Thursday, December 15, 2011

Coasting

Last month, Oberon Onmura got his LEA sim - number 20. It's his for 5 months, perhaps more, and he was thrilled from the start, promising something 'totally scriptalicious' - although I may be paraphrasing.  I wonder how many points 'scriptalicious' would be worth in 'Words with Friends'. Anyway, he's thoroughly enjoying the luxury of both space and time to play with ideas without worrying about gallery deadlines. Despite - or perhaps because - of this great freedom, the first creation is here, and it's huge.
 "WAVE FIELDS". It opens on Sunday  December 18  at 1:30 PM SLT.
Oberon Onmura:  The idea here was to see if I could create a sense of waves - liquid waves - from solid cubes.
Crank up your draw distance and be ready for a bumpy ride on a glassy sea of boxes. The four quadrants change color with the wind, recalling the much smaller but infinitely gorgeous  Slow Chaos, and the shape of the build reminds one of another fabulous Onmura build, Coriolis.
There's an elevator to the glass roof, I fell off it seven times before achieving roofdom but hey, I also have no blue crystals in Linden Realms. Fellow observer Kakukkfu Yosuke had no such problems. He wanted to be closer to the waves though. Look how small he is against the sea of cubes.
Kakukkfu Yosuke: I have to check them, and stay a bit down to feel... these blocks reminded me of the Jewish monument in Berlin.
Oberon Onmura: Ah - that's interesting. I believe someone told me that about a different piece of mine.
It's truly mesmerizing.
Many builds with blocks falling feature knocking or fallling noises, but Oberon resisted the temptation. Enjoying this build is not the work of a few minutes; you want to linger here, and any looped sound would soon become a tiresome repetition, in stark contrast to the elegant variations below. Blocks writhe and flow against each other in one quarter, while in another they seem to be seeding themselves, and another, turning to haar. The blank spaces are both endings and beginnings, as endless as the sea itself.
 Oberon Onmura: In each quadrant, the cubes have to find their place in the grid.  Each one operates differently - they are scripted to within an inch of their lives.  I think sometimes all four quadrants just go.  It's a little random but it creates endless variations, which are pretty slow,  it takes about 30 seconds for a wave event to complete itself.  I like it when wave fronts crash into each other, like magic - but the magic is that our eye/brains perceive it as motion; the word roiling comes to mind.
Coast was the word, in my mind. The high, bright Oberon Coast. Brilliant.
Visit "WAVE FIELDS"  for yourself  on  Sunday afternoon at 1:30 PM SLT.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, this waves pulled me over an hour in their magic.
Oberon's artwork is a true must visit!

Btw, there is a typo in the SLurl, this one works 'Wave Fields'

Thirza Ember said...

hey Dilspi thanks for catching the typo! I corrected the text now (I hope!)