In 2021 Titus Palmira, Sofie Janic and Megan Prumier opened a region build called Skrunda-2, an interpretation of a deserted Soviet-era military base and town built by Russia in Latvia during the 1960s for the operation of their Destnr early warning radar system, before eventually abandoning it in the 1990s.
It was a popular build, attracting photographers and bloggers alike (see Skrunda-2 an atmospheric slice of Soviet history in Second Life), as did its successor (see; Skrunda: the returning in Second Life). One of the latter is Blip Mumfuzz, an artist / photographer with a gifted eye and an ability to create images that are so natural in angle and composition, they sit as scenes we might naturally sport for ourselves when visiting a place – as she richly demonstrates with Images of Skrunda, now open at Frank Atisso’s, Art Korner.
Art Korner: Blip Mumfuzz – Images of Skrunda
Set within an environment suggestive of a deserted town with slab-like blocks rising from all sides that stand as reminders of the blockhouse-like bulk of the great apartment buildings of Skrunda, and surrounded by ruins the offer a further echo of their study, these are genuinely remarkable images. Through a considered use of focal length, focus, and angle, Blip presents pieces that are so life-like in composition they might actually have been taken within the aged, deserted remnants of Skrunda itself, whilst they also offer a unique sense of place and time entirely of their own.
Take Skrunda Drone, for example: it is hard to to imagine one is looking out from a high vantage point across a run-down corner of a township. Meanwhile, it is hard not to look at Skrunda Dream and not feel one can walk into it and take a peek through the open door or climb the rusting steps up to the gangways above, and onwards among the gantries and tanks; similarly, Skrunda-3 12 gives the impression one can hop onto the old rails and walk along them, following the railcar that appears to be vanishing around the bend in the tracks that sits between graffiti-painted buildings.
Art Korner: Blip Mumfuzz – Images of Skrunda
This is another genuinely engaging collection from a gifted photographer and storyteller that helps to recall a genuinely engaging Second Life region build.
It’s taken me a while, but I finally managed to drop into Onceagain Art Gallery, owned and operated by Onceagain (Manoji Yachvili). The occasion for during so was to visit Drawing a Dream, an exhibition of of images and drawings by Onceagain herself.
It’s an exhibition can be reached in one of two ways – via direct SLurl, as given here, or by dropping into the gallery’s main landing point and taking the teleport from there to Onceagain’s personal exhibition space. One on the platform, one will find a winter setting, heavy in snow and with a slightly otherworldy look to it thanks to the huge mushrooom trees and and tall crystals, which also help give the suggestion of a place from dreams canopied by the a starlit sky.
Drawing a Dream, February 2022
This open space, marked by stepping-stone paths and a shallow pool of water, is home to horses (complete with poses alongside them for those who may wish to take photos with them) and a collection of pictures by Onceagain that are drawn from both the physical world and Second Life, all of them on the subject of horses – animals for whom Onceagain has an understandable love. As such, I’ll leave it to her to explain her exhibition:
I live in a small farm and among the different animals that populate it there is a mare. She’s been with me for 23 years, I consider her like a friend. She is a barefoot horse, most of the times I’ve ridden her without saddle or just allowed her to follow me like a friend; but she is old, she just grazes.
For twenty years I have made drawings of her, and ten years ago I start to take photos of her. Now I doe the same with horse in Second Life. What you will find here are a mix of all these three things. The pictures in dark frames are from real life, and those in the light frames from Second Life.
– Onceagain (Manoji Yachvili)
Drawing a Dream, February 2022
The result is the most fascinating selection of equine studies it’s been my pleasure to witness in Second Life. All of the images have been finished so as to give the impression they have been hand-drawn,whether they originated in the physical word or were created from photographs taken in Second Life.
Predominantly offered sans any backgrounds or other distractions, they are drawings that perfectly capture these beasts that have been a central put of so much of humanity’s history, and with whom it is so easy to form a special bond. Each piece speaks to the strength, grace and beauty of these magnificent animals – and also speak to the love and understanding in which Onceagain herself holds horses.
Drawing a Dream, February 2022
For those wishing to have one of these pieces, they are available for sale – but only in limited quantities – available numbers are displayed with piece piece in hovertext when viewing up close.
An exceptional selection of art that perfectly blends the physical and virtual worlds.
