Category: Art in Second Life

The Sea of Cubic Dreams is a new installation by the ALEGRIA Studio team. It is an intriguing piece, a preview, perhaps, of a much larger work which will be opening in the same region in due course, entitled Theatre Night’s Dream.

This prelude piece presents the visitor with a rich blue environment – it’s really best appreciated with the default windlight – penned on two sides by tall blue mural-like walls, the remaining two sides open to the surrounding sea.

floating on, under, or over the waters here are a series of differently sized black, blue and teal cubes which make good use of materials on their surfaces. They come in several different sizes, and if you get close enough to one (trying standing on the really big ones) you can sit down, give it a shove, and you’ll set off floating across the region until you opt to change direction with another shove, slow to a halt, or collide with another cube. The latter can, depending on the size of the cube you are sat upon, send you tumbling around (and up into the air or underwater), allowing you a bounce around the space.

Some of the cubes you collide with will also react, sliding off on their own or rolling over gently, depending on their size. Controlling your direction takes a little practice, and a set of three transparent region-wide prims stop you from colliding with the region boundaries or flying up off up too high. and it has to be said that bouncing around when someone else is using the cubes can be fun!

Theatre Night’s Dream is apparently being developed higher up in the air and sounds as intriguing as Cubic Sea of Dreams appears. “This is going to be the new ALEGRIA’s adventure,” the team say of the piece. “A surrealistic CG New Media Art installation inspired in the theatre and fantasy culture, the role of the hero in modern video games era, the Cloud Atlas film and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Theatre Night’s Dream opens the gate between the real and fictional sides of its characters, all members of the cast of a theater production, as short stories where their real lives merges with their roles in the play during its release. Two worlds that blend into a night dream where they will have to face their tragedies and fears to become sublime.”

There’s currently no opening date for Theatre Night’s Dream, but doubtless one will be announced through ALEGRIA’s website and via the LEA blog when the productions starts. In the meantime, visitors are free to enjoy Cubic Sea of Dreams, and Ultraviolet Alter will be performing for the official opening at 14:00 SLT on Saturday August 16th.

Related Links

• The Sea of Cubic Dreams, LEA25 (Rated: General)
• ALEGRIA website

In February 2014, Mac Kanashimi unveiled Dragon Curves at LEA26. A stunning 3D piece of fractal art which quite captivated those who visited – including myself.

Now, as a part of the Artist In Residence (AIR) round 7 series, Mac is back at LEA26, this time with Pinwheels, which he invited me over to see on Saturday August 2nd, not long after he’d set it up in the region. Pinwheels is another remarkable mathematical structure with something of a fractal bent, and which uses Charles Radin’s pinwheel tilings, themselves based on the Conway triangles, to tremendous visual and artistic effect.

To explain this requires delving into a little bit of maths and geometry, but bear with me. A Conway triangle is a right-angle triangle with sides of 1, 2 and . which can be divided into five isometric copies of itself by the dilation factor of 1/  (see the image below), and when suitably rescaled and translated / rotated, can produce an infinite growing pattern of isometric copies of the original.

A pinwheel tiling is essentially a pattern of these isometric triangles where one tile may only intersect another either on a whole side or on half the 2 side (which actually makes the Conway triangle itself a pinwheel tiling – again, look at the image on the right and see how the five smaller triangles are positioned relative to one another). There’s actually more to the math than this, but I’ll let wikipedia explain the rest.

Like Dragon Curves, Mac’s Pinwheels is a huge piece, measuring 256 x 256m, but this time is confined vertically to a height of 256 metres as well, so to get the full measure of the piece – and to appreciate the overall complexity and beauty of the piece, you’ll need to ramp-up your draw distance to at least 600 metres, and cam out.

When you do so, the patterns of pinwheels and triangles and triangles within triangles becomes apparent. Each Conway triangle forms an individual segment made up of five prim isometric triangles of a similar shade (blues, greens, reds, etc, sometimes mixed with whites), which helps the eye to define individual groupings. These segments in turn are arranged to form pinwheels among themselves – although you’ll need to cam overhead to see them clearly.

Nor is it static; sections of the design rise and fall, creating an ever-changing landscape of colour and form, with only the arrival point, which is itself quite fascinating to watch. However, this motion isn’t in any way random; the triangles making up a particular pinwheel pattern all move together, and in doing so, they communicate their height and position to one another and to the surrounding segments.

The result of all this is that as the landscape changes and triangles and patterns rise and fall, paths can be found running through the entire construct, allowing the visitor to walk through it starting at the landing point (itself a static platform of 5 Conway triangles), with the individual prim triangles within each larger Conway triangle suitably adjusted so that they form steps for you to follow.

Just how artful this is requires you to walk through the piece. In this way you get to experience how the motion of segments works – no matter how the triangles on which you stand rise or fall relative to one another or to the surrounding patterns, no matter how high the plateau on which you find yourself lifted, or how far down into the depths of the piece you are carried, a footpath can always be found before you and behind you, leading you through the piece without ever necessarily reaching an end.

Pinwheels is another mathematical masterpiece from Mac, and will remain open through until the end of December. If you enjoyed Dragon Curves or if you’re into maths-based art, it’s a recommended visit.

Related Links

• Pinwheels, LEA26 (Rated: General)