Metaverse Art 2011-2013 Nr 4. IMAB events

2011-2013 Nr.4 IMAB events

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josina burgessnazz lane

velazquez bonetto

This e-book dedicated to

Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574)

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Intergrid Metaverse Art 2011-2012_________________________________________________________________

1. Tendences

1.1 MESH1.1.1 claudia2221.1.2 Atari Patrucci yes it is MESH

1.2 LEA FULL SIM SERIES1.2.1 Rebeca Bashly The tower1.2.2 Rebeca Bashly Inferno

1.3 Narratives1.3.1 Bryn Oh

1.4 Colaboratives1.4.1 Pirats art chaos

1.5 Migration to OSG1.5.1 Alien Bolero in Craft and in Metropolis

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2. Metaverse Projects

2.1 UWA 3D OPEN ART CHALLENGE

2.1.1 FLY WITH THE WIND by Josina Burgess2.1.2 FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE by Miso Susanowa2.1.3 THE GLOWING SERPENT by Ginger Alsop2.1.4 LAZER BALLS by Betty Tureaud2.1.5 DREAM OF THE COLD SLEEPER by Typote Beck2.1.6 (“It’s raining in my heart, as it’s raining in the town” by Cherry Manga2.1.7 TRAVEL IN THE SHADOW OF TECHNOLOGY by Anley Piers2.1.8 PARANORMAL FROTTAGE by Misprint Thursday2.1.9 THE ILLUSIONIST by Gleman Jun2.1.10 LIGHT TOWER by Betty Tureaud2.1.11 TURNING THE TIDE by Nish Mip2.1.12 CHOOSE YOUR BLOSSOM by Suzanne Graves2.1.13 SYMPHONY IN THE BARREL OF A GUN by Arrow Inglewood2.1.14 PLANET CENSORED by Anley Piers

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2.1.15 STRANGE PLANT...UGLYNESS & BEAUTY by Claudia222 Jewel2.1.16 THE RHYTHM OF MOOD - Lea Supermarine & Jarapanda Snook2.1.17 DIGITAL GLOVE by Misprint Thursday2.1.18 THE WILD WILD WORLD OF ILLUSION by RazorZ & Olga Soulstar2.1.19 THE MINOTAUR OF CARTON by Typote Beck2.1.20 ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Cherry Manga2.1.21 SHATTERED by Ginger Alsop2.1.22 THE FRAGILITY OF THE SOUL IS NOT A DEFECT by Gleman Jun2.1.23 SPANISH BULL by Silene Christen2.1.24 TROIS PETITS TOURS ET PUIS S’EN VA (Three little turns and it goes away) by Josiane Sorciere2.1.25 JUNGLE CHALLENGE by Dusty Canning2.1.26 THE DOCK SPIRIT by Scottius Polke2.1.27 ULTRA VIOLET by quadrapop Lane2.1.28 THEATRE OF WAR by Miso Susanowa2.1.29 VENUSTRAP by Claudia222 Jewell2.1.30 ONE AND FOUR TIMEBOARDS by L1Aura Loire2.1.31 UNE HORDE DE CORDES by Aristide Despres2.1.32 5x8 COMPUND CUBE by Wizard Gynoid2.1.33 TIME AS A HELIX OF SEMI-PRECIOUS STONES by Miso Susanowa2.1.34 THE HUMANICAL FROG by Lollito Larkham2.1.35 HERE COMES THE SUN by Sledge Roffo2.1.36 TV MORNING EXERCISES by Dusty Canning2.1.37 PIUME DI PAVONE by Nino Vichan2.1.38 DANGLING NARROW CHAIN DEMONSTRATOR by Emilin Nakamori2.1.39 HARMONIES IN C GREAT (+) by Artistide Despres2.1.40 NOTEVERYTHINGISPLAINBLACK&WHITEbyFuschiaNightfire2.1.41 LIVING FRACTAL by June Clavenham2.1.42 THE MATTER OF IDEAS by Gleman Jun2.1.43 THE SUPERHEROES BREAKFAST by Typote Beck2.1.44 DOWN ON THE DATA FARM by Miso Susanowa2.1.45 PETITE ETUDE SUR OLIVIER MESSIAEN by Artistide Despres2.1.46 OMNIPOTENT by Pixels Sideways2.1.47 THE CHASM by Oberon Onmura2.1.48 EXCERPTS FROM REALITIES by Glyph Graves2.1.49 THE ABANDONED DAUGHTER by Eliza Wierwight2.1.50 YOU CAN’T TOUCH HEAVEN by paleIllusion2.1.51 AUTUMN by nexuno Thespian2.1.52 THE CROSSING by Nish Mip2.1.53 FANTASIA EN LA SOMBRA by Romy Nayar2.1.54 PRIMSCAPE DREAM by Sledge Roffo2.1.55 99% by Harter Fall2.1.56 BLACK SHIRT by Misprint Thursday2.1.57 IN DREAMS by Blue Tsuki2.1.58 SWALLOWEDUPBYTHECROWDbyFuschiaNightfire2.1.59 L’IMPATIENCE by Josiane Sorciere