Gem Preiz: Exoplanet: One Step Further, February 2022
Wednesday February 22nd, 2022 saw the opening of the first half of a 2-phase art installation by Gem Preiz. Presented under the over-arching title Exoplanet, the installation carries the sub-title One Step Further, and is located on a sky platform within the region of Akikaze, held and curated by Akiko Kinoshi (Akiko Kiyori) as a part of her “Akipelago” group of regions.
This is another exhibition by Gem that combines a prim-base build with his always fascinating fractal images; as such it follows in the tradition of past installation such as Arcadia, Skyscrapers, Elusive Reality, Sapiens, and The Anthropic Principle, allowing the visitor to consider an architectural theme and / or enter an immersive environment in which his fractal art offers an extension to the environment. At the same time, it is also something of a harkening back to installations such as No Frontiers, his two-part series Heritage: Vestiges and Heritage: Wrecks and Rhapsody in Blue Fractals, in which the fractal images are the nucleus of a tale – a journey, if you will, of the imagination to futures and places within the cosmos that await our discovery.
Gem Preiz: Exoplanet: One Step Further, February 2022
In terms of the the build, this takes the form of a human outpost on another world. Where this may be is anyone’s guess; the environment outside suggests Mars, but that belies the main title for the exhibition – Exoplanet – so I prefer to think of it as somewhere beyond our solar system. It’s a curious place, sitting within a geodesic dome (which for me carried echoes of a much smaller dome sitting within Gem’s Skyscrapers city), powered by solar arrays which sit alongside a communications array beyond its curving walls.
In all, 14 different locations can be explored within the dome, either on foot or via the teleport HUD that is offered to visitors on arrival (and which contains a 15th destination – a point just outside one of the dome’s access points). These range from a control centres through to crew habitation units, although not all of the buildings are necessarily accessible. Within the base are also a number of vehicles: shuttles, hover cars and tracked rovers, which can be sat upon and driven, adding a dimension of fun, while the base is staffed by static NPCs that have a slight Star Trek edge to their uniforms.
Gem Preiz: Exoplanet: One Step Further, February 2022
A point to note here is that the base isn’t supposed to be in any way “accurate” in its representation of a stellar outpost, as Gem explains in the installation’s introductory notes:
Exoplanet does not intend to look realistic or even consistent from a scientific point of view. Rather, it aims to create an immersive 3D environment which evokes space exploration. It deliberately uses, as with all my builds, prims with their SL attributes (bumpiness, shininess, alpha etc.), and does not rely on meshes or textures to reproduce reality — except for crew avatars.
– Gem Preiz
Gem Preiz: Exoplanet: One Step Further, February 2022
Turning to the art, a total of 18 pieces are offered within the installation and can be seen in one of two ways: via a large screen that hangs to one side of the dome, the 18 images displayed on it as a slide show, or by visiting the needle-like Tower that faces the screen from across the dome, where the images are displayed across several floors connected one to the next by wall-mounted teleports (note also that this tower also incorporates the Observation and Headquarters destinations on the teleport HUD).
While they may not necessarily all be new, these are pieces that all tell a story that is literally cosmic in its theme, carrying us to strange, new worlds orbited by vast space station-like structures, or upon which a civilisations has created massive cities and structures, and out into deep space where more structures are huddled – but whether they under construction or damaged and broken by events unknown and their age or finished articles built to some strange design ethos, is left entirely to our imaginations.
Gem Preiz: Exoplanet: One Step Further, February 2022
With the facilities under the dome suggesting a human base sitting beyond our solar system but still on the very edge of the rest of the galaxy, the images present suggestions of both humanity’s journey to reach this point in history (BZ Fractal SF9, BZ Fractal SF18, BZ Fractal SF1 and BZ Fractal SF13), and of the far older alien civilisation whose remnants have both drawn humans to the remote location in the inky blackness of space, and which even now is the reason the people of this base are preparing to venture still further from their homeworld.
There is another aspect here as well, as again noted by Gem in his introductory notes:
The purpose of the combined mixture of fractals and 3D interactive build, is to make them resonate : the space base offers an immersive 3D experience, even if it is in a simplistic environment, while the fractal images show a complexity impossible to reproduce in 3D.
