Kimmy LittleBoots is a highly regarded second Life photographer whose work graces many Flickr groups – and is often selected as a banner image for those groups. Specialising in avatar studies, she works in both colour and black-and-white, covering a broad spectrum of moods and settings, from the seemingly every day through to the sensual, to emotive self-studies.
Throughout February 2018, a small sampling of Kimmy’s work can be viewed at Artful Expressions gallery, curated by Sorcha Tyles. Simply entitled An Exhibition in Black and White, it features seven studies, each one of which embodies a specific feeling or condition in a beautifully evocative manner – a mouseover or right-click for Edit will reveal the title of each.
Each of the pieces on display is worth an essay in its own right; there is a richness of expression and depth of sentiment in each which is captivating. So much so that I found myself repeatedly drawn back to each image time and again, repeatedly drawn into its story.
In this, the use of black and white photographs is a masterful stroke. Being monochrome, the images are from the outset more easily seen as a whole statement. Yes, we are obviously drawn to the central figure in each, but as there are no strong colours either in the background or off to one side or the other, so we are not distracted into focusing on them. Instead, we are encouraged to see each picture as a whole, to appreciate the balance between figure and setting more evenly, taking in everything as a single expression of mood, thought, or condition. Thus, each image is brought to life far more effectively than had each been rendered in colour, drawing us ever more deeply into each one.
Exhibition in Black and White really does speaks for itself, although I’d perhaps suggest a title plaque for each would be of benefit, given how closely image and title are linked. For those with an interest in avatar studies and SL photography, it is an exhibition not to be missed, and I strongly encourage a visit to Artful Expressions to witness it. And while there, do take time to explore the gallery’s garden, which now features a cosy little beach side café offering a quiet corner in which to relax.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates for the week ending Sunday, February 4th
This summary is published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Official LL Viewers
Current Release version 5.1.0.511732, dated January 9th, promoted January 16th formerly the Alex Ivy Maintenance RC – no change.
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 at Holly Kai Park, unless otherwise indicated.
Monday, February 5th 19:00: Sentenced to Prism
Prism is a planet with a uniquely crystaline environment and which supports both silicon and carbon-based life forms. It is a planet where even the tiniest creatures are living jewels.
For some time, the Company has been illegally exploiting Prism, but now all contact has been lost with the research team there, leaving the Company with a problem. Any attempt to launch a rescue mission will draw unwanted attention both to Prism and to the Company’s activities. Something else must done; so they call on the talents of Evan Orgell.
A smart, self-confident and successful problem-solver, Orgell has access to the best equipment available within the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, and as Orgell discovers, Prism is a harsh and hard place – a lot harder than his state-of-the-art environment suit. When that succumbs to the local flora/fauna, Orgell finds himself exposed to the hostile environment and fighting for his survival without any protection, dependent upon little more than his wits.
Then help arrives from an unexpected quarter: a sentient life-form native to Prism calling itself A Surface of Fine Azure-Tinted Reflection With Pyroxin Dendritic Inclusions – which Orgell decides to call “Azure”.
Join Gyro Muggins as he reads a standalone story from Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth series.
Tuesday, February 6th 19:00: 21 Balloons
Faerie Maven-Pralou reads from William Pène du Bois’ 1947 children’s classic, The Twenty-one Balloons.
A steamship en route across the North Atlantic comes across the strange wreckage of twenty deflated gas balloons and rescue, much to their surprise, a lone man – one Professor William Waterman Sherman.
The professor had last been seen some three weeks previously, departing San Francisco aboard a giant balloon, determined to spend a year aloft and drifting on his own.
Now, as word spreads that the professor has been found alive and well – and in completely the wrong ocean to the one he had last been seen flying towards – the world awaits the story of how he came to circumnavigate the globe in record time, only to be fished from the wreckage of twenty balloons when he had started with just the one. When he has sufficiently rested and recovered after receiving a hero’s welcome on his homecoming, the good professor tells a tale most fantastic…
Wednesday, February 7th 19:00: Corwyn Presents Or Else!
Unexpected poetry with Corwyn Allen
Thursday, February 8th
19:00: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
With Shandon Loring. Also presented in Kitely (hop://grid.kitely.com:8002/Seanchai/144/129/29).