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2.2 CARP Metaverse Exhibition Szombathely2.2.1 Naomi Devil2.2.2 Josina Burgess2.2.3 Velazquez Bonetto2.2.4 Frieda Korda2.2.5 Maxxo Klaar

2.3 Inworldz Dreamz & Visionz Festival 2011

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3. Metaverse Procedual Art

3.1 SL TLC The Schöffer Tower3.2 The Change3.3 Sky dance V

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4. IMAB Events4.1 Craft World4.1.1 Vulcan - Artists in connection4.1.2 Building competition

4.2 Inworldz4.2.1 Alizarin’s Aquarella4.2.2 soror Nishi4.2.3 Teal Freenote, “Dreamsinger Sculpture Garden”

4.3 Metropolis4.3.1 SoA Albert Querstein Alex Boyd Alex Grün Antonia Ling Atari Patrucci Carda Mom Caro Fayray ChapTer Kronfeld doong susu Eliopod Beaumont First Prim Galen Dreamrezzer

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Josina Burgess Junivers Stockholm Keve Magic kjs Yip Klarabella Karamell Kueperpunk Korhonen Larysa Firehawk Moewe Winkler Pixel Prim Thierry Noir Uwe Furse Velazquez Bonetto Wanda Shigella

4.3.2 Josina Burgess Installation4.3.3 Velazquez Bonetto VJ4.3.4 Rebeca Bashly The Tower

4.4 OSGrid4.4.1 Ruben Haan4.4.2 H. J. Kaeppeler

4.5 Second Life4.5.1 Tuna Oddfellow4.5.2 Solkide Auer

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JOIN VIRTUAL CHRISTINE ONCE MORE IN THE VOL-CANO!!! COME SEE AWARD WINNING ARTIST EAMON KUHN’S FOURTH PART OF THE CRAFTS BIG WEIRD IMAB EVENT!! SOCIAL COMMENTARY!!! FIRE TEMPLES!! REAL-LY TASTY GREEN TEA!!! MY HOME GRID ROCKS!!!ATTN NEWBIES!!THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOOOOOOME!!!!Posted on March 17, 2013 by virtualchristine Here I am, in the belly of the volcano, bravely attempt-ing to escape the shooting jets of liquid flame and rentlessly grinding behemoth gears, as the crushing weight of my inventory finally overwhelms my fabu-lously tuned musculature , sending my hapless com-panion and I plummeting into the arms of…yes I said the weight of my inventory! What the hell other other

weight would factor in? Exactly! I’m glad you acknow- no, wait; you’re mocking me now, aren’t you?Hello my dearest dears! How marvelous! here we all are again ready for another whirlwind adventure on OpenSim, the software platform that hosts hun-dreds of independant worlds, many of which choose to be connected by an amped up teleportation sys-tem called the hypergrid, which allows you to end-lessly seek out these brave new worlds , exploring, meeting interesting people from every corner of the planet,and snagging enough free content to actually expand your physical body ma- oh shut up.

If you simply do not know how to get on OpenSim, and believe me, you are not alone, please see my ” How to Get on OpenSim in SixRridiculously Easy Steps” page at the top of this blog. And don’t forget my Newbie Glossary, also at the top. It’s easy, come on ; spread your wings in the free metaverse!

For today`s adventure, we will be staying on my be-loved home grid of Craft-the Friendly World for the fourth part of Craft’s big weird exquisite corpse Vul-can event for the Intergrid Metaverse Arts Bienniel or IMAB. No, really, this is a real thing!

1) The IMAB thingie is an unprecidented-in- the-meta-verse nine month art festival, that has staged events and exhibitions over six grids, including Big Daddy Second Life.

2) Craft , the smallest grid in the festival, has staged several events. One was Vulcan- Artists in Connection, a four part installation built by four individual artists, each of whom worked in secret for a month, so the following artist would have no idea what they were doing. This method of collaboration was developed by early 20th century surrealists and was based on a then fashionable parlour game called The Exquisite