– Gem Preiz
Gem Preiz: Exoplanet: OneStep Further, February 2022
All of which makes for an engaging exploration. When visiting Exoplanet: One Step Further, be sure to not the recommended environment setting displayed at the landing point. And for those interested, Gem has produced another of his soundtrack videos on You Tube, which offers a mixes of pieces that contain within them echoes, perhaps of M83 and Hans Zimmer.
Tabula Rasa is a Latin phrase meaning “clean slate”, it is a term often used by some epistemological philosophers to encompass the theory that we are born without built-in mental content, and all the knowledge we attain comes purely through experience or perception. We are a clean slate upon which our natures are formed as a result the nurturing and influence we receive from those around us, and through the environment we live within.
It’s a doctrine that sits in opposition to that of innatism, which holds that the mind is born already in possession of certain knowledge and traits which form the basis of our nature and personality, and thus are unlocked, rather than formed through the process of gaining experience and our developing perceptions. Both doctrines have long histories, tabula rasa can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle, whilst innatism was a doctrine held by the likes of Plato and Descartes.
Theda Tammas: Tabula Rasa
Tabula Rasa is also the title Theda Tammas has selected for her latest installation, which recently opened in Second Life. It Occupies a sky platform on which is set a stark setting – a construction site, if you will – has been established; a place of beams both horizontal and vertical, here and there with sheets and strips of fabric attached. Within it, and under the overcast sky, figures stand, walk and twirl on the spot. Most do so individually although some are in pairs; all have their faces covered as they appear to be exploring their environment.
The symbolism here is clear: the covered faces reference the idea to the blank slate, the we are all initially vessels empty of knowledge; their motions and poses of the individual figures suggesting they are exploring their environment – that through these acts, they are embodying the core concept of tabula rasa – that the knowledge we gain, we we become, is the result of exploration, experience and the growth of our perception.
This is further exemplified by the pairs of figures, their poses encompassing both the idea of experience and the concept of nurturing: in one place a hood figure cares for another by carrying it; in another two hold a loving embrace, suggesting the love and care passed from a parent to a child, further helping the latter gain understanding of love and care through the contact.
Theda Tammas: Tabula Rasa
Nor does the symbolism end there; it extends to the construct that forms the setting: the fact that the setting is that of a construction site underlines the idea that who we care, what we become, is a process of construction through experience and growing perception – just as a building is formed the the bringing together of beams and joists.
Whether or not one agrees with the doctrine of tabula rasa (studies have show innatism can be shown to exist, whereas tabula rasa is much harder to establish), this is a fascinating and rich exploration of the latter. When visiting – and as per the sign at the landing point – make sure you have ALM and shadows enabled (Preferences → Graphics), and use the local environment settings (menu → World → Environment and make sure Use Shared Environment).
Monday, February 14th, 2022 saw the opening of Crescent Moon, the latest exhibition Dido Haas is hosting at her Nitroglobus Roof Gallery in Second Life. Presenting the work of Adwehe, this is an exhibition that mixes 2D and 3D art together with a custom EEP setting for the gallery which really should be used (menu → World → Environment → make sure Use Shared Environment is set) if the exhibit is to be properly appreciated.
When the EEP is set, visitors will see that a crescent Moon dominates the sky along one arm of the Gallery; but this is no mere play on the title of the exhibition, there is a purpose in including this huge waxing crescent Moon and making it as much a visual element of the exhibition as any of the images and sculptures Adwehe has on display.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Adwehe – Crescent Moon
Perhaps the best way to sum up the theme of Crescent Moon would be to use a word that has become a common subject within the world of Second Life art: “identity”. However, this is also too simplistic a term when applied here; Crescent Moon is a multi-faceted exploration of interlocking themes: an exploration of self, identity, the relationship between human and avatar; questions of “godhood” and creation and artistic discovery.
As Adwehe notes, the Moon has a special attraction for humans down the ages and around the world. It has been a focus of worship, a reminder of our small place within the cosmos, encouraging our ancestors to see it as the seat of one deity or another. It is also something we only see thanks to the sunlight it reflects – reminding us the Sun is very much the source of life on Earth – whilst that reflected light causing us to see the world around us differently to how we perceive it by the direct light of day; a world both illuminated, yet distorted.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Adwehe – Crescent Moon
And like the Sun and Moon were once seen as seats of goods, so we can, in sitting behind our screens, become gods in our own right: we can create and destroy at will, whilst our avatars sit as the projection of “self”, but one perhaps distorted. They are not us but projections or who we are – or more correctly, what we want to present of ourselves – through the medium of photons – the same atoms of light that give us life – but organised into a form that is not truly “us”.
