Category: Art in Second Life

Monsters, Demons and Chess in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kondor Art Centre: Monique Beeb – Monsters, Demons and Chess

Monique Beebe – Moni to her friends – is one of the most expressive digital artists I know in Second Life. I’ve had the good fortune to follow the growth of her photographic and digital art skills since her first exhibition, hosted at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery back in early 2017 (see: Hidden Faces in Second Life), and have always utterly enjoyed exploring her work as it enfolds the sensual, the sublime, the emotive and more – always with a story to tell, a question to ask, or a subtle means of engaging her audience’s minds.

Through the years since that first exhibition, Moni has continued to enthral, engage and challenge through evolving styles and approaches, as is the case with Monsters, Demons and Chess, which opened at the Kondor Art Centre, curated by Hermes Kondor, on November 8th, 2022.

Kondor Art Centre: Monique Beeb – Monsters, Demons and Chess

To be honest, this is an exhibition I would have embraced even without having an admiration of Moni’s work which has only grown over the last five years, because it encompasses a form of art that is gaining increasing traction among artists engaged in Second Life: that of hybrid art, and specifically the use of AI processes – in this case the Midjourney AI art generator. I’ve outlined this open-source software previously in these pages, but I’ll let Moni – who has been using it for around six months at the time of writing this article – describe it:

It is software used to generate realistic images, based on Artificial Intelligence. It is used with text we can write down, and it creates some indications; it is not a random image taken on Internet, which corresponds to your text, your words really create something with a deep learning algorithm, giving birth to a new image.
[It presented] A complete new experience for me! In the beginning I was doubtful about it, and I did read a lot of discussions around this subject. It ended becoming a curiosity in my mind, and turned out to be a complete addiction. It [has] allowed me to search more about AI, to discuss it with users and artists, in what way they manipulate it to come to something they wanted at first or appreciate something they did not know about previously.

– Monique Beeb

Kondor Art Centre: Monique Beeb – Monsters, Demons and Chess

Offered across the two floors of the striking gallery building are some of the fruits of Moni’s labours with Midjourney: a striking series of 25 images that allow us to see into Moni’s journey with the software tool, a journey involving chess, monsters and demons, as she explains in her liner notes accompanying the exhibition:

My first use of this software was rather random, I was mostly discovering it. I took simple shapes, balls, and it ended in chess pieces. I made many of them, arranging the background, the lights, the perspectives … When I tried to make faces, I often saw irregularities in the way they were created. Distortions on the eyes or lips, strange shapes. Then I worked more, trying to identify why it came that way. I was at some point left with a gallery of “monsters” on my computer. Their unusual odd curves made me like them … I eventually edited them on Photoshop, and make them: beautiful monsters and quiet demons!

Monique Beeb

I don’t propose to delve into the pieces in depth – each and every one of them speaks clearly and beautifully for itself. The lower floor of the gallery focuses on the works featuring chess, and like that game, there a marvellous strategy at work within them as Moni takes the nuances of MidJourney’s algorithm and combines it with her own innate ability to frame a single-frame story which born of the aforementioned sensuality, subtleness and expressiveness.

The latter is also present in the images around the upper level, where Moni’s “monsters” and “demons” reside.  These may not be sensual in the conventional sense like those on the gallery’s lower floor, but there is a richness of expression, beauty and look that makes them as equally attractive and as rich in their own narratives.

Kondor Art Centre: Monique Beeb – Monsters, Demons and Chess

As a part of this exhibition, Moni asks a question that is not uncommon with the subject of hybrid art: are images generated through, or collated and manipulated by, AI (and other) means really art? She also enquires whether such images have a place in Second Life. My personal response to both questions is an unequivocal “yes”; traditional artists manipulate brushes, paints and inject their own eye and imagination in their work in order to create a piece of art; similarly, Second Life (and digital) artists also manipulate images with tools like  PhotoShop and GIMP and paint with digital tools to produce an end result.

The fact that tools like Midjourney rely on descriptive text elements or the manipulation of algorithms or alterations to their baseline parameters does not lessen the fact it is the artist’s eye and imagination, often assisted by additional tools that allow for editing and / or compositing – just as with other digital art forms, as noted above – guiding the entire creative process.

Kondor Art Centre: Monique Beeb – Monsters, Demons and Chess

More than that – I’d defy anyone to visit Monsters, Demons and Chess and not see the images presented as a richly artistic expression.

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Camels and Chameleons with Cica in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cica Ghost: Camels and Chameleons, November 2022

November brings with it another foray into whimsy with Cica Ghost, as she offers an installation entitled Camels and Chameleons – which you have to admit is an interesting combination of beast and reptile!

