Category: Art in Second Life

Creating and inhabiting an avatar is, for me, an act of translation. It does not replace the body; it extends it. The gestures, the gaze, and the silence of this digital body are attempts at language — ways of existing within a space where everything is image and nothing is tangible.

By using my own avatar-character, I transfer fragments of myself into a body that must learn to feel without skin, to speak without a voice, to occupy space knowing that every presence there is also an absence. It is in this tension — between being, existing, and trying to communicate — that the true pulse of my work emerges.

These are the words Debora Kaz uses to introduce the latest chapter in her Invisible Cities art series, entitled Syntax of Absence, which is being hosted by Dido Haas at her Nitroglobus Roof Gallery in Second Life.

Collectively, Invisible Cities thus far comprises Fighting Women, hosted at Nitroglobus in August 2022, The Future in the Present Overflows, presented at Artsville galleries in May 2023 and Essay on Desire, again presented at Nitroglobus in September 2023, and now Syntax of Absence. Together, these installations offer(ed) personal reflections of what it is to be a woman, with Fighting Women focusing on showing the pain and difficulty of being a woman in a world where women have historically been portrayed as objects of desire, exposed to consumption – and how they are encouraged into harmful (and often shallow) rivalry with one another in order to be seen as such.

The Future in the Present Overflows, meanwhile expanded upon these themes, encompassing them in a boarder historical context before Essays in Desire took on a more directly personal (to the artist and the observer) exploration of the precepts of desire – notably those of sensuality, sexuality, and eroticism – and how they play a vital role within the process of self-discovery and understanding of oneself.

All three of these past exhibitions were offered in the abstract of “invisible cities”, places which are not physical or tangible, but rather symbolic; shades of light and dark, suggestions of spaces and places sketched from the void and intended to present architecture of emotion intended to backlight, if you will, the core themes and discourse Debora presented in each exhibition, rather than forming a structured part of them.

Within Syntax of Absence, Debora more brings together the literal – as in the emotions and perceptions present within the earlier chapters of this series – more directly with the artificiality of the “digital backlighting” of those earlier installations. In doing so, she further explores concepts of self, strength, vulnerability, femininity and erasure. However, she does so through the idea of the self becoming subsumed within the digital.

The women I create live in an in-between state — they want to exist, yet they also want to disappear. They are fragments of myself, of others, and of what society insists on projecting and consuming: the female body as both victim and language, erased as person, highlighted as product.

These investigations unfold into Syntax of Absence, where the body no longer inhabits the city but becomes the code itself. The feminine turns into syntax, command, and conscious noise. Absence becomes language; presence becomes data.

– Debora Kaz, Syntax of Absence

In this idea of the subsumption of the body by the digital, Syntax of Absence in some ways completes a circle that started with Fighting Women: the study of the feminine rising out of a digital landscape to provoke and evoke our thinking, now sublimating back into and becoming lost within the digital.

At the same time, it perhaps might also be seen as a wider observation of our current state of our digital engagement today; one in which we gain both a far greater freedom of expression and ability to escape constraints we might otherwise feel, whilst at the same time our ever-deepening involvement (reliance?) on digital means for projecting ourselves and digital (AI) tools for interactions / expression), we also risk further reducing ourselves, became more of the digital noise, our presence reduced to mere data bytes.

In all, another thought-provoking exhibition with layered meaning  / interpretation. When visiting, do please note that Syntax of Absence extends through the main gallery and The Annex at Nitroglobus.

SLurl Details

• Nitroglobus Roof Gallery (Sunshine Homestead, rated Moderate)

It was back to Nitroglobus Roof Gallery for me of late, to catch the September 2025 Main Hall exhibition. I was keen to do so as Nitroglobus owner and curator, Dido Haas, has invited Catherine Nikolaidis to display more of her art.

I’ve touched on Catherine’s SL-based  photography on several occasions in these pages. Working predominantly in monochrome with a focus on avatar studies, she has a gift for framing her work as much a photo-essays in reflection of mood, emotion, beauty, vulnerability, and life. Her skill lay not only in the technicalities of composition, framing, processing, cropping, and so on, but in inhabiting her images with a depth of life and subtle detail rich in the power of communication.

This was very much brought home to me some two years ago, when I was able to catch two overlapping solo exhibitions by Catherine, hosted at Frank Atisso’s Artsville Gallery and at the Kondor Art Centre (see: Catherine’s black and white photography in Second Life), and it is further underlined within this Nitroglobus exhibition, which Catherine has called Skin like Syntax. The easiest way to describe this exhibition is to use Catherine’s own words.

Skin like Syntax explores woman and her body as a living language. In monochrome tones, I capture shifting moods and the balance between softness and strength, intimacy and distance.

Through my lens, real life turns into visual poetry, where light, shadow, and emotion blend together.

– Catherine Nikolaidis

The result is a stunning collection of images rich in context, subtle in narrative and utterly captivating in form and presentation. Within each of them is a story  – or perhaps a poem might be a better term, given Catherine’s description – waiting to be told. In fact, such is the richness of expression to be found in each piece that offering words here is somewhat superfluous – and would merely be subjective on my part.

As such, I will close here, and leave it to you to visit Skin like Syntax and allow Catherine’s unique voice to speak to you.

SLurl Details

• Nitroglobus Roof Gallery (Sunshine Homestead, rated Moderate)

Miles Cantelou is an artist whom I have covered on numerous occasions in these pages, most recently in terms of Miles’ return to Second Life after time away, when I wrote about his Homestead gallery space Scirocco Art Galleries (see: The art of Miles Cantelou in Second Life).

But I’m not the only one appreciative of Miles’ work. Dido Haas, the operator / curator of Nitroglobus Roof Gallery also visited Scirocco and, like me, was struck by the intensity of Miles’ studies – particularly (I hope I’m correct in assuming) those found within the Galleria Polynesia. As a result, Dido invited Miles to exhibit at Nitroglobus, and on September 1st, 2025 they opened Shamanism.

Located with The Annex at Nitroglobus, this is a further richly engaging exhibition of paint-renderings by Miles, this one on the subject of Shamanism, with a focus on the (mainly female in this case) Shaman. Produced through a process of ink line sketches scanned into a PC and subjected to photographic and post camera blending, prior to being printed and painted, before an image of the finished piece is uploaded to Second Life.

Shamanism is a spiritual phenomenon centred on the shaman, a person believed to achieve various powers through trance or ecstatic religious experience – the Shaman, a person regarded in many cultures as intermediary between humans and the spirit realm, performing roles such as healing, divination, guiding souls, and maintaining spiritual balance within their communities. The term comes from the Manchu-Tungus word šaman, a noun formed from the verb ša- “to know”; so a shaman is literally “one who knows.”

Given this etymology, the terms apply in the strictest sense to the spiritual systems of the people of northern Asia. However, shamanism has played an important role among Australian Aborigines, some African groups, Arctic peoples and Native American Indians.

Shamanism presents fourteen richly emotive portrait studies startling in their intensity and depth. Given the headdresses apparent in all of the images, they might be taken to lean towards Native American shaman. That the majority of the images appear to be female in nature reflects the fact that shamanism has no gender exclusion.

For me, however, what is particularly striking about these portraits is the intensity of intelligence and vitality they carry. It is hard not to be drawn to the eyes of those pieces which appear to be looking directly at you and not sense the depth of knowledge and wisdom lying behind them. The result is a series of images that suggest they have not originated from within Miles’ head and sketches, but with the subjects physically allowing their likeness to be captured.

In order words, a marvellous selection of evocative art.

SLurl Details

• The Annex at Nitroglobus (Sunshine Homestead, rated Moderate)