Thus we have the opportunity to explore, to experiment, be it through self-expression, through that ability to create with prim, texture, particle, and mesh – and for the artist to do both, through experiments at colour and art from, physical and digital, camera and canvas, Opportunities that both reflect on our inner natures and also to play back into ideas of creation, godhood and primality. All of this is richly explored within Crescent Moon. Within the images we have a captivating mix of painting and photography; they speak to the artist’s acknowledged experimentation with her work in preparing for this exhibition.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Adwehe – Crescent Moon
But there is something more within them as well. The colours used in many of them are primal in tone: red, blue, black, green; colours that appear to have been painted on Adwehe’s avatar as much as the canvas. This gives the colour images a primal element, something added to by the fact that the character in them – and most of the more monochrome images – is dancing, something that might be seen as an act of worship – or given the Moon’s association with the female gender, perhaps they might also be seen as a celebration of femininity and woman as the source of life. Through these primal / feminine themes, we have a further intertwining of ideas of identity, exploration of self and place both as modern explorers of coming to terms with a new digital realm, giving birth to new means of expression and creation, whilst also presenting an echo of our ancient ancestors as they faced a new and strange realm of the world we have long-since tamed – or is that conquered?
This expressiveness of art, dance, and exploration of our sense of self and place extends into the sculptures Adwehe also presents. With regards to these sculptures, I particularly like the way they both embody the themes of the exhibition and moods expressed by the images and even gently enfold JadeYu Fhang’s KHAOS, a regular piece Dido has on display at Nitroglobus, perfectly into Crescent Moon.
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Adwehe – Crescent Moon
This is an exhibition that mixes so much into it: 2D and 3D art; primal body painting and modern abstractionism; contrasts of humanity and godhood; reflections of our modern mastery of the technology to create worlds of our own, and of our need to find comfort in what could be a strange and something frightening physical world through the worship of what appeared to be two great constants of life: the Sun and the Moon. It is also an exploration of self and mood as we join the artists in her experiments with light, colour, image and object.
Since entering Second Life in 2019, Milena Carbone (Mylena1992) has demonstrated her talent as both an artist and as an agent provocateur in the way she has utilised her art to encourage us to think about matters of import to us all: the environment, climate change, the preservation of wildlife, the nature of our relationship with God and the controversial role religion has played in both that relationship and on the course of our history as a growing civilisation, and the greed that has also played that central role in the unfolding of our history. At the same time, Milena’s work serves as all art should: as pieces that stand as images to be individually appreciated in their own right for the beauty and / or simplicity of appearance and statement.
With the recent overhaul of her gallery space to form The Carbone Studio – a reflection of Milena’s expressiveness in art and dance – Milena opened her latest exhibition Light and Life, a selection of portraits that follow the lines of her more recent works in that that are engagingly minimalist in form whilst offering a depth of meaning and story.
Milena Carbone: Light and Life
Life and light are – as the introductory notes for the exhibit state – deeply intertwined. Both are born out of darkness, both express all that we have and are – and from whence we came. Between them, they offer us a chance too be renewed each and every day as we awake from darkness as the light of day calls us, and the life of wakefulness returns.
Within the nine images Milena presents in this exhibition is a glorious minimalism that personifies a part of the relationship of light and life: images that express the richness of life as captured through the message of photons travelling through space to be captured by the eye and lens to capture a moment; a memory. At the same time they also speak more broadly to the themes noted above the birth of life from darkness, its growth through the nurturing warmth of light from simple organisms lost in a drop of water through to the complex creatures we are today, able to take joy in each new day, to share, create, to give and receive -even if darkness still sits within some of the poorer more selfish decisions we make as individuals and as a civilisation.
Milena Carbone: Light and Life
Whether you wish to enjoy Milena’s images and portraits of her avatar and life as she expresses it through it or whether you which to ponder the deeper questions and ideas Milena postulates in her introduction to the exhibit, Light and Life is again, a rich collection of images with an engaging, provocative core theme. It is reached via the main landing point for the Carbone Studio; while there, and before jumping to the gallery space, I also urge you to read Milena’s statement about herself and her art.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 