21:00: Seanchai Late Night
Contemporary Sci-Fi with Finn Zeddmore.
Please check with the Seanchai Library’s blog for updates and for additions or changes to the week’s schedule.
The featured charity for January / February 2018 is Reach Out and Read, giving young children a foundation for success by incorporating books into paediatric care and encouraging families to read aloud together.
DiXmiX Gallery, curated by Dixmix Source, currently featured three exhibitions of art respectively by Titus Palmira, Gaus (Cicciuzzo Gausman) and Burk Bode. While all three are entirely individual in nature, two of them might also be seen as overlapping a little, if not in theme, then in broad approach.
The longest running of the three – and potentially due to end soon – is Dark Underbelly by Titus Palmira. Occupying the upper White Gallery level, it presents some twelve self-studies designed to convey very focused feelings, as indicated by their respective titles. As might be suspected from the exhibition’s title, some of these feelings sway towards the darker side of our personality: self disapproval, inner demons, anger, with confusion and uncertainty sitting more to the edge of such darker emotions. Others within the selected images express something of the darker side of life – voyeurism, staking and hiding behind masks.
Most of the images are presented in monochrome; this makes the conveyance of their emotion more effective than had they been in colour. Conversely,where colour is present, our emotional response is also deepened by the strong contrast the colour presents to the surrounding monochrome images. So with Ugly On The Inside, for example, there is a sense of recoiling away from the image, a reaction which may not have been felt were it one among many colour images or, conversely, presented in monochrome alongside the rest. Similarly, the use of colour in Confusion (a Default State), evokes a greater sense of identification with a confused state of mind.
Humour also pays a part here as well – as seen in Before My Morning Coffee. But the truth is that all of the twelve images are so perfectly framed and presented, each one carries more than a spark of identification for the observer; I’ve little doubt anyone looking upon many of these images will fail to feel a tingling of subjective recognition, and inner nod of, “Yes, I’ve felt this…” Whilst elsewhere, we can objectively appreciate the mood and feeling each image expresses. For me, both subject response and objective appreciation come together in Don’t Tell Me the Moon is Shining (above) – a fabulous piece evoking something we have perhaps all felt: that moment of calm before our anger explodes in a destructive burst of temper.
We’re all likely familiar with the expression “the eyes are the windows of the soul”. Where it originates from is unimportant, but it perhaps has its roots in an observation by Marcus Tullius Cicero, Imago animi Vultus est, indices oculi eius intentio (literally, “the countenance (face) is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions”) – and it is this more rounded expression which I would suggest applies to the second of the exhibitions reviewed here: Le regard de l’âme (literally, “the soul’s gaze”), by Gaus, and displayed in the ground floor Black Gallery.
On the one hand – and most simply – the faces of our avatars are their most expressive element – just as our faces are in the physical world. Through the care we put into crafting them, shaping mouth, chin, nose, ears, and eyes, we imbue our avatars with an identity – perhaps the closest things they have to a “soul”. Thus, on the one hand, Le regard de l’âme offers an opportunity to reflect upon the sixteen head-and-shoulder portraits presented within it, and what they say about the avatars presented.
But I would also argue that there is something deeper here. The very care we put into crafting our avatars, and particularly their faces, become reflective of who we, the people behind them, are. This may be wholly conscious: a desire to give our avatar a look mirroring our own, or to express an aspect of our personality; but even when creating visually divorced from who we are, making it a representation of who we would like to be, still reflects some of who we in fact are. Thus, the faces of our avatars become something deeper: a portrait of ourselves; and it is this essence of self which is perhaps captured within this images.
With Shameless, presented across the ground floor and mezzanine levels of the Grey Gallery, Burk Bode offers an exhibition of black-and-white images which steps well clear of the ideas of identity present within Dark Underbelly and Le regard de l’âme. Instead, he offers a series of images best noted as being NSFW, given their depiction of sexual acts.
This is a very in-your-face exhibition (literally, given it occupies the gallery space adjacent to the main entrance) in which the observer is clearly cast into the role of voyeur. Indeed, given the subtitle of the exhibition, They are watching us, there is a suggestion that our very presence may have triggered at least some of the acts portrayed; in others, the lean is perhaps more towards exhibitionism and the thrill / risk of performing sexual acts in public.
