This is quoted from an email conversation with a colleague where we were discussing Second Life artistic endeavors.

And it is an understatement if ever there was one – when you consider it solely from the vantage point of “objects”, that is. You cannot export objects out of Second Life at the moment. Well, yes, there may be complex, esoteric means of doing so. But the results fall far short of expectations. And what is more, you also cannot import objects into SL. Yes yes, sculpties, I know. But come on people, let’s face it: That is a half measure at best! And not even… Which would be the reason why professional architects tend to avoid the place like the plague – outside of a handful of visionary pioneers who (correctly) regard it as a testing ground for architectural concepts. I mean why waste time on building stuff that you cannot send to a 3D printer to create a physical architectural model to show to your clients? Surely AutoCad works better for that?

When it comes to art however, you have an equally big, if not even bigger, problem. SL-Art will not get you RL shows. Other virtual art work will. Create something in OpenGL or VRML and the world is your oyster. Every art & technology oriented venue, biennial, curated international art event, juried show, museum, gallery – you name it, it is yours for the taking. Do the same exact work in SL – no one wants to know. I know this from personal experience: I have tried. It won’t work. On one occasion I even had the reviewer own up to their prejudice: Kicked off the rejection paragraph with “who would have thought that work like this could come out of Second Life!”, continuing to tell me in something like 300 words how they loved what I had submitted, only to end the paragraph with “sadly, the work has been created in Second Life and as such is not suitable for this event”. The work in question was Anatomia. And no, I am not going to tell you the event that I had applied for (I may yet do so again one day, after all… ;-), but it was one of the biggest art and technology exhibitions globe-wide.

So, as my colleague says, the output to RL is very tiny. A host of aspiring individuals, who have rezzed just one phosphorescent glow object too many, have seen to it that the place has acquired an unbelievably bad name for “serious” art. So, unless you are Cao Fei, you suffer for the misdemeanors of others. It is unjustified, I know. There is good art in SL. Few and far between, it’s true. But it is there. And what is “good art” you may ask? Well, I talked that one into the ground a few months ago and in case you missed it, here’s the link.

For me at least, art in SL has absolutely nothing to do with the creation of objects. It has to do with the construction of identities for which “objects” may or may not be utilized. I am going to dare and take this one step further even: I would dare to suggest that the creation/investigation of identity (as opposed to the creation of objects) is one of the very few routes left to explore for “serious art” in the year of 2010. Where there is a big question left unanswered. The quest for which involves wandering down the abyss of who you are and coming face to face with the complexity of “you”. And bringing that quagmire of “you” back to the surface of your consciousness. And sure, this may involve the creation of objects. Objects as signifiers of identity.

It could be argued that when it comes to the creation of objects human ingenuity is endless and what is wrong with wishing to create even more of them? For me, what is wrong with the practice is that unless you contextualize what you rezz (SL or RL, I am using the word rezz in a broader context here) within some deeper quest, you will inevitably end up with silliness on your hands. And the silliness may even look good! Not at all the point – how good it looks! It will still be vapid, a pretty soap bubble which cannot sustain its own existence. Anyway, we have always contextualized our creations within deeper quests, up until the last 30 years or so. What happened here, of late?

What happened (I believe) is that we hit a wall. As a species. Not where science and technology are concerned, mind you. There we flourished. Or design. Again, we went from strength to strength. But in art we floundered on the same rock of materialism that aided creative progress in those fields. Quests that dared to address unanswerable questions became very “uncool” in the modernistic/post-modernistic world of materialism… And so all art was left with was a bunch of PC clap-trap, social awareness, bla bla bla bla… And of course, objects. Just that. Objects.

You cannot take objects out of SL. What you can take out is a mindset. A mindset wandering down the path of the self, or of novel perceptions of the self. One that is constantly testing the borders of consciousness and metamorphosing them into art. Art, very likely, created outside of Second Life – art that feeds on the mindset of the synthetic world from whence it arose, however. Just to give one tiny example: I reviewed a paper written by Gregory Garvey for a special edition of the Journal of Consciousness Studies the other day. Garvey points at a number of strong analogies between the Second Life experience and clinical dissociative identity disorders; particularly focusing on the default “over the shoulder” POV of most virtual worlds and similar perceptual shifts in clinical DID patients. Fascinating subject, fascinating paper. Artwork based on a query of this “over the shoulder” POV and how it affects identity and consciousness would, in my mind, not be a “tiny output to RL”.