As with recent installations from Cica, this one is extreme easy on the eye to view and offers gentle exploration on foot. The largely flat landscape offers a desert-like suggestion with adobe-style walls and structures for the most part not too far removed from the kinds of environments one might reasonably expect to find both camels and the desert varieties of chameleon common to the more arid parts of Southern Asia. These are interspersed with cacti which, whilst not common to the lands in which camels might be found, are certainly found within the more arid parts of the California, into which Chameleons have been introduced.

Cica Ghost: Camels and Chameleons, November 2022

Of the two types of creatures, the camels are the most numerous, with two of the three recognised “true” species represented: the single-humped Dromedary (aka Arabian camel), which accounts for around 94% of all camels and which is common to the Middle East, the Sahara Desert, and South Asia, and the two-humped Bactrian camel, common to Central Asia, including the historical region of Bactria, and also found in remote areas of north-west China and Mongolia.

Exactly which species of Bactrian is represented isn’t entirely important, but given their short-haired nature, I preferred to think of them as being the rarer Wild Bactrian of China / Mongolia. The chameleons, on the other hand, are fewer in number, and I can’t help but feel Cica perhaps missed a trick in not blending them more with some of the landscaping / other features within the setting (allowing for their size, of course).

Cica Ghost: Camels and Chameleons, November 2022

I qualified the structures within the setting above, because whilst most of them are styled in a manner in keeping with the desert / arid environments in which camels tend to be found when roaming free, there is a rather novel structure towards the centre of the installation. Comprising blocks and towers that are, at first glance vaguely reminiscent of a Middle-Eastern fortification, it also has a slight other-worldly feel to it, with some of the blocks suspended in mid air on horizontal planks bridging the gaps between other blocks, and many of them sprouting deadlock-like growths of cacti from their tops.

Rounded out with another quote from Dr. Seuss, Camels and Chameleons also includes a range of  places to sit and / or dance (including on a camel or tow!) and offers a further opportunity to appreciate Cica’s art in a whimsical and light setting.

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Art for balanced thinking in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Third Eye Gallery: Zia Branner EUNOIA

Currently open at the Third Eye Gallery, curated by Jaz (Jessamine2108), is an exhibition of art by Zia Branner entitled EUNOIA, drawing on the ancient Greek word.

Essentially meaning “beautiful thinking, a well mind”, the word’s usage is more complicated than that. Originally, it was applied to the art of oration, and the need for speakers to cultivate a sense of goodwill between themselves and their audiences to encourage a better reception of their ideas and / or viewpoint. However, Aristotle used it to define the foundations for an ethical existence: the kindness and benevolence flowing between spouses. In this, it might be taken to mean approval, sympathy and readiness to help.

Both Isocrates, and (later) Cicero leaned towards a more political usage of the term (eúnoiã, in the case of the latter): as a means to describe an individual’s feelings toward party, or the city-state, and the benevolence in which the city-state or party so hold city-state should bear towards the honest citizens, and allow them their right to hold an opinion. Much more recently, it is used as a means of referencing good mental health and general good disposition.

Third Eye Gallery: Zia Branner EUNOIA

It is in terms of finding that mental balance and our desire / need / want / struggle to achieve it that Zia presents this collection of her art. Presented in her familiar mix of abstract and impressionistic work, these are piece in which – as the artist notes in her introduction to to this exhibition – the ebb and flow of colours (for Zia, red and blue) represent the ebb and flow of our emotions in that drive to try to achieve that sense of equilibrium.

In all lives from time to time it isn’t easy to have a mind in balance. We have our downs, we have our challenges. There is cold, there is warmth. Our strength then lays in our goodwill, in our kindness and with this the balance in our mind and our well being goes up again.

– Zia Branner

There is something faintly ironic in the idea that “balance” is something that should be sought after; the idea that we must strive for it through meditation or study or exercise or whatever so often can lead to frustration or annoyance that the calming balance we desire remains tantalisingly out of reach. Yet through art we can find that balance, be it as the artist or the witness. For the artist, the act of creating art can be a harmonising act; bringing the disparate parts of self together to present a finished work; for the witness, it presents the opportunity to become lost within the flow of a piece of art, to naturally put aside consciousness of self, and thus achieve that inner equilibrium.

Third Eye Gallery: Zia Branner EUNOIA
All of this is present in the 11 images offered in this collection. Whether you see the expressions of mood / emotion in Zia’s red and blue or other colours or whether to see the expression of a coastal scene or of a daydream matters not; these are pictures in which it is easy to lose oneself in the flow of colour or the contrast of hard and soft line – and in doing so, perhaps find a balance of thought for yourself.

