Winner's Circle

The declared winners of the Science/Art (shakes fist at Blogger, which has issues with the ampersand) have been announced by Marjorie Fargis...
This very wonderful piece is 'untitled string theory'  by Mila Tatham and Rodriguez Imako, (sorry I forgot to mention Rodriguez when I blogged this earlier).

All the top pieces are on display for one week from today between the menhirs of MarkWD Helendale's Pseudostonehengikon, on Frontier Land.

The final trophyholders are (drum roll)...
Merlino Mayo, for this

... and Abstract Baroque for this.

You may have seen some of Abstract's early work, together with Eden Toll,  over at Diabolus  a while back. I asked Abstract to do the Winner's Quote thing and this is what he said, just off the top of his head,
Abstract Baroque: "Just as Second Life is at the cutting edge of new art forms, so in science String theory is leading scientific thought. Bringing the 2 together conceptually has been a challenge and great fun, and I look forward to all artists in Second Life developing an art form of the future, and maybe sharing the journey for a while."

See, he's much more than just a snappy dresser. Check out this video too!

Anyway, if you like to read Italian, you can do no better than to visit Frontierlander Aliza Karu's version of events in her admirable blog. 

Another Country

...they do things differently there.

L P Hartley, The Go-Between

*sigh* Another flurry of impending Arma-Linddon posts across the blogosphere... I haven't been keeping up with most of it, since repetitive whingeing brings me out in a rash, but before we all go to hell (or Blue Mars) in a hand cart, why not contemplate Pathfinders. Take a look at Leslye Writer's exhibit, you'll find it a thoughtful work-in-progress, to which you can probably contribute, in one way or another.

Enjoy the maps of Ye Olde SL, which show long-vanished places like 'The Disco', and sims like Clyde and Stillman visible in their first incarnations. Click on the little ball beside the nameplate under each picture to receive notecards at turns revealing and tantalizing, with photos of oldbies as they are now and, in some cases, showing how they looked when they were newbies.

Here you'll find famous figures from the fields of SL art, writing, music, building and scripting, including Huckleberry Hax, Russell Eponym, and Madame Thespian Underhill. I sat on 'The First Prim' - is that sacrilege? -  and had a read. In some cases, Leslye has added the story as she knows it, in others, the interested parties have contributed a paragraph or two about what it was like to be an early Resident, and how things have changed both technologically and as a community. Persephone Phoenix gives a sweetly lyrical account of her early life and her love of flying. I liked Filthy Fluno's card best though, as soon as you read it you'll agree, it sums him up to a T.

Are you an oldbie? Do you know someone who falls into that category? The cut-off age to qualify is currently class of 2006. Why not join in? Visit Pathfinders or send Leslye Writer a current photo, an early pic of yourself, and a short account of what life was like in 'olden' days - you remember, when you had dorky hair, couldn't walk right, and kept crashing. Oh wait, that was me on Blue Mars yesterday ...and in SL this morning.

Pixels in the City Part 1: Skinsmith

Serene was a word...

Betty Smith,  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 

Ah, serenity. Remember that? Back in Manhattan, me, and spring busting out all over the Park, but the traffic was terrible, so thank goodness Oberon Onmura sent me a TP to meet him in Brooklyn the other day - no, not Brooklyn is Watching, RL Brooklyn, where there's a(nother) world-class museum of art. Oberon wanted me to see the Kiki Smith installation, 'Sojourn' - it's a collection of sculptures and drawings that are inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and an embroidered picture from the 1800's by Prudence Punderson showing the stages in a woman's life. 

Oberon Onmura: Kiki Smith was focusing on the body before it got fashionable. I also like how she uses materials - a lot. I'm not a theorist so I can't really go there, but for me there is a sense of woman (as opposed to girl) in everything she does that is very strong. So much work out there feels like MFA studio projects. Kiki has always been, to me, an "adult." This is hard to quantify - it's just my impression of her work over the past 20 years or so.

The paper and silk used here are very feminine: Smith has often applied the word 'skin' to describe her work, and it's apt: porous, resilient, thin, containing, a bridge and a barrier to the world around us. The pieces in the show, with their themes of feminine ties, mortality, and creativity, are delicate in every sense of the word, and something about the overall look made me think of our own Feathers Boa. I asked how the transient nature of art - pixellated or not - affects her work.