There is an “artistic” migration to RL from SL in progress, even as I write. And quite inevitably so, I fear. However, as Castranova describes very beautifully in his book, unlike a discrete, one way migration (as is the case with population shifts in the physical world), this migration may (hopefully!) be of a continuous nature, with migrants switching back and forth between the physical and the synthetic world. The mindset in one world, the output in another.

Curioser and curioser… As Alice once said…

I am probably one of SL’s worst travelers. Stay at home, mind my own business – pretty much. Not that I am alone in this, I imagine: All hardcore builders are probably more or less the same way, in the end. Stay put, get on with your rezzing – till the cows come home…

So anyway, I had been seeing this background image on the Emerald viewer for the past few weeks and from the first time that I did so, it aroused my curiosity. And yesterday, on a total whim, I clicked the “visit this location” link and found myself in one of the most remarkable sims I have ever been at in Second Life to date: Xeniversity, the home sim of a Mr. Xenius Revere, who apparently uses the place to teach people Maya and SL lighting techniques and who also sells furniture, sculpty packs as well as a very nifty range of goggles. So, essentially this is a learning and commercial sim. But, important as function and usage may be to the design process, Xeniversity is a location which has surpassed it’s design brief and has evolved into something quite beyond that. Something downright awe inspiring, I would say.

This is the sort of visuality, construction, design system, architecture, art – call it by whatever name you will, that makes my heart skip. And one that I hardly ever see in Second Life – or First, for that matter… Sure, I see similar efforts that somehow never manage to deliver quite what Xeniversity does with such impact: Not only is it a complex, intricate and yet liquidly harmonious design system which Mr. Revere seems to have rezzed through the usage of hundreds of cubes; but it is also incredibly, beautifully, finely, masterfully crafted. And, for me, it is this attention to detail and craftsmanship which makes Xeniversity work where so many other “minimalistic” efforts  seem to be failing so miserably.

Glorious textures! Just glorious! Really I cannot think of a lesser word here so I am going to stick to it at the expense of sounding totally bombastic – they are that stunning! So, what’s so special about texturing a whole bunch of cubes with an almost solid fill, you may ask? Ah… But you see it is not just a solid fill! Mr. Revere has added very delicate, soft shadows behind every cube he has rezzed! Either these are part of the actual cube textures, in which case he would have had to place each and every cube in exact proximity to its shadow, or these are separate alpha enabled png or tga files, which have been mapped onto very thin prims and then placed behind the cubes. I did not do a ctrl+alt+T to see if this was in fact the case while there. Never even occurred to me even. I was much too engrossed in admiring my surroundings to have all my speculative faculties engaged. But, whatever the technique involved has been, what matters is the result: Depth! Light! Softness! The breaking down of the rigidity of the construct (it is all cubes – all of it!) into something which creates it’s own “flow”. Becomes “nature” even, I would say: Cubes that metamorphose themselves into a remarkably powerful topography and (in one instance, at least for me) also flora.

Only 2 colors are placed within a tonal range which travels from white to black, incorporating a series of gradations of gray. The first of these colors is a brilliant blue which is emitted from light sources which colorize their surroundings and then, secondly, there is a vitriolic green. And this green could have ended up being such a god awful blunder had it been in the hands of just about anyone but Mr. Revere’s? As it is, it stands apart on its own little islet, manifesting in a tonal range which is mapped onto a rectangular variation of the cube system of the main island. Which seems to cling to a huge tree almost like some strange minimalistic novel plant form. A cubic vine?

I could continue on and on and on here, but I am not going to. Instead I would very much like everyone who stumbles upon this post (and who hasn’t been there yet, obviously) to go and visit Xeniversity for themselves. This place is a must see for all people who cherish design and architecture, virtual or otherwise:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Xeniversity/214/227/81

My hat goes off to Mr. Xenius Revere!

…

Two little additions: One is that I could not help but think of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat project as I was gazing at Mr. Revere’s construct. Not that this matters all that much at all by the way. Things do not have to always remind us of other things and we should not be groping for these associations to validate output. In fact, if anything, it is an odious little habit to always be doing so. However, in this case, Xeniversity really does remind me of Habitat and the association is strong enough that I feel that I should probably say it.