Sex is at best a difficult topic for discussions, as reactions to it tend to be far more subjective and perhaps shaped by preconceptions. As such, I’ll leave it to readers to visit Shameless to form their own impressions.
Meraki Islands, on the homestead region of Felicitie Isle, is a group build by Nïc H Bour (NicBor) and Busta (BadboyHi). It is currently home to Etnia, the store operated by Mika Whitesong-Holloway (Mika Whitesong), and offers visitors a perfectly landscaped environment to explore and appreciate.
It was actually Busta’s involvement in the design which encouraged me to visit. He was responsible for the enchanting Yasminia, which Caitlyn and I visited in 2016 and 2017, so I was keen to discover what Meraki Islands had to offer.
Predominantly flat, the landscape has a wonderful wetland feel to it, water cutting channels through the northern side of the region, seemingly at random, trees and bushes offering shade. A single table of rock rises from the south-east corner of the region, a crown of silver birch trees on its top surrounding the walls of Etnia, reached by a single stepped footpath winding up the side of the platform.
A broad strip of land runs west from this, separating the wetlands on the north side of the region from the open waters south of it, before turning north to where a farmhouse sits slightly elevated above a flagged courtyard with a pair of houses on one side. Unfurnished, those look out across the wetlands, in the middle of which sits an out warehouse building, re-purposed as a simply furnished cosy spot.
The warehouse and houses aren’t the only structures; there is a second farmhouse on the south finger of land, while scattered around the water channels are old walls, a disused greenhouse, a folly and bridges offering routes over the water and between the many fingers of land between the narrow channels. One of these bridge leads eastwards to the neighbouring region, which at the time of my visit was still being designed – again by Busta, suggesting a reason to return for a future visit.
If this all sounds simple in design, it’s because it is – and in being so, it is also elegant and highly photogenic. There is a sense of serenity about the region which not only encourages exploration, but gives people plenty of reasons to stay. Scattered over the waters are rowing boats offering gently rocking places to sit and appreciate the setting, while the coastal and inland paths offer further places for couples to sit.
A further charm with the region is that it looks out over its neighbours to the west and north. This gives Meraki Islands a sense of place in the world – although be aware that the neighbouring regions are private homes and not open to the general public. There are other points of attraction as well such as the avenue of trees bent over the channel running around the foot of the south-eastern plateau.
In all, this is a veritable tour de force of region design. Simple yet elegant, subtle in touch. The measure of care taken with the build is exquisite, the presentation wholly natural from the cut of the waterways in the wetlands through the selection of the trees – particularly the weeping willows – to the dressing of things such as the steps up to the store.
The great beacon tower of Pharos, on the east coast of Nautilus. built by Garden Mole, it is one of several builds within Nautilus designed to add to the mythology of the continent and its discovery by Magellan Linden
Saturday, February 3rd, 2018, marks the annual Mole Day celebrations in Second Life, and all SL residents are invited to attend festivities at the Bay City Fairgrounds, North Channel.
First held in 2010, Mole Day honours the members of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW), affectionately known as the “moles”, who are responsible for the construction of the Mainland infrastructure in Second Life – the roads, railways, waterways, and so on.
“Moles” are resident builders, scripters and others who create new content on Linden Lab’s behalf and to the benefit of all. These Residents all have Second Life accounts with the last name “Mole”, and work under the auspices of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW).
The Moles have been responsible for some of the larger mainland development projects, such as creating many of the more famous sights in Nautilus and wells as undertaking initial development of Zindra, the Adult continent.
More recently they have been directly involved in projects such as Horizons, the Horizons Experience and PaleoQuest. The Moles also develop Linden Homes regions on behalf of the Lab, including all of the parks and places to discover within them.
However, their very first project was developing Bay City itself – hence the City’s annual celebration honouring them. Normally held on the same day as Groundhog Day in the United States, the event this year will again take place at the Bay City Fairgrounds February 3rd commencing at 11:00 SLT. The event will feature DJ GoSpeed Racer of KONA stream followed by Stratus Mactavish performing live at 12:00 noon SLT.
About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest group for Residents of Bay City.
