying purposes:

‘Travel to Originalia’ is the newest art exhibit on Amase Levasseur’s Originalia sim.

The show includes three exciting exhibits by award winning artists. In keeping with the theme of the sim, the exhibits include fresh new work that has never been seen before in Second Life.

‘Travel to Originalia’ includes “Postcards Home” by Callipygian Christensen, “Adapt or Perish” by Cherry Manga and “Gateway to Hell” by Fuschia Nightfire. As a special treat, visitors will also be treated to a reprise of the much loved exhibit “The Docks” by Scottius Polke.

‘Travel to Originalia’ opens to the public on Saturday 10/22 at 1pm SLT

Follow the SLurl below and enjoy your “Travel to Originalia”.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Originalia/38/154/21

All of the creations are well worth a visit. Calli Christensen has some lovely SL landscapes intriguingly cast as postcards home (we only get hints of what’s written on the backs), and “Gateway to Hell”, “Adapt or Perish”, and “The Docks” are all, well, not to spoil the experience… all builds eminently worth seeing.

So go! Tomorrow at 1pm or later, that is!

(And don’t mind the newborns who clicked on it in Destinations and are now wandering randomly or standing in Edit Appearance for hours; they’ll get the idea eventually…)

Boots!

So normally I go barefoot (or in socks if it’s chilly) in SL, sort of like in RL, because well really why not, and especially heels make my feet hurt.

But well I’ve been on sort of a clothing-acquiring binge for a few days now, as mentioned in the previous post, and somehow this led to my acquiring some very (very very) nice boots.

(Not that I don’t have some other nice boots that I have acquired from various hunts and chairs and stores and friends over the years, but…)

I mentioned this on Twitter, and a certain fictional character (John Carter, Mars, get it?) had the nerve to demand evidence.

So!

Silvana tights (in Forest) and Lavinia top (in brown, with feather collar) from Kunglers.

Amazing BAX Prestige boots, also in brown, also from Kunglers.

See? Boots!

The boots (which somehow don’t make my feet hurt hardly at all) were actually the finishing touch on this to-die-for Autumn outfit:

Silvana tights (in Forest) again and Lavinia top (in brown, feather collar off this time) again, the latter mostly hidden by the lovely Brigitte knit coat in Moss.

And the amazing boots again.

I can’t usually wear high-waisted stuff like this, but somehow in glorious warm earthtone knits I adore it.

The boots are amazing not just because they look so grrrrrr, but also because they have like a zillion options and things, including optional walking sounds, two different optional AO walks, being able to have the sleeve at the top up or down, or put on rolled-up denim for wearing with jeans, and four different basic brown shades and the ability to recolor like every tiny little detail.

Usually I keep them basic brown and black, but if one wanted to get a little crazy…

Lavinia top again, this time with adorable little Gigi sequined shorts (skort?) in Garnet (from Kunglers yet again), and with the boots set so that the zipper and edge details are in metallic gold, and the soles largely in red.

Not only do the boots make me six inches taller (six foot three, yipes!) and maybe a little hawt (blush), but with these shorts my legs look, like, five miles long.

Woot woot!

Oh, and if it occurs to you that I don’t generally have nearly this much fashion sense, you’re entirely right. :) Introduction to Kunglers, as well as quite specific suggestions on what would look good, are all owed to v nice an’ well-dressed friend Michele again (in fact as I recall this latest burst of acquisition was because I admired the Brigitte knit that she was wearing (hers in purple), and she said, ya know…).

I am becoming such a lil clothes-horse! :)

My poor inventory!

Shortly after I logged in tonight, nice friend Michele IMd that she was on a hunt, and being in that sort of mood I said Oooh tp me. :)

It was a fun hunt, in three locations of the same store (starting here), each one containing a (tiny tiny tiny) pumpkin with some fun stuff in it, and a special bonus (with a nice extra prize) at the end once you have all three. (They’re Japanese stores, but they are named “Shön”, which isn’t a terribly Japanese name!)

That’s the red gown that’s the final bonus prize, plus the hat from the first of the three stores. The other two stores have matching tops and bottoms in the same color scheme that make up a fun casual outfit in Hallowe’en colors.

And then when I admired Michele’s hat and wings she took me to the places she’d gotten them. :)

I madly lurve this outfit. It comes with like three different skirts in various lengths, two different pairs of wings (one of which drops these lovely autumn leaves constantly), and this gorgeous top (which is actually a separate shirt and jacket, either of which can also be worn alone). It’s “Fall Fairy”, from Angelwing (or Angelwings? I forget). It was only like 200L!

And the hair-with hat, for like 250L, where both the hat and the forelock have various different available colors / textures via a texture menu, is from Ivanka Akina. (Also, I think, Japanese despite the name.)

An’ Michele saw the hair-an’-hat on Harper’s weblog. Everything is connected! :)

And in various of those places I bought various other random things, some of which I haven’t even gotten around to trying on yet, and my inventory is even bulginger than ever. But it is fun!