Second: I would like to create a “Xeniversity” avatar as part of my output for alpha.tribe. The place has really inspired me and I am now obsessed with inner images of how I could translate the architecture there to create unique avatar apparel, which may or may not be thought of in conjunction with Xeniversity. I have to first consult with Mr. Revere to do this, of course. And I had not even heard of him or Xeniversity until yesterday. So, I really do not know this person and I have no idea what his reaction would be – possibly not favorable at all, is my guess… But, I think I will pluck up my courage and contact him and ask for his permission anyway. And maybe he might say “yes, go ahead”. Who knows?

Oh and also! Very important this last one: These have been photographed with a custom sky preset, Mescaline Tammas’ London 2050, to be specific. However, I should probably also have added an image captured with the default SL sky into this series. This is the only case which I think I have ever seen in SL where an entire sim’s architecture actually (almost!) works even under a midday SL sky! That is how good the building/texturing of it is!

I am putting this here for the benefit of my graduate students, and particularly Onur. Although they do follow my blog, I do not think they venture forth as far as my Flickr, where I have already posted this a minute ago. I will not be seeing them until the third week of February and they may want to visit this before then. It is not going to be around for ever and may in fact already be gone by the time we all re-adjourn.

This was created by Selavy Oh in Second Life. What actually “makes” the work is the virtual earth itself, which reconfigures itself into an ever widening circle which wipes over an underlying earth spiral. And no, I will not be blubbering on about durée here (I think that that is what this work is all about), but simply link back to the wiki page, which explains it all like I never could anyway.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alpha_auer/4296503412/

A bit of a discussion seems to be brewing on my Flickr (although I seem to be the one blabbing around the most – as per usual :-\). But I thought it might still be interesting to post it here as well. Scroll down to the comments please…
;-)

… and Tautologies!

I have been giving some thought to these of late. I found a gem of a one the other day, but I am saving that one for later. And if I continue to find some more, who knows, I may even start a weekly rubric called “Artistic Oxymorons and Tautologies by Alpha Auer” right here on this semi-dead blog. Neat, huh? Pump some action into this place!

Coming home from work just now, stuck as I was in heavy traffic on the bridge, another really good one occurred to me. Which seems quite an appropriate location for inspiring thoughts to spontaneously burst forth by the way. Given how you are stuck between two continents, there would have to be some added planetary (not to mention cosmic, of course) energy, right? hhh… So, really no wonder at all that several million Istanbulites hit peak levels of misanthropy on this very spot on a twice daily basis…

But hey! What the bridge evoked in me tonight is not just another good one! Oh no! This one is the cherry on the icing of all artistic tautologies of all times: Conceptual Art!

As opposed to?… ? What?

Un-conceptual Art? Now what could that possibly be? The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel maybe? Wonder what Michelangelo would have to say about his pride and joy being called un-conceptual? Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson? I am sure he would not have been best pleased either! The cave paintings of Lascaux? Let me tell you, those shamans would have had fits! Elgin’s Marbles – Phidias, dissolved in tears over the insult? Monet? Cezanne? Who? What? What in the entire history of art that is even worthy of the slightest mention therein is un-conceptual? Could ever be so?

So, if anyone out there can enlighten me on this subject, I would be truly indebted to them. Mind you, I am up to scratch on all of my Kosuth reading and so forth – so, I am most definitely not looking for any elucidation on what conceptual art is. What I would very much like to know is the other one…

So, please people – tell me: What exactly is un-conceptual art?

I am updating my other blogs, especially the one for alpha.tribe, which I haven’t touched in ages. I am writing down the stuff/ideas/problems that went into the design of the outfits, going in reverse chronological order and got as far as de.stijl today. Which turned out to be a good one. (Or, at least so I hope). So, here it is.
:-)

I have been taking photos of the Annex and posting them on Flickr. Venk’s photos have finally shamed me into doing it, which meant spending some time there, of course.

The Annex is about death. It may be dark and gloomy below the water but I am realizing that I am looking at death as a good thing. The way I did things over there seems to point at that, although in most cases I did them more or less unawares: The poor old carousel horses who are then finally released as ghosts and the limbs that are pointing up at Arcadia Asylum’s globe of the constellations. And even the mortuary is actually very peaceful.