4.1 IMAB events CRAFT WORLD

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CRAFT WORLD IMAB events

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Eamon would do in… …the big honking volcano. See the long staircase that goes from the beach to the lip of the crater? Just walk up the stairs, and jump into the lava! This was the volcano interior four months ago. Do you see the roadblock and little fence on the right side of the picture? Metaverse building legend Lumiere Noir had hol-lowed out a chamber UNDER the floor, filled it with cooling water, and built a beautiful reactor, to harness the creative power of the volcano. A” beautiful” reac-tor? reader arches eyebrow. Then a month later … Tosha Tyran’s Alienation visibly drew power from Lu-mi’s reactor. It was an wildly interactive story of crash-ing lightening, blood, smoke, ….the world’s most vulnerable…. … struggling… ..to live their lives amidst a forest of blades.The next month, the volcano inspired Ruben Haan to leave behind the concepts of man made power and social strife, as well as his usual bright colors, to cre-ate… ” Dirt (free, as in public domain)”. Ruben’s signature “sharing” red arm appears to have simply tossed these seemingly unremarkable stones across the chamber floor… I don’t know what was more impressive, the dramatic

Corpse.3) Vulcan refers to the Roman god of stuff like cre-ativity and craftsmanship. He lived inside a really big honking volcano, therefore we have staged our event in one. Small grid, big fat ideas.There have been a couple changes in the Vulcan event. Well known artist Oberon Onmura was sched-uled to be the last slot, but RL obligations prevented him from participating in March. Sooo, at another Craft IMAB event, our Second Annual Building Competition, which took place last January, Vulcan organizer Ger Orsini popped the question to.. …first place winner Eamon Kuhn!! (Sorry about your skin Eamon! I had a sucky connection!) Now, I didn’t really know anything about Eamon’s work before the Building Competition, whose theme had been “Es-cape”. But it was no surprise… …that his unprepossesing looking entry won the day. The title is “Escape Predjudice” . You click the blue hand on the front door… …and teleport into this hellish room of tormented souls. Behind every door is a flaming hand print that represents a some form of bigotry-racism, sexism, nationalism, religious intolerance… look for the next blue hand…. …and you find yourself inside this genuinely breath-taking matrix , trying to make your way toward the light and the next blue hand… … where a last blue hand rezzes the spirit of imagina-tion and freedom; yes, that is a flying machine from the mind of the original renaissance man, the eter-nal maestro Leonardo da Vinci! I have been in virtual worlds a long time, it takes a LOT to make me gasp aloud. I was really looking forward to seeing what

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inner life of the stones… …or how perfectly Ruben caught the spirit of the great canyons, where you are privileged to view the human race at a distance reserved for angels and eagles, the warm breeze bringing you the scent of Jurrasic pine and the song of coyotes, as you chew a stalk of sweet dry grass, and contemplate the eter-nal, nestled in a billion years of warm magnificent dirt. Free, as in public domain.So the next month I was all excited about the open-ing. It got complicated. As you can see, everything was slow to rezz, and I thought part if not all of the problem might be my re-ally- user- friendly- but- can’t -always- handle- Open-Sim Firestorm viewer. So I decided to log off and come back with my much sturdier Imprudence viewer. As a result, when I went into the volcano, I saw this… See the bright yellow and reds on the floor, and the big gears? If this is what you see when you enter the volcano, you are using a viewer that is not mesh enabled, and thus seeing about one quarter of the build. Of course I had no clue. I always use Firestorm, and had fogotten about that particular limitation of Impru-dence. And it was all sort of neat looking in a mildly psychedelic way. So I blithely congratulated Eamon, asked him what his build was about.Eamon Kuhn: It is called “Assembly Line”. Matter com-ing from the bowels of the Earth is consumed by man, who day after day despoils in order to draw energy. Who is master of energy is master of the world, and makes other men slaves to plunder the riches. But the Earth’s resources are not infinite, and already battling to steal the last crumbs. What and when to stop hu-

man stupidity? I sure hope it will not be the end of humanity, too.virtualchristine: What is on the screens(on the floor)?Eamon Kuhn: It is a way to illustrate the media’s influ-ence on humanity. And also to explain the meaning of the work. Some videos are only fog, obfuscation of the mind. Others tell in short human history.Eamon Kuhn: The columns of fire are the energy of Earth’s pulse; the breath of the Earth. And the well pipes…

Now at this point, event organizer GeR, who doubles as my guardian angel(hugs), realized I was not asking the right questions. He asked me a few about what I was seeing, then told me to log off and come back with Firestorm. It was getting late,and frankly, I didn’t think it was such a big deal, so I came back the next day. Wow. From mildly psychedelic to Dantes Inferno. Eamon had continued with Tosha’s violent sword theme, but whereas she had dealt with their effect in our society, Eamon tackled their origins. Here, in a ca-cophany of hissing steam and grinding gears, again in a hellish scenario…. …where this time, there seemed to be no escape… … not from above… … nor on either side; no inspirational idea on any horizon to lift you away …. … well, not quite:)I wanted to know why this particular work had been so disturbingly hopeless. So I IMed him. I had met the man once for ten minutes , and didn’t think “Dude! That bowels of hell thing is a freaking DOWNER…” would be world’s greatest opener. Instead, I told him how beautiful it was (hey, it IS beautiful; nightmar-

