Currently open at the Carmel Art Community, is the Carmel Summer Art Fair, organised by Martha and Robert McFarren. It features an open-air display of art along the Carmel seafront road, offering visitor the opportunity to appreciate the art on display and pop into the local beach-side shops.
The festival is interesting in that it comprises Art from Robert McFarren and his guests, and five headline artists who were in turn given the opportunity to invite – if they wished – up to two artists each whose work they appreciate, to also exhibit two pieces of their own work.
Kody Meyers and Dhyezel Ravenhurst
This means the overall line-up is as follows:
Robert McFarren: CybeleMoon, Michel Bechir; John Huntsman, Tempest Rosca-Huntsman, Kisma Reidling, Secondhand Tutti, Viktor Savior, Anouk Lefavre and Pavel Stransky.
Raging Bellls: Dhyezel Ravenhurst and Kody Meyers.
Seiko Blessing: Micki Blessing and yours truly.
Bliss Enchantment.
Bubbles Song: Mara Telling and Lynx Luga.
Nils Urqhart Aneli Abeyante and Terra Merhyem.
Robert McFarren and Secondhand Tutti
Given the number of artists participating, the art on display presents a broad mix of styles and approaches. The focus does lean towards landscapes, but there is still a fair and attractive mix of work.
Alongside of the art festival, the Carmel Art and Crafts features an exhibition of Alps photography by Nils Urqhart, and the garden pavilion a further exhibition by John and Tempest Rosca-Huntsma. All of which makes for an ideal visit for any lover of art in Second Life.
Seiko Blessing and Micki Blessing
As one of the invited artists, I’d like to thank Seiko for inviting me to join her at the festival; it is an honour and pleasure to be able to do so.
Shortly after Linden Lab launched the Log (or lodge, as I tend to prefer) Homes for Premium members on Bellisseria (see Second Life: Log Theme Linden Homes released), they started to add – as they had with other Linden Homes themes – a number of public spaces. Some are on the main run of land, others sit on islands within the lakes and rivers. All offer places of escape and relaxation. Chief among them its is Randelsham Forest, intended to act as a community hub, open to those who might wish to make use of it.
We actually visited Randelsham back at the end of April. It’s a rugged location, sitting between lowlands with house and a large, semi-sinuous body of inland water. At the time, I didn’t blog about it, as it appeared the regions around it were still very much a work in progress: whilst on a stretch of the Bellisseria railway passes by and has a local station, the line doesn’t as yet connect to anything.
Randelsham Forest
This is still the case, but it’s clear that now that SL17B no longer requires the input, the Moles are returning to work on Bellisseria, so I’ve little doubt things will be properly connected up.
The focal point for the setting is a large “tree house”, in part sitting up on wooden legs from the shore of the lake to level itself with the railway station, to which it is linked by a wooden board walk. Split into two, the tree house offers a large lounge area with wooden walls with a long balcony to one side with a bubble rezzer at the far end for those who fancy taking to the air. A bridge on the other side runs down to an open-sided platform ranged around the trunk of one of the area’s great redwoods.
Randelsham Forest
Like other community areas before it, the tree house is able to be reserved as a community use space to gather with the community, your friends. socialize, hold events, and enjoy the beautiful scenery.
Lamp-lit paths await discovery, offering opportunities for people to the means to descend down to the banks of the lake, where trails further give opportunities for exploration and to find places to sit.
Randelsham Forest
The paths also offer routes up into the hills rising either side of the rail lines, to peaks where people have the opportunity to take to the air in a different way – via zip line; although when we tried it, the ride was a little rough! The line out to the lake’s island also (at the time of our visit) leaves folk without an option to get back to shore without flapping their arms to take to the air; I assume this will be rectified as more work in the area is completed (a rowing-boat rezzer, perhaps, to connect to the little pier below the tree house?
With a path down to the houses on the inland side of the hills, Randelsham offer a perfect setting for the locals to use and hold their own events, planned or spur-of-the-moment. On a broader front, it, and the social spaces large and small that can be found throughout Bellisseria offer the means to help break-up the land and present places for explorers and visitors to discover. For my part, I’m looking forward returning and using it for a start of some more horseback explorations of Bellisseria.
Long-term Second Life resident DimiVan Ludwig – Dimi to his friends – is a man of many talents: business owner, musician and photographer. As a business owner, he created and ran the Hummingbird Café between 2006 and 2011, and is also the owner of the Duval Pub. As a musician, he was a regular performer at both, and at venues across SL, including Menorca, the first live music venue in Second Life (2005) and recently re-created in-world.