And then, yesterday I observed an encounter. It was a very minor, polite social exchange and had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I just happened to be there really. What I picked up on was so small, so seemingly insignificant that it would take me a very long time to describe what I mean, so I am not going to even attempt it.

…

A lot of things are going through my head. I keep writing down sentences and deleting them.

…

A year after I started the job that I have now, the dean called me into his office and said that unless I began to present academic output I would get fired. Meaning, I either had to exhibit art work (in a very substantial way) or I had to write academically – or else I was out. I had been doing neither. I had spent the 10 years before that making things on my computer, terabytes worth probably, but nothing that would even remotely fall into either category. I didn’t write anyway. I made stuff: I drew comics. Other stuff. I would spend months building very elaborate stages in 3D software and then take renders. Not even the slightest likelihood of exhibiting it or something. A tiny bit of it is on my RL website. Most of it isn’t. I must have made hundreds of website interfaces for my website. Or I would put in little sub sites that talked about flowers or my facial rejuvenation treatments. Countless little videos. A few I have salvaged and posted at vimeo. Most are lost. I have not even stored the stuff properly. None of it is video art or “art” or anything like that. Like I spent one whole winter making illustrations with cats dressed up as historic Istanbul people. A cat selling doner kebap. 3 cats smoking hookahs. A courting, old fashioned cat couple on a sofa, a lot of female cats in a hamam. I am going to have Alpho make t-shirts for one of her outfits out of them in fact.

I knew that the art exhibition route would be the harder one for me. My stuff was fragmented, I did whatever came into my head. Some of what I did may have looked “artsy” but the mindset behind it most definitely was not.

At around this time I was also reading Roy’s book and was completely entranced by it. I ended up becoming his student not really because I wanted to get a PhD but because I wanted to be his student. And there I realized that I could write. So, I chose the second route, writing, to retain my job. And to this day, it is the only reason that I continue. I have lost too many jobs in the past. In fact, I have been very cavalier in that regard and I have learned my lesson. It is called being penniless. I was (and still am) scared of that. I like money. I like to spend it.

…

I am Turkish. And we are nomads. We have been settled for a mere thousand years – and even then have we ever been really settled? Not that I am so very Turkish genetically either, I should say. And not that Turkey is not teeming with people who show duration and take root in one place. Me – I have moved so many times that I have lost count. And I probably will again before I die. I have changed my mind so often, lost careers and started new ones. For reasons which most others would probably laugh at. The job I have now I have had for 8 years and I am amazed. I think the nearest one to this was 3 years? 2? Basically I have run out of options and this is a dream job which I would be mad to lose. I have to stick around or else…

…

In the Muslim faith the best sort of grave (in the eyes of God) is the one which is unmarked or even completely lost. So, I am quite contented to know that it will not make a blind bit of difference whether I have been around or not. When I die. I make things because I have nothing better to do. And also of course because I have a really good time while I am making them. Including academic papers. And yes, of course I like it when people like what I make. Who wouldn’t?

…

What does all this have to do with the social exchange that I saw yesterday? I could somehow tell from their demeanor (although I am not exactly sure how I did that) that the two people who met and exchanged polite greetings had not spent 10 years drawing terabytes of cats in hamams and weird comic strips and facial rejuvenation web sites and God knows what else. I did and I still do so. For me, alpha.tribe is precisely that. And Syncretia too. There is no master plan. I do not see an aim in it, an illustrious culmination or whatever. It is all virtual anyway. Could crash and be gone any minute.

And that is precisely what I love about it. That is what I love about life itself. And that is why I think that I will welcome death when it finally comes. And I feel very very very alone as I am stating this feeling that life’s beautiful fragility gives me. And it is that loneliness that made me write this now.

…

Quite important note: I just re-read this, the day after I wrote it. And there is something here that needs to be clarified. The people I am talking about  – they have absolutely the right idea! They appeared to have a clarity of purpose in their lives which I seem to lack. I felt very alone, very outcast, and yes – ultimately very jealous as I stood there. But it is my problem, not theirs in any way!
:-\

I am so glad that I can post this now, right after the last post. After having completely let loose about how I am so fed up with the mediocrity, the banality, the cliche ridden existence of contemporary art in general, it feels so good to be bowled over and wowed by this! Truth be told I am at the point where I no longer even bother, no longer go to art events, avoid biennials and such. I no longer want to be subjected to so much ado about nothing, to endless loops of grainy video with no tangible beginning and no end. I have had it!

