Day: April 5, 2020

Secrets, magic & science, poems, and games in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Seanchai Library

It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home unless otherwise indicated. Note that the schedule below may be subject to change during the week, please refer to the Seanchai Library website for the latest information through the week.

Sunday, April 5th, 18:30: The Secret Garden

Caledonia Skytower continues this classic of children’s literature  by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911, at the Golden Horseshoe in Magicland Park.

Orphaned after losing her parents in a cholera epidemic, young Mary Lennox returns to England from India, entering the care of her uncle Archibald Craven, whom she has never met.

Up until this point, Mary’s childhood had not been happy; her parents were selfish and self-seeking, regarding her as a burden over which they were not obliged to hold much responsibility. Not overly healthy herself, she is as a result  a temperamental, stubborn and unmistakably rude child – and her arrival at Misselthwaite Manor and the relative gloom of Yorkshire’s weather does little to improve her mein.

Her disposition also isn’t helped by her uncle, who is strict and uncompromising, leading to Mary despising him. But her uncle’s story is itself filled with tragedy, particularly the loss of his wife. As she learns more about her uncle’s past, so Mary learns about a walled garden Mrs. Craven once kept, separated from the rest of the grounds and which, since her passing has been kept locked by Mary’s uncle, the door leading to it kept locked, the key to it buried somewhere. 

Finding the missing key and the now hidden door, Mary enters the garden, and her passage into it starts her on a journey of friendship and discovery, one that leads her to the thing she never really knew: family.

Monday, April 6th 19:00: The Higher Space

Gyro Muggins reads Jamil Nasir’s 1996 novella that mixes science and magic.

Bob Wilson is a lawyer with a house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, and a predictable life. Then he agrees to represent a neighbourhood couple in what looks like an open-and-shut custody case.

But no sooner do the Wilsons take in fourteen-year-old Diana Esterbrook than Bob must ask himself some troubling questions. Is Diana a computer genius or a dangerously disturbed adolescent? Why is his house being bugged? Who is the mysterious man in black? And what about Diana’s birth mother, a convicted kidnapper just released from prison?

Wilson’s quest for answers will lead him to an enigmatic private detective, a meek professor with dreams of immortality, and finally to the secrets of a discipline called Thaumatomathematics a strange blend of magic and science where death becomes the key to beatific ecstasy.

Tuesday, April 7th:

12:00 Noon: Russell Eponym, Live in the Glen

Music, poetry, and stories in a popular weekly session that is finding a new home in Ceiluradh Glen as guest of Seanchai Library.

19:00: Words for Our Souls: Poetry in The Glen

Seanchai Staff share words for our time around the fire.

Wednesday, April 8th, 19:00: No Session

The library will be dark.

Thursday, April 9th:

19:00: What’s in a Username?

Shandon Loring returns to Game On: A Gamelit Anthology, this time to read Angel Leya’s short story, What’s in a Username?

While playing a hot new MMORG called Power, gamer girls Maddy and best friend Amber run into a guy on whom Maddy has an all encompassing crush. 

Given her inability to talk to any guy she likes without becoming a tongue-tied, fumbling wreck, Maddy determines the best way to make her feeling known is through her (albeit male) game avatar.

Things start to go awry, however, as Maddy realises Amber likely also has a crush on the object of her affections. As a result, both of their gaming suffers in their pursuit of the eye-catching player.

But what  no-one playing Power realises is that there is more at stake in the game than they could ever realise.

Also in Kitely – grid.kitely.com:8002:SEANCHAI).

21:00: Seanchai Late Night

Contemporary Sci-Fi-Fantasy with Finn Zeddmore featuring stories from sources including Escape Pod, Light Speed, and Clarkesworld on-line magazines.

