Nine Lives: Coppelia's first year

          The art group Coppelia turns one this week, and they are celebrating the anniversary with an art show from 6-8pm SLT on Friday 28th February.
           Art groups are quite fascinating. Not the big message-board ones, but the guild type, where everyone's an artist. Some are free-for alls, with a mix of genuine innovators and wannabes whose talent is mostly for gallery politics. Then there are the B-List cooperatives where nobody is very good but nobody minds, because dancing and gossip are regularly available. At odds with the B-list are the pretentious collectives for 'premier artists', the kind of elitist BS that third rate academics love. You can see where they are coming from - all of us want to escape from mediocrity, but as the Anglo-Saxon proverb says, 'He that

The Art of Blogging ... Art

Writing about art in Second Life can be a lot of fun. You get to have proper conversations with interesting. passionate people... also quite a few twits, but you knew that already. What makes for a better blog, when it comes to blogging art in Second Life? Here are the reactions of a handful of people who know a bit about it, from different perspectives.
Apmel posts notices, reviews, and (what he probably would hate to see called) understated social comment. His blog is regularly updated, sometimes several times a day, often in Swedish, never without purpose. What would be his philosophy on blogging about art - well, not just the art but the people who make it, buy  it, and blether about it? Appropriately, his answer was a link to his blog.

Apmel: his blog is scary good.

          Let's get this out of the way before we go any further: the 'Dear Diary' style: "I got an IM, and..." "I always think...", "I was invited by my good friend Kewlkid Namedrop..." I, I, I....unless you're describing your illness or your solo trek up Everest, mentioning yourself 10 times in the first paragraph makes you sound like a raging egomaniac, not a hip young thing, or the voice of authority. We know that you were IM'd/invited/present at an event, and heck, we kind of guessed that your blog contains things you think and opine. Be warm and personal, but get straight down to the bit we care about, the art and the events.

Method and Madness

Kenya's Feed A Smile is a great charity and Kiana the maddest pea of them all is trying to raise money for them in Second Life. The MadPea crew have set up a charity auction in a park at  Mad City among the wildly beautiful New York sims. The auction starts February 15th and runs through February 23rd.

The idea is that you bid on people offering goods or services or, in the case of the celebs, maybe just 'to spend time' with them. And there are some pretty well-known names up there, all the way from Bryn Oh to Drax. (OK you're expecting some comment like :"I would pay good money to have Drax pass 24 hours without spamming about himself and that bloody Fluffee", right? You're out of luck. This is 'don't mention the Drax' week. Thank God it's Thursday.)

Convivial Pursuit

You will still be here tomorrow, Though your dreams may not.

    Cat Stevens

           Back in the golden age of SL, there were so many Italian sims it would take you months to visit them all; an immensely varied galaxy of  nostalgia and extravagant architecture, vibrant communities packed with dance and drama, passion, imprecision, and boundless enthusiasm. Many of those luminous points have gone out, while those that survive cluster together for company, almost orbiting in systems, let us say solar systems, like sim Solaris, which is home to Arte Libera, Pyramid Cafe, as well as the Torno Kohime Foundation, or to put it another way Tanalois, run by  run by Aloisio Congrejo and Tani Thor.             

           Pol Jarvinen is there now, with a new show, Chasing Butterflies. No running around with delicate nets though. At first glance, you might mistake the build for a sort of zoo, or aviary. There are painted pine livestock cages at the entrance, the kind of thing they used fifty years ago when it was still okay to scoop animals out of their habitat and drag them off to some civilized country to be stared at. But these boxes don't contain lemurs or parrots. They have butterflies in them; ghostly, enormous and (thanks to the alpha bug) not entirely inside the boxes, either. Spooky.

Life is but a Dream

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Traditional       

 Noke Yuitza had some good news. Even in IM, her merry enthusiasm was infectious. It was the perfect melding of SL and real life. The birth of a new life. It is a very beautiful story, let me tell you it because it is attached in a certain way to this installation. They met in one of my classes some years ago here in SL; they are from different countries, Germany and Sweden, and I introduced them. I met them in RL too. They started to going out in RL and now they are together and with a baby!!

Wear it well: Kikas Babenco

          Here's Kikas Babenco, coming to you from sunny Portugal, with impeccable English, learnt 'with the Beatles' and via many, many books. She teaches graphic arts and introduction to multimedia in real life.

           In Second Life you'll most likely know her from the joint performances – or better 'Adventures' - with her RL and SL partner Marmaduke Arado. For Kikas, art is about questioning the world around us, but from a positive point of view. She's all about hope, and good companionship, and... well, let her tell you.