And then along comes somebody and grabs you by the scruff of your neck and frog-marches you into the Haus der Kunst in Munich and you stand there gobsmacked, not to mention thoroughly ashamed of your all-encompassing big mouth from just a few days ago!

Well, maybe not straight off the bat, I have to admit. The first piece is gigantic and impressive. As I subsequently find out the massive construct was shown at Documenta where it collapsed during a storm and what I am looking at here is the relic corkscrewing onto itself in gigantic cylindrical segments. A relic assembled out of hundreds of doors and window frames torn out of old Chinese houses. Poignant, shocking. It is really quite stunning and I am duly stunned – and yet, and yet, I cannot help but feel that I am still facing “a problem solved”, the spectacular output of a master designer commenting on the “rape” of antique artifacts, in other words. Then come a number of three dimensional Chinese maps, delicately constructed wooden towers that are maps when looked at from above. Truly beautiful, but again, smells very strongly of a designer’s mind to me. Not that anything is wrong with that at all – I am one myself after all and have nothing but the deepest respect for my own trade. But art? Hmmm…. I wonder… I mean, I really am trying to co-operate here but at this early stage I am not yet convinced…

And then, we make our way into the central hall of the exhibition where a petrified forest awaits us and there I am totally blown away! This is certainly no master designer but an artist – a genius of an artist, in fact: This is the brink between order and chaos, a visual response to the question with no answer – presenting you with even more questions, even more riddles.

I am difficult by disposition (in the unlikely case that this might have slipped your attention somehow) and so inevitably some few details, such as the photos of the 1000 or so Chinese citizens whom Ai Weiwei brought to Documenta and which provide a background texture to the forest and especially the tent displaying their accommodations next door keep on niggling at me. I really do not want to see them. Why? Because again, they seem to bring in some kind of a “problem solved” thing which is so insignificant next to this sea of gigantic trees. Or to all of those heavy beams driven into those delicate antique tables on display in yet another room. And then there is a single table and a single beam in one other room and suddenly the whole exhibit, tree trunks and all, does a huge perceptual flip for me and I see Eros. Not Eros the cute little cherub equipped with bow and arrow but Eros the primal force. As in Eros the roof beam. But also the table. Many tables. The couplings of roof beams and tables. And then next door, huge chunks of trees, almost fossilized, arranged like the soldiers of the terracotta army. And also neolithic urns, thousands of them, so many in fact, that he has ground them into dust and placed them in glass jars. Some colored with aniline paint. Metaphors I almost understand and yet do not. There is a fight with human culture here – maybe. The insignificance of it – or maybe the significance – or maybe a contradiction grounded in culture. Really, I am not sure. But, am I glad I saw this! And at the height of my hatred of “contemporary art” at that!

So, who was it that dragged me kicking and screaming into the gallery in the first place then? It was none other than the human of Selavy Oh! There are very few people that I really seem to hang out with in SL, and Selavy is one of them. We first became associated while I was writing up the NPIRL blog post last June. Emailed back and forth about the work, met in-world a few times and so forth. After the post went up we made a pact: We would say hi to one another once a week. It seems that we are both very shy (yes, despite my loud mouth I am in fact very very shy and so apparently is Selavy), therefore unless we had had an agreement of this sort we would undoubtedly have gone our separate ways. But we have in fact kept up this pact and have hung out, mostly via email it seems. So, a month or so ago when I knew that I would be going to a conference in Munich, Selavy’s home town, we arranged to get together and have a coffee at least. Coffee turned into an almost 5 hour session, during which we first wandered through Ai Weiwei’s show and then through various streets and quarters of Munich, in and out of underground trains, punctuated by cups of coffee, a lunch during which I demolished 3 gigantic weisswuerschtl and Selavy’s human half a roast duck; more wandering, quite a few cigarettes (turns out we are thoroughly nasty old smoke stacks, both of us). During the entire time, I do not think that we stopped nattering even for one minute – or at least I didn’t for sure. And somehow Selavy’s human also managed to get a word in edgewise every so often, I guess. Which is highly commendable, of course: Shows persistence!