As a photographer, DimiVan works both in the physical and digital worlds, and his work from both is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Kultivate Signature Gallery.
Kultivate Signature Gallery: DimiVan Ludwig
The introduction to the exhibition notes:
He calls himself a novice, but those who have seen his photographs would say otherwise. He frames his shots with the final product in mind, editing very little in post production. He uses his Nikon d3500 to shoot real life landscapes. In Second Life, he prefers to snap portraits utilising the features provided by LUMIPro.
On witnessing the pieces on display, I would have to agree to the first part of this statement: there is a natural framing to the pieces, whether avatar study, physical world portrait or landscape (from either realm), that presents the subject matter in singular depth that is a delight to witness and marks Dimi as having a natural eye for photography.
Kultivate Signature Gallery: DimiVan Ludwig
Presented across the three floors of the gallery space, there is also a certain thematic approach to way they have been laid out. On the lower floor, the focus is predominantly from Second Life, presenting on the one side avatar studies (although with a couple of portrait images from the physical world), and on the other Second Life landscapes. On the middle level are photos from the physical world, whilst the upper is reserved for Second Life images of a more intimate / adult nature and which should probably be regarded as NSFW.
I admit to being particularly drawn to the pictures on the mid-level. This is not to say I do not appreciate the SL photographs – I do. But there is such a depth and marvellously natural set to each of the images from the physical world, that they naturally draw the eye; in fact I’d go so far as to say that one in particular demonstrates that as well as having a flair for capturing the natural world, Dimi potentially has a keen eye for astronomical photography.
Kultivate Signature Gallery: DimiVan Ludwig
Another excellent exhibition for Kultivate, featuring a gifting artist.
In late 2008, the US Army made the headlines in a number of on-line periodicals such as Wired, when it announced the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) was opening a “recruitment island” in Second Life, hoping to tap into the “4 million” users of the platform (yes, this was the era of hype about SL) into signing-up through a mixture of promotion and tchotchkes.
While that announcement was met with sniggers by some of the press reporting on it, it actually masked the fact that the US military had been engaged in evaluating Second Life as a platform for modelling, simulation and training (MS&T) activities for more than a year.
This work was centred on a group of regions called MiLands – Military Lands – which at their height (2009-2010) were made up of around 30 regions, split between the four major branches of the US military: Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps. Such was the US military presence, Linden Lab assigned Scott Linden to manage the regions and liaise with the US Department of Defense in its use of SL.
The MiLand Meeting Room, home of the MiLand Charter
Within those regions, Coalition Island, established (2009), was created to offer a public point of access to the US Military’s use of second Life. Today, it remains as a piece of Second Life’s early history – although it could in all honestly do with a little TLC as parts of it have not weathered the passage of time too well.
At its heart is a large pentagonal area – the symbolism here fairly obvious! On four of its sides, this presents photographs of each of the four military branches mentioned above Brownstone paths radiate each to lead to informational displays on how each branches was using SL – although both the Army and Air Force displays look more recruitment oriented, and the US Marine Corps is now conspicuous in its absence. The US Coastguard also gets a passing nod, with a small inshore patrol RHIB moored to one side of the island.
The fifth side of the pentagon comprises a broad set of steps once used for presentations (and now somewhat disconcertingly inhabited by three disembodied heads). At the top of these is the island’s former greeting / conference / meeting centre, the upper floor of which contains the Second Life US Military Coalition Charter, covering the aims and use of the former MiLands regions.
Coalition Island: the Team Orlando information display
Close to main conference centre is a display by Team Orlando, a collaborative alliance of U.S. military organisations working in modelling, simulation and training using a number of platforms including – back in 2009-2010 – Second Life.
While I was unaware of Team Orlando’s use of Second Life, thanks to Dr. Douglas Maxwell (Maccus McCullough in SL, and also the founder of he in-world group RL United States Military in SL), I had originally become aware of attempts by the US military to use Second Life as an MS&T platform, back in 2011.
As a civilian contractor, Dr. Maxwell was employed at the Navy’s Virtual Reality laboratories in Washington DC, and in 2008 he was asked to head-up the work in establishing a 12-region campus in Second Life to be used by the Navy Undersea Warfare Centre (NUWC) for training and simulations.
It is a computationally steerable persistent simulation. The capabilities in here are tremendous: in-situ scripting, terrain deformation in real-time, every object is composable, not static. We got the idea that if we could increase the fidelity of the physics in here, it could actually be very useful.