The Dance Queens’ Dance Festival IV

This from Slappy Doobie of Virtual Burlesque, one of our very favorite SL venues; but it will also be of interest to folks who like dancing that doesn’t necessarily involve disrobing:

Ladies and Gents…..
This weekend, we would like to make you all aware of a wondeful weekend long vent…

THE DANCE QUEENS DANCE FESTIVAL IV
23 Jul 8:15am to 5:30pm and
24 Jul 9:45am to 5:00pm
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Not2z/17/17/1251

Featured among some of the best troupes in SL is our very own Viva La Glam – Virtual Burlesque Dancers!!!
**Sunday @ 2:45pm – 3:30pm…

We have a brand new, over the top feast for you that you wont want to miss!!!!
See you then!!!!! XOXOXOX

Sounds like a Good Time! I will have to try to remember… :)

Gracie’s book!

Lounging among some of the 1000+ avatar pictures (including one of me!) at Gracie’s latest location.

I’ve pre-ordered the RL book, and you can too!

I suspect this will be one of my very favorite coffeetable books ever. :)

(You can also get an inworld ThincBook preview of the RL book at that location, which is fun. And the sim down on the ground, California State University at Northridge, is a nice peaceful academic build with paths to wander and art to look at and University buildings to feel studious around; worth exploring after you admire all the AVs in Gracie’s pictures.)

Bunnies vs Argaloth!

Just to show that WoW isn’t all battles and fighting and stuff, here’s a moment of silliness, where most of the 25-person guild raid waiting for the last two members to show up before taking on Pit Lord Argaloth decided to turn each other into bunnies and get out our Spring Rabbit pets, and hop around for picture-taking.

(I really should have turned off all of the floating nametags, ’cause they sort of clutter up the picture…)

I am happy to see that the picture has already been favorited once on flickr. :)

I wasn’t actually planning to be in this raid at all, I just happened to be doing Tol Barad when it was time for my guild‘s weekly “Raid Boot Camp” run, so I got included in the invitation, and I thought “What the heck!”.

The raid was fun (even not counting the bunnies), and the Boot Camp part consisted mostly of following directions (something I am generally pretty good at). And I was rewarded richly, in that as the only rogue there I pretty much by default got the nice rogue PvP legs that dropped, and they were a good upgrade to my PvP set.

(In fact they’re enough better than the legs currently in my PvE set that I’m thinking of swapping them in there also; but wearing PvP for PvE, even when justified by the numbers, is sort of a WoW Fashion Faux Pas…)

So see! What WoW is really about is (a) silliness, and (b) fashion. Now you know! :)

Sabrinaa Nightfire

I have been so out of touch the last month that I only tonight found out that we’ve lost Sabrinaa Nightfire, SL artist, patron of the arts, and generally wonderful person.

Here is a nice posting on the Prim Perfect weblog about Sabrinaa and her passing and various ways her less out-of-touch friends have remembered her.

I will just post a few pictures.

That’s Sabrinaa dressed all festive at her Peace and Love Oasis build at Burning Life. She made big colorful things, things that made you happy just to look at. And she was all about peace and love and health and all that kinda stuff.

That’s her at the opening of the Caerleon Museum of Identity, looking appropriately all mature and mentorly. She was always giving people things, and holding artistic Challenges to encourage people to make stuff, and generally fostering the community. (See how many of my own postings here mention her.)

She made all sorts of artworks, and not only displayed them, but also randomly dropped copies on her friends. Clothes, flowers, sculptures, solid frames full of interesting things.

Here are three of the latter:

These were done for some “Illusions” show. Left to right, I think they are called “Illusions Just for Fun”, “Illusions of Time”, and “Illusions of Love”.

Utterly fitting, writing this now, that she herself is in the middle one.

Here is I think the last surprise that suddenly appeared in my inventory from her:

Still big and colorful and delightful, but a bit subtler, as some of her more recent things have been. I think I will leave that one on display in the Park for awhile…

I’ve had this very festive tree sitting in my park forever (near the money-giver thing and the dogs playing poker). I’m so used to it that I didn’t even think of it when I was rustling around for Sabrinaa things to take pictures of, until suddenly there it was…

Such a happy thing.

Damn, I miss her!

She was great at prodding me into actually making things. :) Here’s the last thing that I made for one of her challenge shows.

It was for “Black and White and Red All Over”, which I don’t think she ever quite had a chance to open (unless I was just offline and missed it). It’s called “The Red Ball”, and I’m very fond of it. And I will think of Sabrinaa every time I see it.

Thanks for the dance, friend. And the art. And everything…

Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education 2011

I will let friend KendallQ do all of the work here, by quoting the notecard she sent that eventually got me (and got me into) that picture…

Hi all –

Many of you know that the VWBPE Conference starts today.

I had mentioned to some of you that I would be presenting on “Conflict Transformation for Organizations”. This is an unusual topic for a conference of this type and I am excited to be included.

This will be at 2 SLT on Friday. The SLURL is http://slurl.com/secondlife/VWBPE%20South%203/120/117/43.

ABSTRACT is:

Is your way of handling conflict like Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey; or do you avoid conflict, possibly at all costs? Regardless of the world you are operating from, conflict is a natural part of every-day life and also part of every organization.