Not to worry. I am not going to go into any kind of a discourse over RL and SL and their respective merits and shortcomings now, would be very inane to still be doing so after 3 years of full time SL Residency anyway. Only one thing to say really: Human beings can smile. And avatars cannot.

Fact.

Stelarc has come into Second Life. Hugely significant, I think. He is a breaker of taboos, a master of the art of pulling the cute little rug of complacency out from under people’s feet. And, from where I am standing, our little world needs some serious breaking of taboos and a thorough dishevelment of complacency.

Not the many people who unassumingly pursue their individual paths of playful creativity by taking SL photographs to post on Flickr or building their own personal toys. Or the many merchants providing an endless procession of ingenious artifacts for them to utilize in their quest. They most certainly do not need any shaking up and bringing to their senses. Those people, at least in my book, are the persona grata, if not indeed the lifeblood of the metaverse. They are what makes Second Life into a builder’s world. They sustain it, and in more ways than one at that. Their combined endeavor is well on its way to creating its own distinctive genre, a type of 21st century folk art, and I have a hunch that in decades to come art historians as well as anthropologists will be writing many a ponderous tome on what they are embroiled in today, under our very noses. Their emergence is something that Roy predicted all the way back in the 1960’s when he was building the cybernetic art matrix and spoke of an entirely novel user group of art domains:

“The new leisured class can be expected to swell in numbers as automation becomes more totally applied to society’s productive activities. The main body of this class will comprise workers, employed in industry, commerce, and other services on a part-time rotational basis, doing about three five-hour days’ of work per week in the short term, and probably even less at a later stage, as W. Gordon has suggested. The opportunity for “creative play” will consequently be considerable, although the demand for it may not be very noticeable initially. We can expect a continuance at first of the present trend towards “recreational buying”—the consumption of goods for the activity and pleasure of buying—and the use of established commercial forms of entertainment. But there will be a growing need for amenities that provide for social and intimate participation in creative activities of new and stimulating kinds.” (Ascott, 1966)

So I will take this opportunity to bow to their combined creative endeavor, consumer and merchant alike, and proceed to sink my teeth into the crowd that I think does need some very serious whacking on the head.

Of course it isn’t SL, it is actually RL. That is where the original malaise comes from. And slowly but surely it is casting its insalubrious odor into the metaverse as well. Has been doing so ever since I signed up, in fact. Has horrified me from the get-go. And, Stelarc or no Stelarc, it will win anyway (just as it has done in RL) through the sheer fact of there being huge strengths in numbers, in other words the existence of an awful lot of self-important people with remarkably over-inflated estimations of their own abilities combined with a very low opinion of what “art” may actually be all about. Were you to ask them, by the way, of course Art is their God, their one and only raison d’etre or some other such unctuous malarkey. Ask me – they actually have the audacity to think that art is a simple enough endeavor to be tackled by all and sundry – including them! hhh – and I really mean hhh this time…

Art is about asking the question that is unutterable in words, that has no answer, for which there is no outcome. It is about laying bare the horrifying uncertainty of the human condition. It is torturous and tortured by nature in that it is an attempt to articulate the in-articulate. That is what it has always been about. No wonder then that for millenia it placed itself in the service of religion; because religion, at its finest moments addresses the same dilemma. Who are we? Why are we? Where are we?

But somewhere along the line we lost religion. The torture however remained, to be briefly picked up by the avantgarde of the early 20th century. People like Duchamp and Ernst. And yes, also Picasso. Please do not tell me that Demoiselles is about something else? And here we are, still grappling with the same unutterable void – these days on psychiatrist’s couches and feel-good seminars. It has become trivialized, it has become banal – but it is still there, nonetheless. How many “artists” over the past 30 years have asked it? Have made it the business of their lives and of their work to ask the unutterable question to which there is no answer?

And how many of those that did, have had the stamina to look things straight in the eye and admit despair? How many have pulled it off without falling into endless pits of banality? With no melodrama, no cheap histrionics? My colleague Selim Birsel (above, 1993) is one of them.

