The moment you arrive at Miso Susanowa and Misprint Thursday’s building, The Roof is Gone, your eyes and ears are put on alert. The main structure, constructed of wooden planks and encased in scaffolding (“I could actually build most of this in Nevada” says Miso), stands cross-like, assuming the air of a place of worship in the middle of a disaster zone. It generates a weather system of its own and is surrounded by swirling details; photographs spiral on the wind above, videos, embedded into prims, blink like lightning, and the static beginning of the soundtrack passes back and forth between your ears like sheets of heavy rain. And then you reach the eye of the storm, calm among the chaos. The song begins to soothe, there’s a living room to rest in, and, if you look carefully, you can even disappear quietly into the building.
The piece is part political, part personal. It conjures up memories of Hurricane Katrina and other natural catastrophes. It also invokes psychological drama through childhood imagery – the house is breaking apart, little bicycles are tangled in spikes, photos of kids are bent and curled. Miso left her “digital DNA” for us to examine, in the form of a poster in hanging on a wall inside. Over 50 hours worth of work went into the build and it shows. There are so many layers to explore (teleport yourself up several meters to experience the accompanying video to full effect) expect to spend at least half an hour to begin to scratch the surface. Miso explained that one of her main goals is to make art in SL that can be translated to the outside world. I look at this piece and see a maquette, a model that might be realized again in the actual world. The artists kindly offer a lovely freebie miniature of the piece, a great souvenir of BL 2009.
Hey, can’t BL be extended for a week? There’s too much to see and do...!
This just in from White Lebed, art director Burning Life: "The events and the activities will be closed in a few days, but the art and the builds will stay for another week and the gates will be opened till Nov 1st."
What terrific travels at Burning Life last night...do see the Burning Life flickr pool for useful links and peeks at activities on the playa. It’s hard to know where to begin, so I started at Burning Life Zero Mile, hopped in a temp rez flaming vehicle and spun around randomly. It’s great to see the sims full of a variety of action - people looking and exploring, performers, like the Lamplighters, dancing off into the dusk, artists fiddling with their work, sculptures powerfully beating out heat, all against mad soundtracks from gentle breeze to speed metal. I was happy to run across wicked-blogger-on-a-break Wyatt Wellman, fitting right against the fiery backdrop wearing his charcoal persona. Blued Food was an ace companion – he’s a speedy scout. I followed him around as he shouted “Click EVERYTHING”. It’s true, the builds are full of surprises. I recommend doing one build per visit to really appreciate the work that’s gone into these sites. We found four Yip’s Fusion and I lost myself there for a good while. Yip has a way of providing comfort and romance wherever she lays her hand, and Fusion is no exception. Simple stenciled eyes blink and tear before you as you’re enveloped in a wash of pink and deep brown scrims, bending like waves. A track by I Monster (Heaven) makes you want to bow with them. The muted, dimly lit space is more mysterious than Yip’s typical palette, and suits the harmonic track. As always, she’s offering some charming freebies – soft bear noses and iridescent butterflies which follow along as you trek.
Other builds of note: Gettr II from Idialab for the Museo del Metaverso at Opal and The Roof is Gone by Miso Susanowa and Misprint Thursday at Black Rock which I’ll write about next.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Pardon my silence - there's been a lot of interesting material to blog about, and I'm gathering entries for posting over the next few days. So please, stay tuned. For now, take this handy map and explore the Playa which makes up Burning Life...more soon and thank you for your patience, dear readers, x.
There’s something special about a work of art unfinished. The viewer is able to study the methods of the artist, and observe their hands at work. Seeing a sculpture where its hinged or the lines that lead into an idea - it’s like being a botanist regarding a leaf with a magnifying glass. Egon Schiele is an artist whose body of work includes several unfinished pieces which are some of my favorite, like this one, of old houses in Krumau.
Coordinators at Burning Life respectfully requested that observers refrain from taking photos of works before they were finished. However, as I watched builders at work today, I was enthralled by the amount of work that goes into building, which I could only appreciate by seeing each and every prim revealed. Seeing these builds in partial states made me consider the intricate planning it takes to build a structure, and, when a build is done right, it leaves the impression that it was a cinch to make.
I crept around Donpatchy Dagostino as he worked today, watching from high above to below his feet, careful not to interrupt. More than half is in a raw state, elliptical shapes awaiting textures, resembling, from above, the shell of a beetle. At this stage it made me think a little bit about artist-architects pushing the limits of wood, like Robert Harvey Oshatz. Dagostino’s intent may be better revealed once the structure is complete, but seeing it unfinished doesn’t make it any less impressive.