Feathers Boa:   The reality is everything is temporal and can be destroyed. The nature of my work in SL is odd, it comes from someplace inside my head and most of what it becomes happens somewhere outside of SL. I make my SL art up from things in RL. Photos, scraps of paper, scans of material, pieces of metal, and digital programs like Cinema 4D. My art is all wisps of smoke blowing in a virtual wind. Once I make it, I try and forget it exists at all. And in some ways, it doesn't exist.
The Kiki/Feathers connection came to mind thanks to 'Butterflies',  Feather's current install over at Aho. It depicts 7 stages of a woman's life: like a butterfly, beautiful, delicate and oh so brief. (admire all seven paintings, note the writing that is revealed only when you approach the canvases, and ooo, try the light switch behind the door!). Aho rocks.

Feather Boa: Every woman is beautiful and unique, I try to show that in each canvas. The words that appear as you approach each canvas are things I've thought or words spoken to me. I made the canvases and painted them as if I was the woman on each one. I wanted to see myself age and remember my girlhood. Imagine myself in my 30's, middle age and as an aged grandmother.
Yet, the apparent transience of memory and experience has another side.

Feathers Boa: I'll tell you a story from RL. Some years ago. I painted something I felt at the time, pain, hurt, shame, fear, a wash of young girl emotions welling up inside of me from a painful childhood. It was a self-portrait. I poured out all my self-loathing on the picture. My girlfriend at the time found it. She recognized my eyes in the twisted hateful face and asked me why I hated myself so much and if I hated her as well. She cried and left me alone with my creation. I burned it in the fireplace the next day, but it is still here inside my head as vivid as the day I painted it, and I'm sure it still is burnt into the memory of Claire, wherever she is. I guess knowing that at anytime all of SL could vanish along with everything in it, does play into how I relate to the art I create in-world. I treat it all like the vapor it is, and hope that somehow it lives on in the memories of the people who see it and experience it.

Woolf's essay is, of course, about how hard it is for a woman to find the space and time for independent creativity. I'm not sure I buy into it, at least not for a Woolf-like woman living today, but it raises an interesting point about time and the metaverse... what is the true shape of our Second Hours?
Feathers Boa:  It is sometimes impossible to find time to be creative. My Real Life is frantic and busy. I used to escape into Second Life. As time has passed SL has become just as demanding and crazy as RL, so much so that lately I have avoided SL altogether in the hopes that people will forget me and I can sneak back into create something while no one is watching. Inspiration hits me sometimes and I just work through the night. I've been known to call in sick if my muse strikes. Creativity is like birth, it is sometimes painful and hard. Sometimes it births something beautiful, sometimes it is ugly at birth, wrinkled, fat and crying. But once I make something, it is out there and I pour my heart and love into it. Finding time for this is like saying "how do you find the time to breathe?"

On the 4th floor of the Brooklyn Museum, 'Soujourn' spills out of the bright, modern space of the Sackler Center, and into the surrounding rooms, which are reconstructed rooms from historical houses. This is the staircase from Tripp house, for example, and in the adjoining space, here we are taking a load off inside the bedroom (I think that tail weighs a lot).

The oversized statues, lights, photographs, projections and pictures blended with the antique interiors which RL people can only enjoy from outside. In SL, we have an added layer of experience (and fun!) that comes of being able to enter art without damage. Spirituality is, for Smith, a synthesis of direct human emotion, aspects of which she draws attentions to in by transmitting her vision through multiple media; we all know everything, there is nothing new under the sun except for the novelty of the moment of transmission from one experience to another. Sitting there, listening to the whirring projector as it looped slides of faint photographs onto a cheesecloth screen, I couldn't help but think - if only you could temporarily script this four poster bed, these walls, how much more elegant ands immediate the art would seem... 

Feathers Boa: Being able to make things change and move and morph as the viewer interacts is what my work in SL is all about. I want the viewer not just to see but feel and become a participant in my work. At first, I just scanned in my RL art and plopped in on a prim. Then I saw this possibility of making things big and changeable, to do so much more. I never looked back.

A lot of examples of that can be found at Feathers' Reactive Art Gallery over on sim Esterhal. Her piece Witch Hunt, a self portrait inspired by the Salem Witch Trials, is particularly striking. Approach or retreat from the artwork, and the fate of the woman in the picture changes seamlessly, shockingly. Not to be missed.