And Stelarc is most certainly one such as well. And like the thoroughbred that he is, his work is hard to take. It is a punch in the gut. It tears into your soul, by tearing into his flesh. I am wondering what he will do here, in SL. Whatever it will be, it will not be predictable. Again, thoroughbred that he is, he sits in a twilight zone of his own creation. Hard to classify, hard to categorize, hard to second-guess, hard to write clever little critiques over. No wonder that he is so well hated.

But again, I am wondering what he will do in SL. “The body is obsolete” he screams on his website. Is SL the place that his agony has brought him? To the place of the non-physical, where there is no more physical pain? Where the flesh can no longer be tormented? Stelarc, for me, is all about the flesh. The utter helplessness of our decaying physical being, of our self inflicted torture, of our endurance in the face of the unknowable.

…

So, I am not an artist. I do not have the stamina, or the means to ask questions to which there are no answers. I build play islands, like doll’s houses they are… And I also make nice little clothes. Weird clothes, but at the end of the day – clothes… I am a designer. I obsess over appearance and function. Or non-function – as the case may be. But my path is defined, it is predictable. I am a very good designer, yes – but this is not to be confused with “art”. “Art” is a huge mouthful. My mouth is simply not large enough for the word. Really, it isn’t.

Recently I have made two things. And I am realizing that with both of them I am actually confronting fears or in the case of one of them, if not fear itself a very strong repulsion.

Jellyfish. I have loathed them for as long as I can remember. They have managed to totally sour up my childhood holidays by the sea. We used to have these huge deep blue ones along with the smaller white variety and basically whenever they were in evidence I would not go into the water. They never stung me or anything like that but I loathed them anyway. Later, in my twenties, I did some scuba stuff on the Aegis and once when I was underwater I even saw a shark. (He showed no interest in me whatsoever – Thank God!). And even the shark did not give me the same gut reaction that I got from the jellyfish. Of course I was scared witless, but I really did not have that revulsion. He was very beautiful and mixed in with my fear was also a huge admiration for his grace. And why am I saying “he” anyway? For all I know this was a girl-shark. But seemed very masculine somehow?

I have no idea why I made jellyfish at Syncretia when I built the lightbulb basin. Given how much I loathe them, I really shouldn’t have done so. When I started thinking about making things for avatars in Second Life a jellyfish outfit was one of the first things that I thought about doing. So, last week finally I made Alpho do one:

I do not know if this will help next time when I am about ready to jump into the sea and I see the monsters floating below me. Chances are very strong that I will still go “yukkkkkk” and run inland as fast as my legs will carry me. But, that said, I am kind of glad I made this.

…

The second thing is far more complicated to explain. I have been building the Annex and almost all of it is sunk into the sea. I really do love the underwater (although I have to admit that I haven’t gone scubaing in a very very long time). So, it would not be terribly surprising if I wanted to build an underwater sim for that reason alone. However, my real reason is that I find the lighting conditions underwater far superior to those above. The light in SL leaves much to be desired. For my personal use I almost always have sky presets enabled. I have a special one for when I am building and for all other times I use the Mescaline Tammas presets. But of course, I assume that the bulk of people who come to Syncretia have the regular sky settings. Even though I set a sim time and everything I am never completely satisfied with the result. And there the underwater lighting really comes to the rescue. In short the real reason is the ability to make usage of the light down there.

I could have created something wonderful and colorful like they have over at Blake Sea where we were last week testing the S+R scuba gear with wolfie. Instead I made this space which scares even me! And I built it for God’s sakes! How can I possibly be scared by something which I made myself? There is a carousel and I honestly do not want to hang out there – it totally gives me the creeps…

Why did I do this? And what is that place all about? If I want to get all high falutin’ and banal I can say that it is about life and death. Consciousness and the subconscious. Above and below. Eros and Tanathos. Bla bla bla bla… But, it is about none of these or all of them or something else entirely which I cannot even name properly. Something which resides deep in my unconscious mind and which scares me. Something I have no knowledge of whatsoever on a conscious level.

