Category: Art in Second Life

Out on the headland, there stands a great tower, so close to the water’s edge that when the tide is in, the only way to reach it is by a wooden walk winding through the coastal reeds.

They say that once it was a nexus, a hub for of our electronic comings and goings. Through the great dishes and between the long narrow repeaters, all our business rushed back and forth at the speed of light. Directed, amplified, boosted, beamed, messages too numerous to ever truly comprehend passed through that great tower.

But that was then, and this is now. The messages no longer come and go; the invisible beams of information no longer form an unseen web of lines spreading outward from its slender form, up down, left right, some passing one another so close, if they could ever have been seen, you’d swear they were touching. There is No Signal any more.

Now the tower stands alone on the headland, its great dishes broken, the clusters of microwave emitters hang forlornly by the heavy cables that once fed them power. Rust now coats the tower’s metal, and its platforms sit in disrepair, lopsided against the backdrop of the sea.

A ladder, as rusted as the rest of the tower, still runs up the side of the structure for those who dare to climb, the creak and groan of metal on metal an ever-present reminder of the decay that sits here.

They say there is a mystery here, waiting to be solved, that if you follow the clues, the enigma of the tower will be revealed. Perhaps the key to the riddle lies within the strange figure, one hand gripping the topmost spire of the tower tightly, their body outstretched, free hand reaching to catch … their hat? … As it is caught upon the wind.

Or perhaps the secret lay elsewhere in the tower’s slender finger. The only way to find out is to walk the headland yourself and visit the place where No Signal can now be found …

No Signal is the latest piece by Nessuno Myoo, currently on display at MIC Imagin@rium, curated by Mexi Lane, and open through until June 14th, 2014. be sure to grab a note card from the welcome board after you arrive. And while visiting, why not take the time to explore the new prim and mesh amphitheatre on the main island, the work of Rumegusc Altamura?

Related Links

• No Signal, MIC Imagin@rium (Rated: General)

Opening on Wednesday May 21st at 13:30 SLT is a new 3D art sculpture by London Junkers entitled A Dream, the Wings to Fly, located at the torno Kohime Foundation’s 3D Art Gallery and jointly sponsored by the torno Kohime Foundation and Tanalois Art.

It’s a beautifully intricate piece, celebrating the history of aviation and flight.  The central element of the sculpture is a jet turbine engine, the blades of which form the two main levels of the piece, connected by a stairway. On the upper section sits an exquisite build which richly encapsulates the dream and reality of flight.

This starts with a sculpture of a bird in flight, the gentle arc of its wings reflected and exaggerated in the arc of the wings of the structure it flies before, and which themselves echo the long history of the dream of flight, when men sought to mimic the shape of a bird’s wing that they might also fly.

At the base of this structure sits the simplest flying machine anyone can make: a paper aeroplane, while above it, continuing the jet aviation theme rises the central spindle of the turbine, passing through another set of turbine blades to support two Spitfire-like aircraft.

But look again, because there is more to be seen here than might at first be apparent. See how the turbine blades are exaggerated in form, twisted into cloudy wisps. Look again at the central turbine spindle rising into the sky, note its shape and the four fin-like supports at its base; here sits not a spindle, but a rocket, pointing to the stars.

And there, at the centre of it all, lies a small, glass Earth, richly symbolic in its placement. It is both the only home we have, a place which aviation and spaceflight have helped us to explore and map and understand as never before. The place our yearning to continue our voyages of discovery longs to one day slip.

There are powerful echoes here: Da Vinci,  du Temple, the Wright brothers, Whittle, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and others; echoes perhaps best summed-up, giving the Spitfire motif, in the words of John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Lizzie Gudkov, London’s SL partner tells me that London hopes the piece will encourage people who visit it to try their hand at flying in SL; that’s not an inappropriate aim. It matches both the aviation theme of the piece and reminds us that Second Life, with all its rich and varied opportunities, allows imagination to truly take to wing, allowing us all to slip the surly bonds of Earth.

A simply beautiful piece, highly recommended to anyone who is either a lover of aviation or whose dreams encompass the freedoms we’re offered through SL.

Related Links

• A Dream, the Wings to Fly SLurl (Rated: moderate)

Melusina Parkin’s Themes is now open at the The Nite’s Place Red Line Exposition Area. Curated by Simonh Sandial, Themes features 42 photographs selected by Melusina in and exhibition space which allows them to be displayed in 6 groups of seven photographs apiece on the themes of “solitudes”, “landscapes”, “industry”, “details”, “urban” and “minimal”.

The selected images are striking in nature, each one displayed large enough to draw the eye into it, making the observer almost a part of the scene itself. What is particularly noticeable about many of the images is the fact that they appear so very life-like; so much so that on first look, it’s actually hard to tell whether they were taken in-world or in real-life. It is only on closer examination, or when the eye is drawn to certain clues, that the fact the photo was taken within SL becomes apparent.

Take the two images above (put side-by-side for comparison purposes): the one on the left (“Loneliness 1”) gives every impression of having been taken in RL, while in the second (“Loneliness 3”), it is only when one sees the while glow surrounding the nearer of the two sets of lamps that its SL origins are revealed.

This RL / SL “crossover” is intentional on Melusina’s art, as she informed Ziki Questi, who reviewed this exhibition earlier in May. “The aims of my photographer’s work are always the same: showing how fantasy and skills of SL residents made a world that reflects the main features of the natural or human environment’s common imagery,” Ziki quotes Melusina as saying of the pieces on display here.

Not only this, but the selected images beautifully – even hauntingly – reflect their intended themes. In this, several of the pictures in the “solitudes” section were particularly evocative for me, while “industry 1” (see on the left in the topmost image in this article) give rise to images of the romantic age of steam and the stirrings of time long past, together with the feeling of a story waiting to be told.

As noted at the top of this piece, this is a striking exhibition, and for those with a love of SL photography, definitely not one to be missed.

Related Links

• Themes by Melusina Parkin, he Nite’s Place Red Line Exposition Area (Rated:  Adult)