Better Angles

Gosh it's late but just a reminder to vote at the  UWA. You have a couple more days. The art is the usual astonishing mixed bag. There is a stagecoach that looks like it's going 70 miles an hour across the prairie, and there's an amusing Witches Cauldron which I voted for, and Oona Eiren has a nice piece, so Oona-ish you can tell her stuff right away. I love that.

UWA always looks like an architectual salvage depot. Nothing has any relation to anything else. 

Wizzy's hoodron is called a Morphometric shape. It was this guy Tomkin Euler who gave her the idea. he likes to make things, but not educate people. Anyway that's what he told me but he called me Ms Ember which always makes me suspicious. 

Wizzy says equilateral triangles are special. Go into wireframe and you''ll see, she said. we're all made of triangels. No, I mean triangles, don't I? Or do I. It's very late.

A History of Gothick

Ahora que se quien soy

No puedes dejarme

Respira en mi y hazme real

Traeme a la vida

Bring Me To Life, Evanescence

If virtual artists were drinks, what would they be? Bryn Oh is the Coca-Cola of Second Life, obviously; Soror Nishi is a Long Island Green Tea, Oberon Onmura would be the shape of the place where the glass once stood, but what about the rest?
Silene Christen would be a rich, discreet Ribera del Duero, from a small yet renowned vineyard nestled beneath the walls of a forbidding castle, kissed by moonlight; and if, fair to say, not every offering is memorable, there are there are enough good vintages to keep you curious.

Not that Silene is an obscure artist, by any means. In RL her work has received recognition in museums and private collections across Murcia; in SL she's won a clutch of prizes from the

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.