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The digital mastery of Milly Sharple in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Milly Sharple – November 2022

I found it hard to believe that two years have passed since I last visited an exhibition of Milly Sharple’s fabulous digital art; so when I recently happened across a Landmark to her current gallery, I knew I would have to pay a visit.

For those who may not be familiar with Milly and her work, she is a successful artist and photographer in the physical world. Not only is her art sold on a global basis, it has been used for book and CD cover art, in promotional material, posters for theatrical productions, and even on bank cards. In 2020 she was invited to do a collaboration representing the Covid pandemic with Salvador Dali’s protégé, Louis Markoya.

Milly Sharple – November 2022

Milly joined Second Life in 2008, and established her first gallery the following year. Not content with simply displaying and selling her work in-world, she also established the Timamoon Arts Community, which in its day, hosted over 40 resident artists and was regarded as one of the most successful and popular art communities on the grid before circumstance forced Milly to retire the region on which it was based.

As one of the pioneers in introducing the world of fractal art to Second Life audiences, and while in recent years her work has diversified as she continues to develop and extend her range of artistic expression, fractals have remained an integral part of her creativity. To produce these pieces, she works with Apophysis, and open-source software package which allows her to create soft, flowing, liquid effects that sets her work apart from other, more rigidly geometric fractal art that can also be found displayed within Second Life. It’s an approach that not only acts a a differentiator between her work and other fractal art, it also gives her work a stunningly organic look and feel, rich in life.

Milly Sharple – November 2022

Alongside her fractal pieces, Milly also produces digital portraits that combine her use of organic forms with the human face and body. Flowing with intentionally rich and vivid colour, these pieces have a life that is both connected to, yet utterly separate from, her fractal pieces, containing as they do their own stunning depth of expression. These portraits share the upper floor of the gallery along with pieces that enfold within them elements of abstract expressionism, pure abstractionism and touches of surrealism in a further engaging selection of digital images.

And if this weren’t enough, the gallery offers a rich vein of Milly’s 3D sculptures and pieces. These again fold within them those elements of natural, organic form and multiple artistic genres to offer a rich and engaging select of pieces that work individual and collectively as works suitable for display in one’s own home.

Taken individually or as intentional sets (such as We Didn’t Start the Fire … Or Did We? – a quite marvellous commentary on climate and ecological disasters that can be said to have their roots in our own role in impacting the world’s climate), Milly’s work is always expressive not just visually, but in offering an idea or story.

Milly Sharple – November 2022

Offering the full richness of Milly’s art, a visit to her gallery is a must for anyone interested in either her work or in the potential of Second Life presents to physical world artists to display their work to a global audience.

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Milena Carbone’s Africa at Nitroglobus

Posted on by Inara Pey

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Milena Carbone – Africa
Milena Carbone is an artist who is constantly pushing at both the boundaries of her own creative means of expression and what might be regarded as the bounds of comfort of her audience.  Through her work, she has encouraged us to consider the world around us and challenged us to face up to the harm we, as a race, appear hell-bent on doing to it – even though that harm may ultimately bring about out own demise. She has also often held up a mirror to humanity’s arrogance and poked us with the conceit of gods created in the image of Man, and she has dared to encourage us to face the failures of religion, the threat of climate change, and more.

Almost all of this is touched upon and / or embraced in Africa, her new exhibition of art opening on October 31st, 2022 at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, curated and operated by the marvellous Dido Haas; a complex and layered exhibit, comprising images, interactive 3D elements, and external elements that present further depth to the installation, which takes as its central (but not exclusive) focus the subject of climate change.

The most obvious elements in the exhibition are the images. These are framed within the continent of Africa – a place of both unparalleled beauty and bio-diversity, and which has perhaps suffered more than most thanks to the uncaring hands of the so-called “developed” nations, and is set to do so even more unless those same developed nations are willing to actively work to reduce the global threat of climate change. They present two interwoven stories, those of Grace and Abel, which unfold as an almost Biblical journey from creation (symbolised by In the Beginning, located on the Gallery’s east wall to the right of the café building), to the end times and the fall of mankind, couple with latter-day plagues.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Milena Carbone – Africa

These are stories we can enter into by clicking on the title plague for each image, located just below its lower left corner. These can be used to open “chapters” on Milena’s website which both offer narratives on Grace and Abel and their respective journeys, and offer-up broader food for thought -notably on the realities of climate change – for consumption.

