U Wiz A

Mighty is geometry. Joined with art, it is irresistible.

Euripides

Last month, soror nishi filled UWA's Virtlantis sim with an incredible, and much blogged-about build, Transubstantiation. It was a beautiful sight, and showed just what can be done when an artist is allowed to expand an idea to sim-sized proportions.

This month it's the turn of Wizard Gynoid to spread her geometry out before us. The UWA's JJ Zifanwe is closing the sim for reasons of cost, but with classic Antipodean good humour, rather than doing a lot of hand-wringing about the decision to downsize, he's taken the opportunity to give some of SL's best loved artists the opportunity to make the sim go out with a bang.

Wizzy is calling the build fractal and hyperboloid art. She told me a hyperboloid is a very excited boloid, but I think she was teasing...  the pieces on show here are a mixture of newness, like this piece, with an optical illusion at its heart.

 There are also some interesting items she's made over recent months, also on other grids. One piece - the centerpiece of the build, was originally made on Craft. It created a very surprising effect when it was imported.

Wizzy Gynoid: It's a fractal, meaning that it gets more and more complex and smaller as you go inward, and it's a huge number of prims, so it's in pieces. I started importing the smaller pieces first. building outward. When I got to the big shell pieces, the blew up when I imported them because they are made up of 'megaprim' pieces.
(Outside SL, you can stretch a regular prim to any size you want, rather than being confined to 10x10x10m)

Wizzy Gynoid: At first this upset me, but then i realized that it looked kinda cool, with the outer shell pieces exploded like that.So I left them like that, and it points out too how limited SL is in that way. In open sim you can build without concern.

Wizzy combines her love of sacred geometry with experiments in numbers and a pension for high primcounts, and on the sim this month her goal is to use all the 15,000 prims available. The island is a geometric shape in itself, prepared using her own terrain texture.

Often people describe Wizzy's art as a lot of straight lines, but this is a very curvy build. Just look at this hyperbolid.
Wizzy Gynoid: These sort of look like particle effects, but it's really 366 moving prims. It looks a bit like one of those black light posters. The center hole is suggestive of the vesica pisces, and of course that means it has all kinds of feminine connotations
To me, it kind of looked like the Time Tunnel on speed. Drop in and make up your own mind. Wizzy's build will be at Virtlantis the for the whole of the month of May.