Regrouping in the atrium of the Brooklyn Museum, right by the light-bulb caravan - doesn't that make you think of the one Harriet Gausman has in the writer's camp at Milk Wood? - I think we were all pretty grateful that Oberon suggested a visit to Brooklyn. If only he'd given us a ride home...

Short and sweet

I was checking out the talent at PiRatsthe other day and wow! some of the art was super nice also.   I'm fairly certain that's not low tar. Eventually I got chatting to Dulcis Taurog. We were pretty in pink, it was like an explosion in a peppermint factory, I liked it. She has a show on at another Pirats gallery, called Linkers.
Dulcis Taurog: I make these completely within SL. I make odd objects, color them, then use different lighting and water settings to get the effects. The wave pattern? it's based on a Japanese textile wave pattern i made it for this show, because of the water theme in this gallery. I don't do any art work in RL, I'm self taught in SL, and found my own techniques here. I wanted to make art, and had little opportunity. Then I started to make things here, and found I could make 'painting' like pictures. I just pursued that then, people liked them, and I have even had the chance to exhibit here! I started out wanting to make Japanese houses, gardens and tea bowls. I've always wished I could do paintings like the ink landscapes of Japan and China and I also love the colorful expression in abstract paintings, so I've tried to capture some of all that.
She showed me her abstract art, and explained her process.

Dulcis Taurog: I usually start with an idea, more like an effect I want to try, or I see a painting I want to try to get the feel of here. I think of how I could use the techniques available here to get an effect, but the end result is usually far off my original idea, but still something I like. The biggest drawback to my art in SL is probably the limit on resolution, and my art is only inworld, I've nothing in RL, but I don't mind that so much. The best thing is that I can show people from all over the world, that many like it, and that here I can be an artist. It's also fun that I have developed techniques using refraction and reflection to obtain a paint-like effect. It's tedious in ways, I've shown people and most don't care for it.  But I can show you, right here if you like, it would take about 10 minutes.

She did. Here's her secret... You simply rez a cube into water, preferably somewhere with a nice current or turbulence. Put your preferred texture on the top side and lower the prim until it's below water. Set your camera so you're looking down on the picture. Then you make sure your graphics preference is good or better, and go to world -   sun -   water settings and then mess about with all the sliders to your heart's content. It's a lot of fun and you may make your own masterpiece! I think it's nice that she wants to share her method with others, too. On a personal note, yes, those are very big boots.

Today, though, today was another story. Sometimes you don't have time, but you should make time, and you won't be sorry. Sometimes.

Simeon Beresford and the others were all over at Bookstacks doing the poetry thing, and wow Leslye Writer was there! She snuck an original piece past Simeon; she didn't know the Saturday session is really only for published favourites, who today included Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ogden Nash, and most striking of all, Simeon's reading of Langston Hughes' Daybreak in Alabama in his distinctive Welsh accent.   The piece Leslye read she calls 104, I call it 170 times, it narrates a fragment of life seen through the windshield of  repetition: driving, domesticity, and those places on the way that are visibly unseen - but enough! get her to read it to you, it's much better that way.
I wanted to know more about her life.

Leslye Writer: Listening and writing........that is what I do. I rezzed in 2007, and wandered 'lonely as a cloud' for a few days until I found the writing community. Inksters was my first group. I remained silent and almost invisible as I listened to the Second Life poets and writers until the day I felt courageous enough to read one of my poems. Now I will read to anyone who will listen but I don't have a very expansive body of work for the over ten year old age group. Most of my life I have written for children. I only recently started writing poems for my peers.
Leslye is also interested in Second Life Photography, and will soon open an exhibition of photographs she has taken of SL writers performing at readings over the past three years. If you'd like to see her current show, Pathfinders, it's on over at Da Vinci Isle. She also introduced another amazing piece by W Somerset Maugham the first 'chapter' (it's more like a prose poem) of The Trembling of a Leaf called The Pacific.
Have a read.

Contesting Science, Artfully

    The next time she has a big idea like this, Marjorie Fargis has asked that she be shot - it's been a mammoth project, but looking on from outside SCIEN & ART CONTEST is a journey well worth taking. The idea (and I should throw the name of Talete Flanagan  in at this point, he's a RL physicist and SL Italy's answer to Bill Nye) came from a Science on the Road show they put on some time back called The Year of the Cosmic Rays. From that starting point, they came up with the idea of six interconnected aspects of physics research: they called them Big Bang, Atom, Cosmic Rays, String Theory, Electricity,  and Nano-technologies. Artists were invited to submit pieces that illustrated these fascinating fields, now on show in six different locations across SL.

My first stop was  UWA Winthrop where the Nano-technologies bit is on show.  Kolor Fall  has built a meditation on the rust of mortality - or is that the (im)mortality of rust? - and if you click on the glass top you can pose among the particles, lying down inside the coffin while drinking in his short, deep poem. Click on the pic to enlarge.  "We're all pools of light," Kolor commented. It's just that he's the only one that looks like a pool of light. Filthy has executed a neat bit of nano-vation by texturing a cube with one of his paintings and calling it Embracing sixfold and Betty Tureaud (may her hens never cease pecking!) gave me the lowdown on her lovely entry.

Betty Tureaud: I am interested in the danger of nanoparticles.
Thirza Ember: But your piece looks like floating toys, or Fruit Loops. kinda. It's very pretty.
Betty Tureaud: Nano is pretty - it's cool structures, complicated nature builds the micro cosmos. The nanoworld is beautiful. Take pollen for example.

She handed me a picture of pollen. It was undeniably beautiful.

Thirza Ember: So that's why you chose it for this competition instead of, say, string theory? For the beauty behind the danger?

Betty Tureaud: Yes! yes you got it right :)

There is, of course, a much better and longer notecard that explains in more depth, but you can get that for yourself. Also in the top picture Freewee Ling's piece that looks like a lab. It said Touch but I didn't want to unleash any particles so I refrained, but you touch it and tell me about it, when you visit UWA .

Don't stop there - five other galleries host the rest of the competing works, and they are all delightful in their own different ways. At the Spanish-language Biosfera 3 the Open Science Project, you'll find interpretations of the Big Bang.

 I really liked Loki Glas' piece, and look forward to going back to see artwork by Igor Ballyhoo and Selavy Oh which hadn't yet been put down. At CWS Isand there's a sort of Stonehenge where you'll find the Cosmic Rays entries. Maryva's is the prettiest (seen in the foreground, with Merlino Mayo and shellina Winkler in the background) but all are thoughtful and highly individual and well worth the time it takes to rez.

There are over fifty artists on show, I can't possibly do them all justice, but here are a few more standouts. Among the String Theory at the USMP which is a Peruvian University - howzat for exotic - there is Gleman Jun's Einstein-inspired cello player (it looks like Kolor gone green to me), and Wizzy's string thing, shown here.

Then these two gorgeous and amazingly different takes on the idea, first, this one by Abstract Baroque

... and an unnamed piece all in white by Mila Tatham, I think it should win, it elegantly portrays string theory 'explaining everything' from love to the planets. Wonderful - look in the Italian bit for the photo of it. 

No pictures of mine are going to do any of this justice, so make sure you TP to all the destinations, you can find notecards, LMs and all that jazz if you go to Second Physics HQ . Oh, and the Electric section of the show is here too. I could go on, about the Atomic Art, at the Alpine Executive Center (pol Jarvinen is a standout over there) and all the rest, there's masses to delight and inform in this exhibition - but your own adventure will be more fun.

 The show is on for about two weeks, then there'll be the prizewinning and jury-bating, and notecard passing, all the usual fun. Hats off to the organizers and galleristas, including JJ Zifanwy, Mark Helendale, Maximo Eames, Noke Yazuka, Sunset Quinell and Mexi Lane, but especially toTalete and Marjorie for giving us so much art for thought.

Inaugurata oggi, Scien & Art è un concorso dedicata alla Fisica di Talete Flanagan  e Marjorie Fargis.  Cincuanta artisti hanno partecipato a questa prima edizione, che vuole unire due grandi discipline, arte e scienza. Il concorso si divide in sei categorie, Atomo, Big Bang, Raggi Cosmici, Elettricità, Nanotecnologie e Stringhe.
Marjorie Fargis: E' nato tutto da un evento, l'anno dei raggi cosmici. Volevamo festeggiarlo in qualche modo, e da quel tema si sono sviluppati tutti gli altri - infatti le 6 categorie si collegano.

Si parte dalla sede principale di  Second Physics  e il percorso ci porta in cinque land diverse, dalla peruviana USMP dove troverai le opere ispirata alla teorie delle stringhe. C'è l'opera di Wizard Gynoid - sotto c'è un prim con alcune foto-ricordi - una dice 'I wish I could speak Italian'... davvero carina. Questa scultura nella foto invece è opera di Mila Tatham, stupenda, come quella di Abstract Baroque visibile nella parte inglese.

Alla land di MarkWD Helendale, CWS Isand, gli artisti si esprimono attraverso la loro creatività dando vita alla loro visione dei raggi cosmici, il luogo si addice all'argomento, è Stonehenge. Dalla pianura di Salisbury, alle montagne: quelle del Alpine Executive Center. La materia qui è l'Atomo, e poi si passa al stupendo sim spagnolo di Biosfera 3 dove sono esposte molte belle opere come quella di Loki Glas, e gli avatar-statue di  MosMax Hax -all'inizio della parte italiana.

L'ultima tappa, l'UWA dove sono in gara le nanologie fantasticate da alcuni artisti di rielievo quale Filthy Fluno, e Kolor Fall. Kolor ha scritto anche una poesia che accompagna la sua 'nano bara'... cliccare per entrarci, se hai il coraggio.. essendo un po' malinconica e amante della poesia, ecco una foto. Ma non è affatto tutta ruggine e mortalità, i nano sono belli, importanti, forti e essenziali alla vita e l'evoluzione del cosmo: e infine la stupenda opera di Betty Tureaud, una delle artiste più talentuose di tutta Second Life.

Non mancare a questo divertente appuntamento con l'arte e la scienza, un'avventura attraverso la conoscenza e l'estro artistico dei nostri cari amici!

Hearts and Lines

I cannot read them now.

O Gentlemen the time of life is short!

To spend that shortness basely were too long,

If life did rise upon a dial's point,

Still ending at the arrival of an hour.

Henry IV part 1

...avevo poco tempo questo we ma ora ho aggiunto anche in italiano... o quasi... basta scorrere in giù un pochino
So tonight I'm going to see Henry IV at the theatre in RL. I don't really want to go, because Americans doing Shakespeare is always cringemaking, but hey, it's raining and, and if it does turn out to be dire, well, that's what the intermission is for. If that seems anglist to you, bear in mind firstly that nobody actually reads this blog, so I may as well say what I really think, and secondly, imagine Ricky Gervaise playing The Duke in a biopic about John Wayne - that's the feeling we get, seeing you lot do Mister S., however much time and money you throw at it, and I'm guessing tonight's performance will have little of both.

But I digress.

Two inworld thingys for your cultural pleasure: first up, the beautiful Coeur Duchy has a job opportunity, if you're of a literary or historical bent. The Duchy is an anglophone RP land, one of those fairytale collaborations that SL7 promises to celebrate. Graceful francophiles Bedrich Panacek, SkyeRyder Varriale, and TatianaDukochic Varriale, together with baharat Atlas have established a beautiful eleven-region playground, based, the notecard says, on Angelique and  "Pride and Prejudice, originally written in 1796/1797". The 'originally' had me wondering if Jane Austen had been dug up in the late 1890s and obliged to rewrite the book under the supervision of HG Wells or similar, but apparently not, so I am glad I didn't ask them that when this very courteous quartet gave me the tour, or at least a partial one. There is so much to see in Coeur Duchy, one visit is not enough. I recommend the  carriage ride, the palaces, and don't forget to visit the caverns in the Languedoc. I fell into them, it's a long story involving Kirsten's viewer and some funky tping.  

The builders have gone to a lot of trouble to recreate the countryside of France, from the canal du Midi to the drained marshes of the Poitou, and though in the palaces there are an awful lot of textures, it is eminently worth the time it takes to rez to see these buildings. If you ever went over to see the old Versailles sim you'll already be a fan of Tatiana's work, and many of her buildings- or rather, renewed versions of them - are here.
Bedrich Panacek: Angelique was set in the 17th century, but Tat focused more on the Rococo period, Marie Antoinette, King Louis XVI and so on, so we gradually moved to the late 18th century, so Angelique is gone, but we still kept the rural aspect of the duchy. This is the time when revolutionary ideas were taking place. France probably saved the US from the British, and in turn, France loved the ideas of the new nation. So this is a time of great inner reflection, especially with the peasants and bourgeois, and our interest is more with them than with the nobles.We are all interested in history and the art of the time, including music and architecture. Baharat has been working very hard to build up the music aspect, and we have a science academy, and a growing library. 

While you're here, don't miss the beautiful Opera house. They hold regular events here,  including the recent Spring Concert. More pictures below in the Italian bit, if I get round to finishing it, and don't forget if you click on them they get bigger. But not better, There's no cure for that.

baharat Atlas:  This is a typical box seating and you can see the beautiful view of the theatre. For our concert with Mr. Zachh Cale we nearly had a full house, he is a sweet man and great musician, and a great supporter of the arts. There is also a green room in the back that we will be using for discussions.  I love this room. Many times I meet with musicians for discussing performances. They really like this room, and we are planning a grand season next Fall.
The build was carefully planned out, and they have replaced most of the outside items with their own creations over the past two years, but all agree, it's still a work in progress, and one that they all continue to enjoy. With a group membership of over 250, clearly they're not the only ones.

This is the Academie Royale des Sciences built by Skye, in the green dress. Inside is a reading room and the building has side rooms specializing in various branches of science including optics and chemistry. There is also an Art academy, and Bedrich and the team take this business very seriously, so  if you've a special knowledge or interest in either French literature, or in the sciences as they were understood during this time, and can see yourself as a drama-free librarian from the 1780's, you should definitely get involved. 

Here's another opportunity to participate in an elegant ongoing event: the Author Convention and Exhibition at the Ars Poetica Gallery located in the London School of Journalism Space Orb. In her opening remarks, Jilly Kidd explained that she'd kept the search for exhibitors fairly low-key, since she really wanted committed writers to get involved in this exceptional opportunity to be part of a permanent display - heck, the LSJ even pays the upload cost for textures used! Corwyn Allen curated the current work on show, an amazing 226 poems by 48 different poets, and he also opened the event with some of his own work, including the beautiful 'Pearls'.

The downside of poetry in SL  ( blame the pathologically kindhearted) is that there is a lot of reallllly bad stuff being performed. At many a poetry event, you'll find scansion, rhymes, and content that would make McGonagall spin like a top, *is that going to get me banned?* not to mention the mock-coy brigade, with their umming and erring "oh! do you really want me to read something to you? I'm so unprepared!" patter, as they audibly flick through their notebooks. 
Anyway, by a miracle of technology, the LSJ orb was blissfully free of that kind of wannabe rubbish today. Corwyn was followed by Wolfgang  Glinka, seen above, who read a published poem about the sea. He has a voice like a rural Archdeacon, toasting muffins by the fire, so his second piece, a love poem involving grinding crotches and loss was surprising, but not in a bad way. Variety is delicious when it's well done. Just before RL reclaimed me, I got to hear another poet new to me, donjuan Writer. Despite the name, he sounded a bit like Ricky Gervaise and read witty, short poems I loved: 'It's not worth it, thinking it's not worth it,' he declaimed. Might be something in that.
Afterwards, I took a minute to read Ada Radius and Harriet Gausman, and (avoiding the dreadful Sabreman Carter) I found this beauty by DanteOsaka Deschanel. Don't miss it.

Eccoci qua. Ti presento due land, e due occasioni per partecipare nella vita metaversale. Prima, London School of Journalism Space Orb la scuola di giornalismo londinese il LSJ ha una regione qui in SL; dove si può anche studiare la composizione e il giornalismo (c'è uno sconto del 10 percento a chi si iscrive ai corsi attraverso Second Life). Sopra la bella land, c'è una mostra letteraria organizzata da Jilly Kidd e curato da  Corwyn Allen.  La mostra è aperta a tutti gli scrittori di lingua inglese, ma finora la maggior parte degli iscritti sono poeti, e troverai 44 cornici (uno per ogni artista) e oltre duecento poesie. Troverai qui poesie di ogni tipo, belle e brutte, comiche  spirituali intime strane. La mostra è permanente, accettano ancora poesie e anche racconti brevi credo, e il LSJ sostiene anche il costo degli upload dei testi, quindi se hai scritto qualcosa in inglese, non indugiare, fatti conoscere ! Inoltre sulla piattaforma troverai informazioni utili a chi vuole farsi pubblicare in real, e il gruppo tiene diverse riunioni durante la settimana per sostenere ed aiutare gli scrittori di ogni genere.

