Art Box

This is another “pictures of a neat artsy place to go” sort of post. (The next one probably will be, too, unless I get distracted.) In this case the neat artsy place to go is Art Box (that link goes to their web page, where you’ll find a SLURL an’ all). And once again it’s v good friend Michele who found the place, and I jes tagged along. :)

The first inneresting thing that the Art Box people do is take RL-type visual artworks of various kinds, and make SL versions of them. Here’s their homage to A Sonnet of Love by contemporary art-person Rob Hefferan:

which is very nice, but the really inneresting that they do is give you a chance to enter into the art:

That’s me in nice yellow gown replacing the person in the picture, with Michele an’ the amazing Art Box persons (more on whom below) looking on.

They’ve done this to a Whole Bunch of artworks of various kinds, and there’s some utterly lovely scripting behind it all: you select the particular artwork you want (either from a menu in a corner control box, or by selecting a picture of it on the upstairs balcony), and the entire main room of the installation converts foom into the SL representation of the work you’ve chosen. Then, depending on the work, when you sit within the room, one of the people in the work may disappear and be replaced by you, or you may fill in an empty place, or whatever. And, if there are clothing or props associated with the work, there’s a little crate off to the side where you can pick up, say, the car full of people screaming in terror at you, if you are The Fifty Foot Woman:

An’ Here is Michele being the Fifty Foot Woman, before she had a chance to pick up her car:

but she is nicely scary even without it. :)

Some of the pictures they’ve done can hold more than one person, even. Name That Famous Image!

I’d changed clothes (and skin and hair and…) for that one, and the new outfit was gratifyingly almost-appropriate for the next one we summoned up:

(Note that I am still holding my little car in this picture; shortly after I replaced it with the sandwich-prop from the crate, which was more appropriate if less amusing. The original of this picture can be found all over the Web.)

The Art Box people themselves are extremely approachable, friendly, funny, smart, and so on. Not to mention dead-cute:

That’s Frankie Rockett and Violet Sweetwater, who is them. I really ought to interview them for the ol’ Virtual Artists Alliance weblog or somefing; they are neat. We talked for quite awhile, mostly about how amazing it all was.

Here is Michele being Red Hot, for the obvious reason :)

and here are we both, in another “Name that Image”, waving byebye, and encouraging you to check out th’ Art Box yourself immediately if not sooner: