A Journey to the Ninth Circle of Hell

In Dante’s Inferno, the Ninth Circle, the lowest level of Hell, is reserved for the traitors. Frank Lefravre has re-created Dante’s vision in Cocytus: the Ninth Circle of Hell. (My thanks to Inara Pey for chronicling the exhibit.) A latter-day Virgil starts by crossing a wooden bridge and then descending into the caves.



The circle has four concentric rings, starting with the Caina, named after Cain, and containing the traitors to relations.



The next circle is Antenora, after a Trojan nobleman who betrayed the city to the Greeks, and contains political traitors.



The third circle is Ptolomaea, after the governor of Jericho in the second century BC, who killed his dinner guest (and father-in-law), and is reserved for traitors to their guests.



The fourth area is named Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, and contains traitors to their benefactors. These traitors are completely encased in ice.



At the center of Hell is Satan, condemned for treachery against God. Satan stands waist-deep in ice, beating his wings but unable to escape.



Dante and Virgil escape Hell by climbing down Satan and through the center of the earth, before emerging in Purgatory. Fortunately, one need not take that particular perilous journey; a teleport is all that is needed to escape this particular Hell.

Dante’s Inferno is a popular theme in Second Life, it appears. Back in 2011 this Journal commented on such an exhibit.

SL History

I visited the “History of Second Life” exhibit - part of the Linden Endowment of the Arts program - a while back and forgot to post the picture. The build, by Sniper Siemens, is actually titled “The greatest story ever told… SL History 1999-2015,” and it’s as advertised (well, the history part; I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it replaces the Bible as the greatest story ever told).



The path takes visitors chronologically through important developments in Second Life’s history, starting with the Linden Lab building in San Francisco.



Major events, including advances in the platform, controversial decisions by Linden Lab, and spats among Second Life communities, have written explanations and often a depiction of the event.







Even the Greenies make a return visit.



The exhibit closes May 31.

Bryn Oh's "Lobby Cam"

The latest exhibit from Bryn Oh on her Immersiva sim is called Lobby Cam, which draws the visitor into the story and then makes the visitor part of the story.



From the painting-filled lobby, where one can obtain the (free) HUD that will record progress, proceed through the painting shown below to emerge into a Saskatchewan wheat field.





As you watch the wheat blow gently in the wind and survey the vast expanse that reminds me of AM Radio’s The Far Away, keep an eye out for pieces of paper. Click on the paper and the HUD records them as diary entries. Piece by piece, a story builds: a man, sitting by himself watching television, changes the channel to find a young woman in an apartment lobby. As days go by, the man finds himself drawn to this mysterious channel, drawn to the woman he has never met in a city far away from him. You become a voyeur into the man’s voyeurism.





Some familiar Bryn Oh characters make cameo appearances:



I found myself eagerly scanning the ground, or in various nooks and crannies, to locate the next diary entry to read how the story would end. I’m not quite there yet, but, according to Ziki Questi, there’s yet another level of engagement between the visitor and the artist to be found. The next time I’m in-world, I’ll be back to see how Lobby Cam turns out.

Metamorphosis in Black and White

Far above New Babbage’s Quarry Hill is a sprawling work of art by Miss Beq Janus, modeled after M.C. Escher’s “Metamorphosis” wood cuttings. From the artist’s note:

My sim was inspired directly by a section of the 1939 woodcut Metamorphosis II - though the scene appears both in the earlier Metamorphosis I and the final Metamorphosis III, created towards the end of his career. 

Metamorphosis is itself a journey and the artwork "morphs" from one tessellated shape to another from a simple chequered grid through lizards and hexagons into bees and fish then birds, capturing many of the themes of his early paintings. It then morphs back into blocks before becoming the view of Atrani.  

I have left many other "journeys" around the sim, some that draw on the notion of infinity that informed one of Escher's key themes. I leave you to find them and to find your own journeys.

I didn’t have time to explore the entire installation, from nooks to crannies, but I was fascinated by how the buildings changed from black to white and back again as one rotates around the image.






Read more about the exhibit in Ziki Questi’s blog or Steadman Kondor’s Google+ entry.

As the artist’s note says,

From the still, black waters emerge flat square blocks, flipping noisily from black to white as they build into a chequered land. With a pop and a jiggle the squares deform and evolve; black and white take on a grey and form into solid blocks that rise dramatically from the ocean. These blocks of stone, stable and solid, now shape and reshape to evolve into architecture. 

In the “new” Caledon Pensans the new Vayandar Gallery is hosting a selection of art from Mrs. Tehanu Marenwolf-Brentano. The show is entitled, "Welcome to Nest of Dreams: The Art of Crowgirl Studio."

From the artist’s statement:

There’s something about being able to do something well that is akin to flying. Running, riding a bike, dancing, making music, writing: there’s this sense of freedom and motion inherent in making or doing something wonderful. That same sense of freedom and motion is what I feel when I dream of flying…or when I create a piece of art. 

Some people dream of worlds of ancient mysteries, of boundless exploration of the universe…worlds and stories on a grand scale. I dream of worlds where dreams find their way into the waking world, where people and animals are friends, where we sometimes have wings with which to fly. I create collages to share those dreams. 

Collage is a rich visual language - water from a deep and sweet well. I see myself as drinking from the same creative wellspring as artists such as Nick Bantock, Anahata Katkin, and Catrin Welz-Stein. I usually start with an image that catches my attention and then try to share the secret story it hints at to me. I create collages using material from a variety of sources, generally vintage images that are in the public domain, photographs and watercolor textures that I create myself, and other digital resources. I take great joy in bringing new life to old or forgotten images.

Even though the opening party was long over, I helped myself to a glass of absinthe.



My goodness, it’s Her Majesty!

Lending a Hand

Whiskey Monday, one of SL’s most intriguing artists, has been awarded a grant from the Linden Endowment for the Arts - essentially, the use of a sim for six months. What’s it about? Well, as Whiskey explains,

My project at this LEA sim will be creating a series of 3D settings meant to be used to create 2D art. There will be lots of them, and they’ll be tiny and huge and everything in between. I’ll set these up one at a time, and they’ll each stay up an indeterminate amount of time. Some may stay up for a day, others for two weeks, and others mere hours. I plan to announce when a new set is rezzed, but I won’t give any warning before deleting it.\ 

While these sets are up, my hope is that others will come use them to take their own photos. With no direction from me, folks can come find their own angles and windlights and stories to tell using the sets. Each photographer will offer a unique perspective, no two photos will be exactly the same. 

There’ll be a Flickr group for sharing shots, and in the last month of the exhibit, I’ll have an inworld gallery at the sim to show them off, as well. My hope is that folks who don’t normally see themselves as photographers might be inspired to take a shot or ten, and those who are seasoned artists might come explore, too.

But before the projects are finished, she’s looking for a little help. In her words:

My LEA Sim project is titled Nothing Endures But Change. If you’d like to review my actual vague project plans, they’re here. But the bottom line is, instead of creating one large, immersive build, I intend to build dozens of smaller builds to be used as photo sets over the next several months. My hope is that other folks will be inspired to come create their own 2D images of my 3D builds. My goal is to have a massive body of 2D work created by others to show off at the end. 

And so, I need a hand. Or twelve. I need props and I need full perm poses, chiefly.

High above the ground on LEA10, where the exhibit will be, is a very large outstretched hand, and on that hand is a tip jar for funds for the project, should you be inclined to donate.



And if you’re looking for some of Whiskey’s work in the meanwhile, there’s an exhibit at Lauk’s Nest Across the Road (look for the Pure Whiskey gallery on one of the higher floors):

I’m going to do my best to look into her exhibit as time permits.

A Tale of Tail

I received a delightful note in the post the other day from David and Beth Cooper-Pentewyns, owners of the Plum Wine and Piffle Gallery, announcing a new exhibit, entitled “The Catgirls of Caledon,” by Miss Tasha Sandalwood. (And, believe me, Caledon has a great many Catgirls, for reasons that remain obscure to me.) The Cooper-Pentewyns went on to say: “The artist has been intrigued by our catgirls and her photos are lively and show an appreciation of the special qualities of the cat girl.



The exhibition is in the upper gallery.





Meanwhile, in the lower gallery, pictures by Mr. and Mrs. Cooper-Pentewyn are displayed.





The exhibit and the gallery are both charming and worth dropping in on.

Bryn Oh's "The Singularity of Kumiko"

Bryn Oh’s latest exhibit, on her Immersiva sim, is “The Singularity of Kumiko,” a story told in pictures and letters (in written and audio form) that unfolds as one moves through the sim. Kumiko receives messages in a bottle, as though from across a sea, from her friend Iktomi, and responds through messages of her own. (Miss Oh has an introduction and a brief video about the exhibit on her blog.)

In the arrival area, a visitor receives instructions regarding Windlight and other graphics settings, the main effect of which is to render the environment very dark. To compensate, there is a helmet-mounted flashlight, like a miner’s lamp, that allows one to see, imperfectly, in the dark.



The first scene one encounters is this accident: a car, a damaged bicycle, and a backpack, its contents strewn about the roadway. The roadway then peters out, and one is left looking for the next patch of light.



These set pieces contain objects in Miss Oh’s distinctive style. Often animal forms mix with machine parts, such as the giraffe swing set below.



Be careful, however, and do not linger in the woods. The sim is damage-enabled, and the sound of a squeaky wheel signals the arrival of a lunatic homicidal mechanical rabbit, Mr. Zippers, who will kill you if possible. You will encounter Mr. Zippers later on as well, in an abandoned, dilapidated house.



Because a visitor may encounter the tableaux in the “wrong” order, one has to puzzle together the narrative from receiving the exchange of letters between Kumiko and Iktomi out of order. Ultimately, however, one reaches a resolution of the story, even if some of the specifics remain left to the visitor’s imagination.



In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which an object is not well-behaved - for example, undifferentiable. However, perhaps a better definition of the word in this context is “the state of being singular, distinct, peculiar, uncommon[,] or unusual.” As the story unfolds, we discover that Kumiko is all that.



The darkness adds to the unsettling atmosphere of the exhibit. On my monitor everything was so dark between the set pieces that I sometimes felt as though I was stumbling blindly through the woods. I wonder if increasing the light a little would still allow the spookiness while making navigation easier. And while I’m on the subject of minor cavils, I’m not sure that allowing Mr. Zippers to kill visitors was necessary, especially as it removes one from the exhibit, at least temporarily, and breaks the atmosphere.

One interesting decision that Miss Oh made was to limit the number of visitors at any one time to 10-15, both in order to minimize the likelihood that visitors would run into one another and, more importantly, to minimize lag on the sim. I had no trouble teleporting into the sim several times (damn you, Mr. Zippers!) and experienced no noticeable lag, so this seemed to be a good idea.



“The Singularity of Kumiko” once again demonstrates Bryn Oh’s, er, singular vision and her use of Second Life to provide a multimedia form of narrative. It’s a fascinating, emotional, and disturbing journey.

For better pictures and a better description of the project, see Inara Pey’s review and Honour McMillan’s review.

Cooger and Dark's Wax Museum and Chamber of Horrors

As I wandered through Babbage Square, my eyes were drawn to the hands emerging from the pavement. They turned out to be part of Cooger and Dark's Wax Museum. Naturally, I needed to see what was inside.



The museum has exhibits of famous individuals in horror and the occult. Below, H. P. Lovecraft...



… and Aleister Crowley...



… and the Babbage Cuckoos. Well, doubtless a part of New Babbage history of which I am woefully ignorant.



Attached to the wax museum is a Chamber of Horrors. Most of these pictures need no explanation.



This lad below, however, bears an uncanny resemblance to the mastermind behind both the wax museum and the chamber of horrors, young Jimmy Branagh.




Master Jimmy noted that there would be a Grand Re-Opening shortly, with a DJ and dancing for those with a left and a right foot, and a bar for those who have been manufactured with two left (or right) feet.

Second Life Turns 10

I didn't spend a great deal of time at SL10B for a number of reasons. (Not the least of which was: I had one hell of a busy week at the office.) I'm not a huge fan of these events, wherein too many avatars pack into too small a space, creating monstrous lag, and inducing those in charge to attempt to manage the lag by shaming visitors into removing prims, AOs, scripts, and anything else that creates lag. If I have to show up as Ruth, perhaps your event isn't exactly the immersive hug-fest that you've advertised it as.

At any rate, I did pop in on two different days, once for a quick look around and the second to see a few specific builds. One was Loki Eliot's build for Escapades Island.



A gigantic green dinosaur with a pink bunny, a medieval village, and a creature wearing boxing gloves fit in with Loki's sense of whimsy. I didn't take the HUD, so I don't know what other goodies were in store for those who did, but it was a fun build.





Nearby was the build for Single-Frame Stories, by Whiskey Monday and Botgirl Questi. They post a weekly topic, and contributors make a single picture on the topic.



Lots of great pictures - some very evocative, some I don't understand, but hey, that's life.





I also hit up Crap Mariner's Shatoetry build. William Shatner, in an effort to expand his empire, has an iOS app with him speaking various words. Users create phrases and sentences and the app "speaks" them in Shatner's voice. Crap has been creating Shatoetry for some time now. For SL10B, he invited people to create Second Life-themed Shatoetry, which he collected for the build. (I submitted one some time ago, but I don't know what happened to it. No doubt I screwed up an instruction.) [Edit 6/28: I apparently lost my ability to read text, because there it was. Ah well.]







Finally, next to Crap's build was the Corn Field, the legendary "time out" zone for punishing naughty avatars. While the original was cut off from the rest of the grid, this one was just a short walk away.



The boredom! The boredom! Fortunately, there's television:



Unfortunately, it shows nothing but a test pattern.