Dr. Douglas Maxwell discussing NUWC’s use of SL in 2008
Coalition Island: US Navy NAVSEA display for the Virtual Navy Undersea Warfare Centre (vNUWC)
Maxwell’s involvement with the military use of Second Life expanded in 2009 when he became the Science and Technology Manager at the US Army’s Simulations Training and Technology Centre (STTC), also looking to make use of Second Life. This came at a time when Linden Lab was engaged in the (ultimately ill-fated for a variety of reasons) development of the “standalone” (or perhaps more accurately, the “behind your firewall”) Second life Enterprise (SLE) product, and Maxwell and his team were steered towards SLE as a potential solution to their needs.
In fact, Maxwell’s team found SLE to be highly conducive to their work thanks to a greater freedom of control over the simulator software and capabilities than could be achieved with the “public” SL product. This allowed them to develop a number of feature-rich training simulations to help train troops in advance of their deployment to Afghanistan.
Nor was the STTC alone in the use of SLE – the US Navy invested in it, at one point filing a US government FBO request for the purchase of up to 70 SLE support licences for the product, worth in the region of an initial US $3.5 million, had it been approved.
Coalition Island: the US Air Force information display
But before that came to pass, Linden Lab opted to discontinue the development of Second Life Enterprise, thus ending US military interest in the product. For Douglas Maxwell and the STTC, this meant taking the lessons they had learnt and applying them to building a simulation environment using OpenSimulator (see: MOSES: the US Army’s OpenSim exercise).
Whether or not the ending of SLE development was also the cause of other branches of the US military stepping back from experimenting with Second Life, I cannot in all honestly say. Today, as far as I’m aware, the US military has little or no official involvement in Second Life. However, Coalition Island today stands window on a time, as short-lived in the scheme of things though it might have been, when Second Life was being looked at seriously as a platform for training and simulation, and so it remains as an integral part of the platform’s history.
As is undoubtedly obvious to regular readers, I’m a bit of a space fan – astronomy, space flight, science fiction – but I have to confess that until recently, I’d never actually written about the Spindrift Space Gallery in Second Life. In fact, until I was talking to Pooky Amsterdam about the special edition of The 1st Question event honouring Paradox Olbers (see: The 1st Question in Second Life (with Ebbe Altberg)), the gallery had completely fallen off my radar – so I thought it time I returned for another visit.
The gallery was established by Paradox in (I believe) 2007, and features the work of artists from the Intentional Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), including pieces by Kara Szathmáry, the IAAA’s Vice Prresident and CFO-Treasurer.
Spindrift Art Gallery
As the IAAA notes, art has always held a special place in the history of exploration. Artists often accompanied explorers on their journeys, providing paintings and sketches that would later enthral audience on their intrepid return. Some actually financed their own expeditions to “far-away” lands: south America, the Middle East, the Orient – specifically to paint those distant “worlds” and present them to patrons and audiences. In the 1870s, American artist Frederic Edwin Church perhaps became one of the first “space artists” of the modern era when he went to the Arctic regions to specifically paint the northern aurora as well as the icebergs of the Arctic Sea.
That tradition of art accompanying exploration has very much been a part of the space age. While artists cannot physically travel into the solar system or outer space, they can offer images of the Final Frontier, bringing us images of the fantastic – interplanetary space ships, future civilisations, alien worlds and so on, as well as realistic portrayals of the possibilities of planetary exploration, the worlds of our solar system and those we’ve detected around other stars but have yet to see through our own eyes or those of our robot emissaries. And of course, art has also given life to the imaginings of science fiction authors.
Spindrift Art Gallery: Rick Sternbach
All of this is reflected at the Spindrift Space Gallery. It features images by George Richard, Ron Miller, the inimitable Rick Sternbach, perhaps most famous for his work in connection with the Star Trek franchise from The Next Generation through Star Trek Voyager, in which his designs, images and conceptual art helped shape our view of the 24th century.
Also featured is the art of the aforementioned Kara Szathmáry, with a stunning series of pieces that reflect our unique relationship with the cosmos that has existed throughout history: stars that helped us navigate the oceans (Arrival), played a role in beliefs and cycles of life and even romance (Grandfather’s Spirit – Rolling Thunder, If Not for You), and that our voyages into space are, at their heart a very human undertaking: inspirational, emotional and, for families left behind, worrisome (In Pursuit of Paradise, Bon Voyage).
Spindrift Art Gallery: Kara Szathmáry
An exhibition of work by Steve Hobbs presents marvellous images of our solar system and explorations within it: Huygens descending through Titan’s atmosphere, Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft at asteroid 25143 Itokawa, Voyager 2 at Uranus and Neptune, the Russian Luna 16 sample return mission and more, as well as views of of the planets and moons of the solar system. Another panel provides a tribute to the writings of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, including a rather Robert Redford like interpretation of Alvin, the protagonist of Against the Fall of Night.
