Tag: Linden Endowment for the Arts

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)

Open now through until the end of July 2014 at LEA23 is Sniper Siemens’ brilliant installation Second Life History, a glorious walk through the platform’s past, marvellously presented in a series of visual vignettes which recapture events which are bound to be both familiar and new to Second Life residents.

From the landing point, one is invited to tread a watery path through a partially submerged park, only the trees, lamp posts and railings visible, the route leading the way from the gates and 2001, through successive years charting the highs and lows of Second Life’s past and present, before climbing a set of stairs towards the open door of the future, and the promise of the Lab’s “next generation” platform.

Along the way you can meet a Primitar (looking rather broken and forlorn, lying in the water) and various characters who point the way to different events and occurrences represented by information boards and self-contained scenes which evoke those moments of history and / or the emotions to which they gave rise.

So it is you can learn about (or recall, if you’ve been around long enough) such events as the initial Second Life closed beta in 2002, the opening of the gates to all in 2003, the tax revolt later that year, the arrival of the Linden dollar as a virtual currency and the advent of free accounts, Black September (2006), the banking shutdown of 2007, the Lab’s withdrawal from paying VAT on behalf of users in the European Union, and so on.

Technical innovations are also marked, both by overhead SL version numbers, and by their own little vignettes – LindenWorld, the first viewer, the arrival of the famous blue UI, prims, pay-to-TP teleport hubs, streaming media, open-sourcing the viewer, voice, windlight, viewer 2.0, it’s all here, as well as all the more recent technical innovations on the platform.

To call the installation a delight is an understatment; if you have any interest at all in SL’s history, it is guaranteed to stir memories, raise a smile, and more. There are a lot of cheeky little touches, and one or two personal pieces; one little vignette marks the rezday of sniper’s first avatar incarnation, while further around the installation is a wonderful little poke at Philip Rosedale’s stepping-down as CEO. Similarly, the arrival of viewer 2.0 is announced by the appropriately named (given users’ reaction to the viewer’s arrival) Curveball Resident.

While exploring the build, don’t miss the web icons; clicking these will take you the official blog posts on the subject being displayed / discussed. These include the very first official blog post from Philip Rosedale in 2004.

This really is a marvellous installation, and shame on me for not having found the time to write about it any sooner. If you’ve not already dropped-in, I really do urge you to do so before the end of July; I seriously doubt you’ll be disappointed!

Given the subject matter, it seems only appropriate that I close with yet another look back at LindenWorld from August 2001.

Related Links

• Second Life History (Rated: Moderate) – until Jul 31st, 2014