“Conflict is normal in human relationships, and conflict is a motor of change. Transformation provides a clear and important vision because it brings into focus the horizon toward which we journey – the building of healthy relationships and communities, locally and globally. The goal requires real change in our current ways of relating.” (source: John Paul Lederach, “The Little Book of Conflict Transformation”)

By reconsidering the way we think of conflict and learning new ways of communicating and relating, we can build stronger relationships with our allies as well as those we inspire to a different way of thinking and feeling.

Not only do we feel and work better with easier relationships but the real “winners” are the individuals who will have fuller, richer lives and are more productive.

OTHER PRESENTATIONS TO CONSIDER:

• “Digital Literacy and the Death of Community: Implications for Education” by Kaseido Quandry aka John Carter McKnight, Friday, 1:00 p.m. SLT
• “Learning about Community in Virtual Worlds” by Elisabeth Hayes (aka Nila Indigo) and John Carter McKnight, Friday, 5:00 p.m. SLT
• “A Virtual Traveler’s Notebook: Some Reflections on Professional Learning & Sharing in Second Life” by Kimberly Flack aka Kimmer, Friday, 6:00 p.m. SLT
• “The Perky Pug: Engineering Play With Strangers in World of Warcraft” by John Carter McKnight, Saturday, 11:00 a.m. SLT

You can find locations for the other presentations by checking out the Master Schedule tab on the left here — http://vwbpe11.vwbpe.org/.

Please feel free to share this information with anyone you think might be interested.

Best regards,
KendallQ

I got there just too late to hear botgirl and friend give keynote. :) I am not really a Educator, and will prolly not go to many Sessions myself, but lots of inneresting people will, so if you get a chance, pop in! Never know who you might meet, or what thoughts you might encounter…

Alizarin Goldflake’s “The Mysterious Forest” coming 20 Feb

I can enthusiastically endorse anything Alizarin makes… :)

PRESS RELEASE
From: Alizarin Goldflake
Topic: “The Mysterious Forest,” a new immersive art build
Event date: Sunday, February 20, 2 pm PST

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lie/203/203/321

Alizarin Goldflake will hold an Open Studio for her newest immersive art build, “The Mysterious Forest,” on Sunday, February 20, 2 pm PST at Atelier Alizarin. All are cordially invited.

On approach, your avatar magically disappears into the trees. The world grows ominously dark. The body-snatching moonbeam whispers touch me. Ghostly voices wail; an invisible man paces, leaving fading foot prints; an owl hoots amid a chorus of other forest calls. Eyes glow from the bushes. Spiders dangle, and swarms of bats swirl out of the trees. Totemic forest animals loom from the shadows and vanish like dreams. **Please touch!**

In addition to your eyes and ears, THE MYSTERIOUS FOREST interacts with your avatar physically. There are lots of animations: Sits, Marshmellow-toast; Sleep; Trapped (dare you to click on the spiders!); not to mention the mischievous moon. Look out for those creepy feelers under a rock! A beheaded snake – still poisonous? – twitches and rattles when you walk by. Evocative of the artist’s childhood experiences camping, part of this build appeared in the Interactivity Collaboration at Caerleon Art Collective, but much has been added that’s new.

“The Mysterious Forest” is 20 meters high and 40 meters in diameter, and, at 174 prims, one of Ali’s larger immersive art sculptures.

Other Atelier Alizarin Attractions include: Musical Kinetics and more immersive art in Sky Studio one level down (TP or jump through the skylight :-), the Sky Sculpture Garden, Orfeo’s Oratorio, The Particularium on the third floor, RL digital drawings on the second floor, 2-D digital collages on the first floor, and a beautiful sculpture park on the ground. And don’t forget Chez Ali, my store where you can pick up fun bits from earlier builds.

The Usual Suspects

Got an IM from Gracie shortly after logging on last night, and not long after I was part of an art project. Very SL. :)

(Speaking of which, I wonder whatever became of that project or whatever it was a couple years back.)

It was fun being photographed, and talking to Gracie and the other people who wandered by to be photographed, because they are all nice an’ interesting. Gracie had a couple hundred pictures up around the place where she was shooting, and they were all of single AVs, against a neutral background, almost every one facing away from the camera. Which is just brilliant, because someone facing away from the camera is mysterious, is a puzzle, is a person whose face you can’t see, but who (in many cases, because people in SL can and so often do make themselves subtly or wildly individual from every angle) you think maybe you know who it is. I saw JueL Resistance (even if I did say the wrong name for her, blush) wearing nothing but a guitar and a book strapped to her thigh (I have that book!), and AM Radio, and oh all sorts of people that I knew, or thought I might know, or didn’t know but would like to.

Afterward, I IM’d a few friends that I noticed were on, and at least some of them are now in the project, too. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me to weblogify about it here until I saw Immy’s posting about it in hers. But now I am!

So give Gracie a ring, and you, too, can be one of The Usual Suspects! Or whatever she ends up calling it. :)

But no using the Hanged Man tarot animation; that was my idea…