Within the images themselves – which are also hybrid art pieces, utilising background generated via the Midjourney AI art generator combined with avatar images – can also be found reflections and dualities. Take Deluge for example. In title and tone, it echoes the story of Noah and the flood, and the destruction of all that went before; but even as it does so, it suggests more of a foreshadowing then a look back: because as climate change increases, the people of Africa – as noted in the preceding Burn Them All! – will face some of the greatest outfalls, prompting a mass migration – a literal deluge of peoples that could wash away our comfortable civilisations to the north and east of that great continent.

Running along the centrelines of the gallery’s two arms is a series of plinths mounting models of African animals. Each bears a label which may at first appear nonsensically humorous, but in fact offers commentary on the nature of our global society, where the divide between humanity and nature is becoming ever wider and more harmful, thanks to the former’s self-indulgent demands for instant gratification in all things. These models also carry additional subtext on both the issue of climate change and on the nature of “god” – whether seen as an independent consciousness or as a construct formed in our own image -, and our relationship with it. To appreciate this, it is essential that visitors to Africa approach each of the plinths in order to trigger its transformation.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Milena Carbone – Africa
(There is also a further interactive element to the installation in the form of a dance video displayed at one end of the gallery, complete with dance positions visitors can use to join in with the performance.)

Further examination of our relationship with “god” can be found within the constructs of the images and the characters within them. Milena herself notes that “Abel” is drawn from the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, whilst “Grace” is a name and a term often associated with “god”. The story of Cain and Abel is perhaps one of the clearest demonstrations of “god’s” fickleness whilst also presenting a metaphor for man’s inhumanity to man – something for which Africa, as a continent both straddling the equator and containing some of the world’s poorest and more in-need nations will perhaps pay one of the highest prices.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Milena Carbone – Africa

From the above, it is hopefully clear there is a lot to unpack and interpret within Africa, and that it is an installation where interpretation should be guided via the artist’s words, and not an “interpreter” (or interlocutor) like me. As such, I will leave you with a recommendation that you visit Africa and allow yourself time to be immersed within the stories and flow of ideas lying within it.

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Bamboo’s Personal Aspect in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bamboo Barnes: Personal Aspect

October 28th, 2022 saw the opening of an extensive retrospective exhibition of art by Bamboo Barnes at the Akiniwa region, a part of the Akipelago, operated and managed by Akiko Kinoshi (A Kiko), supported by 3D sculptures by Kerupa Flow. And when I say extensive – I mean just that: Personal Aspect occupies for main gallery buildings, at well as featuring three “outdoor” displays of her work.

Hailing from Japan, Bamboo is, as I’ve frequently noted, one of the most vibrant, evocative, provocative, and emotive artists displaying her work in Second Life. She is also an artist unafraid of plumbing the depths of emotion and introspection – as can be witnessed in some of the pieces in this exhibition.

Bamboo Barnes: Personal Aspect

Bamboo began her artistic journey within Second Life in 2011, initially working with  with avatar screenshots. In 2013, she became enamoured by in-world 3D art installations, a factor which dramatically altered her artistic trajectory, her work shifting to a format that often presents a 3D depth through the two-dimensional form of the artist’s canvas.

With this shift in direction also came an opening of style and structure to her work; there is a focus of emotional self-reflection within many of them, often expressed through the use of vivid colours. She also sought explore the more esoteric through her art – the nature of self; metaphysics; what constitutes reality; the nature of art itself – particularly her own art, and more.

Bamboo Barnes: Personal Aspect

Within this exhibition – which features pieces Bamboo has selected as her “favourites” from her extensive portfolio – we are invited to join Bamboo on her journey through art, a journey that extends from Second Life landscapes and reflections on the world of 3D art within the platform, through to pieces offering insight into her examination of the themes noted above, onwards to her original digital art and experiments with motion (animation) in art to offer further dimensional depth.

Art is never finished, just abandoned.

Bamboo Barnes

Bamboo Barnes: Personal Aspect

One of the many beauties of Bamboo’s work is that she doesn’t not offer her own thoughts on it; rather, she prefers to allow her art to speak directly to those viewing it. As such, I don’t plan to offer much of a personal exposition on this retrospective. What I will say, however, is that this is an exhibition that should be seen – and appreciated with the time it deserves; to hurry through the halls risks missing the depth of expression awaiting discovery.

In  this, Kerupa’s 3D work is the perfect accompaniment to Bamboo’s. Also hailing from Japan, Kerupa shares that heritage, while her art plumbs similar depths of expression and theme.

Kerupa Flow at Personal Aspect

Not to be missed.

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