Now one of the things which I do when I am building is that I use things which others have made if I can possibly do so. I see no merit in entirely homemade endeavors in a metanomic system. If I can’t find it I make it and of course I make the basic structural bits, but most of the stuff that goes into the structure is acquired. I either purchase the things or I pick them up as freebies. This is of course a kind of three dimensional collage. Max Ernst and André Breton talk about the benefits of collage, “the chance encounter of two distant realities on an unsuitable level”, in releasing the images of the unconscious mind. And my guess is that something of the sort happens to me when I bring together the stuff I pick up on the freebie boards at NCI plaza and Yadni’s Junkyard. I wrote a paper about all this at one point and then even made a virtual flip-book out of the paper. (No one was too terribly impressed by the paper itself, I have to admit. In fact Roy sent me off with a colossal flea in my ear… hhh. So a flip-book as a final resting place for it is about right, I guess).

I had dug some very deep canyons and used a very dark ground texture for the deepest level of the terrain. So, the place has been dark almost from the day that I got the sim. But that has to do with the fact that underwater, as I remember it, is dark. Or rather a weird admixture of dark coming at you from the depths and light coming from above. But it is eerie as a space – underwater. And it seemed to me that creating a dark ocean floor and a lighter upper level would simulate that RL underwater feeling more or less accurately. Because I did want accuracy of sorts in that. But that is the groundwork. What happened after that is that I started picking up things. I found a strange sculpty horse as a freebie. The textures on it were pretty awful although the shape was really good. So, I blanked out the texture. Too harsh. So, I decreased the opacity. Too wish washy. So, I added glow. Suddenly I had a ghost horse. Hmmm… Suddenly I sunk it into the water to see how it would look against the dark ground. Looked pretty good. So, I duplicated it to see the increased effect. And one more and one more. Suddenly I had a herd of ghost horses galloping underwater. I had had no idea, no intention of doing this. I was going to do fish and stuff. I mean I still have a lot of fish down there, but now there is a herd of ghost horses as well.

Then, next thing, I send Amina off to the gnubie store to get kitted out a bit. She has no clothes to wear and although she does not really go anywhere she should still have something to wear, no? And alpha.tribe designers do not really wear their own designs except for experimental purposes. We have a house policy like that. So while she is there she sees this carousel. Picks it up, passes it onto me. I rezz it. I have no intention whatsoever of using it, I just want to see what it is. However, I happen to rezz it right next to the horses. Next thing the horses are on the carousel. And… I get really really scared by what I just did.

It is all like this, what is down there. How it came together. The horses are just one part. There is other stuff too. Of course, there is this synchronistic encounter theory as well, where you apparently bump into things which somehow end up being what you were looking for inadvertently.

So what is it about? Fear of something for sure. Death? There are objects directly related to death in another part of the sim. And the ghost horses are dead too in a way I suppose. But, I am not at all morbid. Hardly ever think about all that stuff. And also, I was talking to a friend of mine Natasha Vita-More, who is very involved in radical life extension research and while we were mulling about all this it emerged that I really have no interest in living forever. Or for much longer than what people normally do these days. Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire or intention to pop my clogs anytime soon, say within the next 4 – 5 decades – hhh. I do want to have a good innings and genetic predisposition on both sides of my parentage would indicate that this is probably likely to happen – unless shit happens, of course. But, if it does it does… So? I am probably about as much scared of death as the next person, but really no more than that. And plus – I firmly believe in reincarnation. They had a case here years ago with all these babies that started blabbing about a location 100s of kilometers away where they claimed to have wives and children. Turns out it it was all correct. And the babies had been conceived within hours if not minutes of the demise of a group of men who had died in a really bad car crash at a young age. Now, that is irrefutable evidence in my book…

Not death then but something. I seem to have spat out a conglomeration of objects which scare me to look at. So, again, as with the jellyfish I must be in the process of confronting something. Except I really have no idea what it might be? Or only a very vague inkling of some sort? And that unsettles me even more somehow?

…

Ah well, I am sure all will be revealed in due course. For now I have far more pleasant matters on my mind: Frigg Ragu gave me her collection of poses and these have got to be the best ones ever seen in SL! Oh and – Amina picked up a set of maracas which make you “manbo” (not mambo!) when you wear them. And, I have had my heart set on making a sailors outfit for the longest time. So, speaking of “the chance encounter of two distant realities on an unsuitable level”, I am frantically busy in photoshop right now making the “manbo sailor” outfit! I am sure it will be the hottest seller yet!

teeee heeee…