Saturday, January 21, 2012

In the loop



Lepidopterous largeness in the form of Under The Sky opened to much fanfare yesterday night on LEA17 .
The opening was organized by Zachh Cale for Japanese artist, Yooma Mayo, and featured Skye Galaxy which was pleasing from a punning point of view, even if his music always conjures the sensation of an imminent arrival at Lobby Level.
People like ants and ants vastly bigger than the people doing the usual loop-the-loop of Being There At An Event. There was considerable lag, but not the fault of the public, as I discovered today, when the sim was empty.
Above the piano party, it was all paleness and detail-oriented prettiness.
 In SL, flowers and butterflies have been done and done and done, (often in exquisite nanoprims, which is way harder to accomplish than this outsize extravaganza) and whole sim builds are now commonplace, so while it's a charming build, I was soon feeling antsy, and ready for a return visit to Wizard Gynoid's Klein Bottle.
Wizard Gynoid has loved Escher since High School. His pictures have been recreated in SL many times; Wizzy herself made a version of his Waterfall, and Stars, which you can still see at Primtings next to Solkide Auer's version of Relativity. - and yes, Primtings is still there. Guess everything is relative, after all.
The build at the Education Center on  sim Clive  borrows from Escher's Mobius ring, but conflates it with Felix Klein's concept of a 'bottle' imagined as two Mobius strips sewn together
It's a much-revisited concept, but maybe the paradox that most speaks to our virtual lives. We see and often feel close to other avatars and their remote controllers, and yet everyone's on their own endless loop, essentially separated from all the other ants. Permanent parallelism influences our sympathies and reactions in ways that the head-on collision of the real world would never permit. And vice versa.
Wizard Gynoid: Soon you'll be able to ride the ants. This way each one will march around their own little Mobius strip. By definition, the Klein bottle has no "inside" or "outside", so, if we were to walk around it, we would end up on the other side of it, then back on this side again. About a month ago, Miso Susanowa made an awesome video of my build - I love it!

Wizard Gynoid: When I was in high school, I saw Eacher's black light posters. I heard you could take drugs and travel into the posters. I tried to but was never able to! Here I can make 3D copies of his paintings, and fly into them - a dream finally comes true. Escher had mathematician friends who influenced him a lot. Math and geometry inspired him, particularly the unexplained paradoxes the things that make your head hurt to think about! I'm very thankful to Escher, and sometimes I think I'm channeling him. He would have a ball in SL.
There's more to see at Clive. Compare Wizzy's studio on the ground with RL photos, and you'll see that it is a lot like Escher's office, with the same toys and concepts floating around.
Wizard Gynoid: My things are an interpretation using the tools I have available here. The artist is always defined (notice, not  "limited") by the tools they have. Lately we've been talking about moving some of our stuff onto 3D webpages using Unity3D, so people could view the works without having to log in to SL or Open Sim. I want to put the Klein bottle on a 3D web page for the world to see!

2 comments:

Wizzy Gynoid said...

thanks thirza!

Oberon Onmura said...

I enjoyed Yooma's build a lot. I especially enjoyed the giant insects around the perimeter as seen from the center. And the mound of ants along one side. I know these have been done a lot, and also that full sim art builds are becoming more common (yay!), but it's not so easy to pull off successfully. I thnk Yooma managed to get it right on, especially for her first try.