I’m prepared for autumn. I collect apples and press a riot of leaves between the pages of unread books. Autumn is for Emily Dickinson, whose grave I used to sit on to make diary entries, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendentalists. Transcendentalismis linked to German romanticism and Buddhism. It believes in the soul’s intuition, inspired, in part, by poetical experience, of nature as the most awe inspiring work of art. “Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament”, Emerson writes in his essay Nature, 1836. The transcendentalists experimented with a utopian community called Brook Farm, begun in 1841 by Unitarian minister George Ripley. The mission of the farm was to “insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor ... guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor...” In other words, everyone, at all levels of society, could share the workload, ideally giving everyone the same opportunity to pursue leisure activities. Brook Farm failed – no one wanted to give up their leisure time to harvest the hay (Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Thank God, my soul is not utterly buried under a dung-heap.”) - But still, society experiments with idealist communities.
Burning Man is one such experiment. Founder Larry Harvey explains:
“If technology itself is left to dictate our ends, then I think we can look forward to an increasingly disassociated way of living. Real community can only be attained through the experience of certain primal unities in the physical world....For the past 12 years I have directed Burning Man—a project dedicated to discovering those optimal forms of community which will produce human culture in the conditions of our post-modern mass society. Within a desert wilderness we build a city, a model world composed of people who attend our event from all over the globe. This virtual community is demographically diverse. It is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and represents a wide range of age groups. It is formed in the image of the great ecumenical world that surrounds us; a teeming population of uprooted individuals. In other words, this intentional community that we create from nothing, and that returns to nothing when we leave, has been 'liberated' from nearly every context of ordinary life.”
Sound familiar?
Autumn is also for Burning Life (beginning October 17th) which is a microcosm of the Second Life experience itself and is modeled on the RL Burning Man event. Run by a slew of volunteer builders, musicians, artists and others, a temporary city and entertainments will be created, a testament to the power of the ephemeral. Write the organizers, “Together, we will build a city, and we voluntarily accept many of the same restrictions that Nature imposes on the real thing. We do this to see how creative we can be with the same palette of materials and to revel in the beauty of simplicity.” The most remarkable thing to see at both events is to watch how a city grows out of a blank canvas, and disappears again. The abbreviated life of anything transient, such as Burning Life, adds to its remarkable allure.
Perhaps the most successful communes are those that are ephemeral. At least in SL, you may choose to avoid being mired in the dung.
I decided to head to Burning Life today and found myself a game companion willing to bear the hippie drums. Wearing our over sized aviator glasses we shielded ourselves from the burning avatars and made our way to a clever diorama built by Manx Wharton called The General Welfare - a lovingly sarcastic ode to back country South; the yard is full of detritus (including a cook book that contains a recipe for squirrel), a worn shotgun shack leans against its creaky wooden steps. Watch out for the swinging carcass draining on the porch. There you can sit on a plastic lawn chair (I could feel the weakened seat strain under my bottom) and take in the many details worth contemplating...Who set the Chevy blazing? We want to know.
Other highlights include AM Radio's installation "Beneath the Tree that Died".... a telescope bisects the land, a story of love lost documented through a telegram. Will the telescope help him sight his memories?
Finally, experience a bit of depressing-but-true political commentary through a "patriotic" installation where you're greeted by a gurning Marilyn Quayle and Lynne Cheney, and further spun and wrung through Warhol-esque portraits of Reagan and Palin...quotes from these brains mimic and taunt..not for the wavering voter this. It culminates via the temple to politics, which offers a soothing hot tub in an appropriate culmination of politics & sex. Let's hear it for Burning Life!
This week Burning Life - sl's version of Burning Man. The theme is the Green Man - the symbol of rebirth. I've never been to Burning Man because it involves extreme heat, sand and nudity. I could take any of those two things but not all three together. Actually, ever since I heard the story about the unsuspecting campers being run over by a flatbed carrying dancing girls the event seems terribly scary. So, a wimpy way to experience it would be through sl. Acres of desert, ominous tire tracks stretching off into nowhere, bright green oases offer respite from the “heat”. Most of the camps are focused on the idea of going green (spinning cloud covered earths, dioramas of the earth falling to pieces, fact filled notecards on emission snd population statistics) . Not exactly promoting rebirth or providing solutions, the camps only bemoaned the inevitable. Didn't see anything burn and the music has been hideous. Most of the camps are depressingly empty. Only one concert hall (an ice palace actually) was absolutely packed with all sorts of people, furries, hippies, industrial types, the largest crowd I’ve come across in sl, and the hosts were playing jazz fusion. Help! The most pagan spot I found was in the Grow camp at Skylar. Sat quietly inside an enormous oak tree, then met up with friends Colleen and Achariya. We took turns being showered with blue particles from oversized tin watercans that floated above us. Automatic chat appeared onscreen that encouraged us to "grow, grow".
My name is Siri Woodget, intrepid explorer and part-time curator. Frequent stops made for indie music. RL archivist /anthropologist/ museologist type. (click on pics to enlarge)
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