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.

The Great Divide

Well, I'm among the 99% who come into SL and then remember they don't have a mesh-enabled viewer and, at the end of an already long day, don't really have the time or inclination to go faffing about downloading Firestorm or (Lord help us) Viewer 3 - actually, wait, I do have Viewer 3, but no amount of wild horses or wicked art is going to make me open SL in that finger-fumbling, screen-blocking, fake-namery piece of shite.

Which is a bit ironic, as Eupalinos Ugajin's build at Split Screen is a meditation on the whole Occupy and 99% thingy. You miss out on the video, but you can get away with a normal viewer for most of the install, and it's a lot of fun. Keep the notecard open, you'll want to refer to it later. Here's the artist with Bryn Oh, and Split Screen owner and part time grouch, Dividni Shostakovich.

Eupa has a brilliantly weird avie, and isn't having any of it, with the whole 'I'm a fancy-ass artist' bs - this is all just an extension of long hours playing with Lego. Love it. I got this lucky action shot of Bryn trying out the rideable blocks being fired noisily into the atmosphere. Her avatar blended so well into the build I thought she was a bot to start with!

Tuning oona

It seems like a lost town, a HiFi wilderness of circuits mysteriously broadcasting, and old signals leaking out of valves and scratchy needles. The little girl in the Test Card shivers a blank smile across the decades. There is nothing on TV... or is there? Are we just on the wrong wavelength, would a touch of the dial make it all spring to life? Among the shadow-filled carcasses of old speaker cabinets, the wire in the voice coil sings a hissing song of rare earth returning to earth, and the ghost of life and light glows in the valve glass darkly. Full of gaps and static, this is a whispering temple  to the age of analog, a far cry from the pure sound of the digital, poles apart, like the difference between teleporting and walking. The modern journey of sound has been truncated, perfected, but here among the hiss and scratches, we are reminded that in all refinement there is loss, that getting there is half the fun, and that is perhaps what makes us human.

This is Live! oona Eiren's new build which opens tomorrow at Dividni Shostakovich's  Split Screen Installation Space.

oona Eiren: Valve amps have the sweetest sound. I like to use lots of scratch in my sound work. Digital seems to want to do the opposite, to clean sound. The inspiration for this build was some vintage Hi Fi record players and TVs. They have history. I have records that jump in the same place they did when I was growing up, I love it, and old cassettes have it as well, they get stretched and warp.  I have software that's very good, but it all begins with hands on recording.

Oona jumped at the opportunity to exhibit at Splitscreen, a space she's sharing this time around with Misprint Thursday's  install White Sheets. It was a great opportunity for oona to try her hand at a bigger build, and over four weeks, the radio and televisual ensemble came together, both visually and with improvised sounds, starting with an image of an old TV and a ten second loop of sound that she recorded while out walking. As you move around the build, touch the objects and listen to their sounds.
oona Eiren: In RL I sometimes do illusration work, but work more with sound making installations and working with dance companys - and then theres a bit of film making thrown into the mix! My next move in SL is to try machinima. I've been playing with that a bit, it's fantastic, to build sets like this and then have a blast filming them!

Under the fun, though, there's a serious, purposeful side to oona's virtual work ethic.
oona Eiren: When I first got here, I had no idea how to use it but am slowly getting a handle on what I want to do. Now, I'm very excited about what I'm achieving, and I hope it's a launching point for my career. I want to show work I'm doing here at venues and places in RL, too. There's lots of places to show stuff, and I want to my feet in RL, not get lost in the SL whirlpool. I had a gallery in Avalon - that was my first public outing, but I always wanted to do bigger stuff. I do think people are missing out on a lot if they just stick to 2D. I must say the real artists for me are the great builders here - that's the way to go. I like what you can do if you layer, say, three or four ten second loops and play around with them.

 oona Eiren: Sound is so important!  Imagine watching a David Lynch movie to a soundtrack from some random band. It would ruin the experience. I'm a fan of Lynch. You should watch 'Fishing for Ideas', a video where he talks about his process of creating. Great stuff.

Among all the melancholy crackles and pops, a single, timeless, living image stands out in the build.
oona Eiren: That's Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein. I love this image, because she is strong. She rejects the monster. She is looking away, like she's saying  - No, you don't just build me to be someone's bride!
Oona a paused.
oona Eiren: I'll do a happy tune next I think - after all this doom and gloom :))) Maybe even a tune you can hum along to!
Live! is at the Split Screen Installation Space from tomorrow Sunday, February 6th at 2 pm SLT.

Mazed

You'd be forgiven for dubbing it Art Mess rather than ART MAZE 2011, the Zindra based collaboration on show until the end of the month. More than thirty artist of wildly divergent taste, style and talent have been mashed up in a land crossing a couple of sim boundaries, connected by series of tunnels. These days, I'm inworld mostly to look at scripts, not art, but Dividni Shostakovich was going back to the Maze for his second visit, so I got a lift with him. Or rather he sent a 'teleport lure', as the kids are calling it these days. Stuff happens when you're away.
If the ArtMaze Welcome notecard were a dog, it would be a golden retriever puppy; large, good natured, energetic, a bit over excited. It promises "an amazing world of endless imagination and exploration", and "the chance to be a real life travel writer" on their Art Maze website!

I had my doubts.
Oh dear, are we so jaded we can't be amused by the Souvenir Mug? Or persuaded to try on the (surprisingly dry) freebie Teeshirt? The show has its own Linden Rep, Blondin of the same name, which I suppose is code for Nipple Police, although, considering we were on Zindra, nipples were disappointingly few and far between. But that might just have been the sag. I mean the lag.

We did get lost, but not in a good way at first, stumbling against a horrible psychedelic trompe-l'oeil. There's no cohesion in the overall design; each artist improvised the links to the next with tunnels.

It's a sort of litmus test to talent, and the winner has to be the wonderful Oona Eiren - much more about her coming soon! - whose Murder in the Lake build is one of the Maze's best bits.

I never did find the hidden body in the room, and that's the problem with massive shows like this, there is so much going on, both in your brain and on the screen, that it's almost impossible to pay the sort of attention to detail the work deserves.

Renowned ischyophile Scottius Polke was lurking in the bookstacks, and he took me to see Penelope Parx's ants.

 
Aloisio Congrejo's Universes are also lovely.

But I fell in love with Corcosman Voom's room, hosting not just his 2D art, but two lovely statues, The Flautist and The Aerialist. It sent me back to my tightrope anim, freshly inspired.

The immersive and interactive elements at ART MAZE 2011 are mostly poses in dioramas, the custom music stream and the chance to share your photos and thoughts with the group. Yeah, no, I'm not going to do that. Although it is a contest, so you should enthusiastically stick a photo or two in the hut, if that's not a euphemism.