The Oller Belair Gallery and Circular in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

Oller Belair Art Gallery: Uleria Caramel

The Oller Belair Art Gallery (follow the path across the covered bridge from the landing point), created and operated by Pencarrow Oller offers a venue for physical world artists to present their work within Second Life. In this, it presents an exhibition space that encompasses art by Pencarrow herself with artist in residence Layachi Ihnen, together with invited artist exhibitions and a monthly competition for physical world artists, the Unicorn Awards competition. For April, the invited artist is Uleria Caramel, whose exhibition Circular opened on April 3rd, 2020.

An abstract expressionist, Uleria works in a number of mediums: oils, glass painting, aquarelles, ceramics and photography. Her art combines colour and contrast, inspired by her own feelings and emotional reactions to the things and the worlds she observes; something that can give her art a particular depth of emotional resonance from observers.

This is particularly true for Circular, her exhibition within the Belair hall of the gallery. This series of works has, as their foundation, the on-going global crisis that is affecting us all, as Uleria noted to me when discussing the exhibition.

I was thinking, what would be this exhibitions theme, and the main thing in my mind has been this corona crisis on this Earth. So my vision started to grow from words like lifeless, rock, space, and round shapes like an Earth shape, the corona virus shape and round shapes in general. But I don’t want to the virus theme into the foreground; if someone sees it, that’s OK; if they see something else, that’s OK as well.

Oller Belair Art Gallery: Uleria Caramel

This idea of a theme for the exhibition that is not in and of itself a driving force behind the images presented within it is clearly reflected in the selection process Uleria used for Circular. While the ideas of circles, spheres and round shapes and form that might contain elements suggestive of things like a virus is prevalent in all of the images she offers here, none of the pieces have been created specifically because of the foundational theme for Circular; rather, they are all pre-existing pieces drawn from Uleria’s rich portfolio if past works.

This give Circular a layering of interpretation and emotional depth that is genuinely captivating; some of the pieces through colour, impression and shape offer very clear reflections of virus-oriented themes, from the idea of a viral invasion. Take Cell One, The Origins, and Drifting, for example, with the latter in particular perhaps bringing to mind oxygenated haemoglobin, so vital to aerobic respiration, offering an indelible link to the respiratory nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the resulting Covid-19 disease.

Oller Belair Art Gallery: Uleria Caramel

Other pieces are more subtle in their connection to the thematic play of the exhibition, allowing us to view them entirely independently of that theme – although the threads of connection are there. Take the corner collection of mandala-like Kaleido images, together with Liquid Moon, for example.

These stand as pieces that engage the mind without any overt thoughts of illness or the like, yet within them are still thematic echoes: the Kaleido pieces offer both subtle suggestions of viral entities and of the interconnectedness we all share as a part of life that can enable their spread, while Liquid Moon can perhaps bring forth celestial thoughts on the cosmos around us and also suggestive of a single cell – the building block of life. Thus, these – and the other pieces presented here – mean that Circular can be viewed both as a social commentary for the times or purely as a retrospective of Uleria’s remarkable art.

Oller Belair Art Gallery: Pencarrow Oller

As noted, the gallery also features exhibitions by Pencarrow, who at the time of my visit was offering a display of abstract, flowing pieces inspired by haikus. Through their use of colour, these are expressive pieces, even without the words of the haiku which inspired them (these should be offered by touching an individual piece, although this was still to be set-up at the time of my visit), with the more slender pieces each suggestive of traditional Japanese scroll paintings, thus adding to the depth of the theme.

Deserving of a more expressive space in which to be shown, Pancarrow’s pieces occupy the Oller hall / stairway leading up to the upper floor of the gallery, where Layachi Ihnen’s always absorbing studies and portraiture can be found. These are presided over by the impressive multi-panel The Infinites, a study that wraps itself around three walls of the exhibition area to form an unfolding story.

Oller Belair Art Gallery: Layachi Ihnen

Provided for physical world artists displaying their work in Second Life, the Unicorn Awards is operated through the gallery, offering a prize pot of L$10K with art displayed in the Unicorn Studio hall. Each awards competition is themed, and details  can be obtained by setting foot in the Unicorn Studio or by contacting the gallery’s manager, Airam79 Carami, in-world.

SLurl Details