Per l'inaugurazione ci sono stati dei reading stupendi, tra i quali il bravissimo donjuan Writer nella foto, e naturalmente dopo si ballava fino a notte fondoò io no, avevo da fare in real, e poi nn so ballare. Un gruppo davvero simpatico, dove it troverai subito a tuo agio, te lo consiglio.

Seconda occasione un po' diversa ma sempre allettante per chi ama leggere. Benvenuta in Coeur Duchy una land francese, americofona, storico-romantica, creata da Bedrich Panacek, SkyeRyder Varriale,  TatianaDukochic Varriale, e baharat Atlas. Baharat gestisce il bel teatro dell'opera, (eccoci in un palco - gentilissimi mi hanno voluto accompagnare tutti e quattro a fare il giro della land) non è solo un trionfo di textures, ci sono spesso concerti di musica classica e non solo. Il gioco di ruolo non è obbligatorio per i residenti o i visitatori, ma l'idea della land è di far conoscere l'arte, la letteratura, le idee politiche e scientifiche dell'epoca.

Tutta la land è fatta con prmura e precisione, gli owners sono anche i builders e hanno dedicato moltisismo tempo al look di ogni sim. Lo shopping qui è eccezionale, e ci sono foreste fiumi e zone residenziali tra i più belli di Second Life. Se ami la fotografia, questo è una meta ideale. Ma c'è di più. Per meglio servire i residenti desiderosi di ricreare la Francia illuminista, oppure rivoluzionaria il gruppo ha creato inoltre delle Accademie e una biblioteca. Uno splendido palazzo sulla riva del canale creato da Skye ospita l'accademia delle scienze.

L'accademia comprende una sala principale e otto studioli, dove vogliono esporre articoli e libri scentifici - hanno già un laboratorio chimico e una stanza per l'ottica con dei bei modelli di alcuni strumenti usati per capire la struttura e gli attributi della luce e la percezione.

Ecco Bedrich invece nello studio dedicato alla chimica. L'idea sarebbe di trovare bibliotecaio a tempo pieno,  una persona informata su questo periodo storico, che abbia anche una conoscenza delle lingue.  Troppo impegnativo? Il gruppo invita 'illuministi' di occupare le stanze e di allestire - attenendosi naturalmente allo stile e le maniere dell'epoca - una piccola mostra interpretiva magari su un solo aspetto del pensiero scientifico del sette-ottocento. L'idea ti interessa? Per sapere di più, basta rivolgersi al Duca. Impegnato collaboratore o spensierato turista, scegli tu - ma questa land vale la pena visitarla, è bellissima!

Rebaked Alaska

A red letter day on sim Rhetorica today, the home of the University of Alaska and the Rasmuson Foundation. Jeffronius Criss (in RL Jeff Clarke, Rasmusen VP) announced the winner of the Distinguished Artist Award of $25,000 and - I'm guessing - both a chicken dinner and a trophy of some sort. There are also a whole load of smaller prizes, covering everything from textiles to novels to photography to performing art. I was having some serious rezzing issues to begin with, but a couple of Ctrl/Shift/R and suddenly the gallery popped for me, in all its four floors of glory.

25k buys a lot of creative time, but you have to be an Alaska resident to get in on this one.
I wonder, though - could we get a virtual Alaska going? I bet Bits n Bobs could put together some pretty realistic culturally referenced animations...*waits for you to put down that mental image*  ...seriously, the Rasmuson vision is one we can all get behind, over the years they've awarded about 4.5 million dollars to almost 200 people working to sustain and renew a cultural heritage as vast and diverse as the state of Alaska itself.

The Rasmuson award ceremony was one of the first events I ever covered on ArtsParks, and so it was nice to be back again, thanks to my old friend Cybergrrl Oh, seen at the top of this post. We were there to hear composer John Luther Adams accept, with only slightly bemused grace, our congratulations and questions.

TP over to the Rasmuson gallery to see art spanning the past four years, it's imaginative, fresh and surprising. Bring a sweater though, it's still snowing!!