From science fiction to science fact by way of astronomy the Spindrift Space Gallery offer a unique, static exhibition of space art and a little slice of SL history.
“With a Smile and a Song”: Storybook, June 2020: – click any image for full size
Caitlyn and I have long enjoyed visiting the Lost Unicorn regions held by Natalie Montagne and designed by Noralie78. The designs offered within them have been the most captivating of any within Second Life. Sadly, as I reported in The closing of a Storybook in Second Life in March 2020, one of the region designs – Storybook Forest – went away, although in a kind-of compensation, Noralie78 went on to design Finian’s Dream, also held by Natalie (see A touch of Celtic magic in Second Life).
But, and as the saying goes, you just can’t put a good book down, so Storybook Forest is once again back; this time with a new name – a simple Storybook -, a slightly different approach and entirely the work of Natalie, who announced the new design in her blog on June 26th, 2020:
I have been working on and just recently completed my first attempt at building a region all on my own. I had a lot of fun and am pretty excited about it and am ready to share it with everyone 🙂 Remember Storybook Forest at Lost Unicorn? This is an all new version … now called Storybook. It is above the gallery region, Faerie Tale.
As a sky build, Natalie has been able to combine the new design almost seamlessly with a mountainous region surround. This gives the real feeling that this is – to coin a phrase used in relation to fairy tales – a land far, far away, something which the ground-level Storybook Forest couldn’t achieve to the same degree. A further difference between this design and that past iteration is that this includes a number of rentals properties that present people with the chance to live within a fairytale setting, and of which more anon.
Visitors initially arrive at a landing point sitting on its own – a click of the storybook there will carry them onwards to the setting itself, delivering them to a small town setting that may at first look quite ordinary. But again, as a saying goes – looks can be deceptive. A mouse looking a little like Stuart Little awaiting a tour guide stands close to the landing point; down the street, another mouse is carrying a try of drinks and cakes in the café; the street, an antlered jackalope enjoys a cup of hot chocolate while another bunny is preparing to take a photograph – perhaps of the little robot trundling down the street or perhaps of Mary Poppins, who is dropping in via umbrella overhead (so much so that it’s hard not to hear the melody of A Spoonful of Sugar as she drifts in).
Storybook, June 2020
The little town marks the heart of the setting – and the detail that has been poured into it: as well as the characters on the streets, the little shops are all given furnishing and décor entirely within the contexts of a storybook setting; but it what lies beyond it that gives the land its soul. The T-shaped streets all end in tall wrought iron gates, neatly splitting the land into three area of exploration: south and east, north and west, and westwards, with the first two – south and east and north and west – having paths that loop through them to return to the little town fairly close to the landing point.
Which route you take is entirely a matter of choice: all three offer much to see, although the forest itself lies through the gates that sit to the west, within an archway of a great castle. Beyond them, steps descend into the forest, mist snaking among the trees, the paths between the tall trunks set out with paved slabs of stone, each with a name that reflects the theme to be found along them: Cinderella Way, Brave Boulevard and Snow White St.
Storybook, June 2020
Each of these gives a clue as to what lies along them by way of vignettes. Those familiar with the past iteration of Storybook Forest will be pleased to note that here – and elsewhere – familiar characters from that build can still be found, although some are now offered in a new aspect of their story, as is the case with Snow White. There are also some new characters to be found as well. Follow Brave Boulevard, for example to its twisting end you’ll discover the old woman who lived in a shoe sitting and reading, while her children are at play. Behind them, their shoe (or in this case boot) house rises – and a careful examination will reveal it is one of the units available for rent.
And therein lies the secret of seven rentals here: all of them are offered in a style entirely in keeping with the vignette they may be placed alongside, or the theme of the setting as a whole- shoe, forest cabin, pear house, watchtower and more, none of which interfere with people’s ability to explore.
Storybook, June 2020
Elsewhere are other reminders of the previous iterations of the design: Alice is still attending an unusual tea party; the little village of animal houses curves around one of the paths, while books and quotes on stories await discovery.
Within the castle – a new addition that forms a gallery space – the Wonderland theme continues on the lower floor with the Red Queen / Queen of Hearts waits. Through its halls, floors and towers can be found more of the Storybook Forest characters, offered in reflection of the art on display: interpretations of Peter Pan (while Captain Hook’s ship floats over the region), Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, making for a visit in its own right.
Storybook, June 2020
The new design offers a setting that captures much of the magic of the original whilst offering something new – a new chapter in Storybook’s tale.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 