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beauty and the geometry of architecture. But also ru-ined and deformed. This represent the inevitable end of every human work.On the other side of the platform… Eamon Kuhn : This side is that of fire. Behind you there are two temples; one is the Egyptian temple of Sesos-tris (Sensuret). The largest is a Cambodian Temple or rather Khmer; in the temple is a pit from whence fire springs. Or rather lava, from the volcano.virtualchristine: What volcano? Oh, THAT volcano!Eamon Kuhn: Would youlike to see the other two parts?virtualchristine: Oh, yes please!!We walked back over the core. Eamon Kuhn: This part is air. Plants breathe; they are the breath of the earth. This section is dedicated to meditation, and yoga. I am still working on the veg-atation. As we relaxed with a cup of green tea, I thought it was the right moment.virtualchristine: Eamon, why was the Assembly Line so violent and angry? Eamon Kuhn: Because I wanted to explain how the Earth’s resources are used to produce products which often serve also violence. Exploiting the work of man to produce weapons to kill other men. And this is a violent and alienating system; those who rebel against it pay dearly. Rebellion is hard. It is hard to find a was of escape, through the chains, to get out of the volcano.Eamon Kuhn : The volcano makes me think of the foundries where metal is melted and worked.): I thought about the relationship between land resourc-es and their exploitation. I thought about how many people in the world are made to do very heavy work to produce goods like weapons: unnecessary and dan-

ishly horrifying, but beautiful) and asked if he had a region on Craft. He said no. I was really surprised; and said ” You mean you have no other builds AT ALL on this grid ?” He seemed to think for a while, then typed “Well, I HAVE been doing a little work on the quarter region I won in the building competition. Would you like to see that?” I was actually a bit nervous. What if the spiritually uplifting “Escape Predjudice” had been some kind of fluke? Forget Dante; what if this guy was going to make Edgar Allen Poe seem cute and cuddly? Was this new build going to be some kind of god aw-ful dystopian slasher diorama I would see everytime I closed my eyes for the next six months?- Well, not quite.:) virtualchristine: Well, you’ve been busy!Eamon Kuhn: This build is called the 4 elements. The themes are Fire, Water, Air and Earth. This is the land-ing point, Water. Come over here please. Eamon Kuhn: At the centre there would be some kind of fountain. I am working on the scripts. Eamon Kuhn: I thought about putting in seating, for music or readings, I don’t know. This sculpture should convey the movement of water.virtualchristine: Oh, it absolutly does!Eamon Kuhn: This is all the water side; the harbor, and an aquaduct.Virtualchristine: What aquaduct?Eamon Kuhn: Behind you. Oh, THAT aquduct!Eamon Kuhn: Follow me please!We walked back over the platform with the beautiful stone columns.Eamon Kuhn: I call this the core. If you’ve seen it, you will understand that I like history and archaeology. The

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CRAFT WORLD IMAB events: VOLCANO, Eamon Kuhn

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gerous. I’m a person who loves creativity but is also attentive to the world. Yes it’s just a piece of work, but I like to remind people, especially through artistic events, to tie art at social commitment. If they can communicate emotions that give constructive mes-sages, that is success. But this place is different. You can do tai chi, and look out over the water. Behind you. It was getting late, and as much as I was enjoying talking to Eamon, we had to get a move on. So we re-crossed the platform. Eamon Kuhn: This is Earth. I like stone monuments, like stonehenge. Man made monuments, but express the force of nature. A stone forest. There is also a cave… Eamon Kuhn: I’d like to make it more, well, fantasy.virtualchristine: There is a lot of fantasy in virtual worlds. I like the natural look. You should put bats in here with big piles of guano!Eamon Kuhn: LOL. I like the idea!And now my dearest dears, I must wrap this tome the heck up. If you would like to see a video of Assembly Line, here is a link to a short film by Caro Axelbrand. The Volcano itself is open indefinitly, and the event may not be over! Grid owner Licu has slapped on some bullit physics, ( be warned it is still a teensy bit laggy!) and we are hoping Oberon may find time in April to do a final part! The volcano is on region WA-TER. The Building Competition entries were still up last time I looked, on region SUQ, and Eamon has said he is happy to have visitors on his beautiful prize parcel, which is a quarter of region PITCAIRN. I think that was everything, so I will love you and leave you! Thank you again GeR, for always looking out for me, and thank you Eamon, for taking so much time explaining all your wonderful creations. And thanks to all of YOU, for joining me on my small adventures. Your company means the world to me!The sweetest of dreams and

the brightest of days to all of my beloved readers! Until next time, Adieu Posted in Avatar, building, Craft-the Friendly World, cyberculture, Grids, Hypergrid, Journal, Lady Hermit, metaverse, Newbie, Opensim, Opensim City, scripts, travel, Uncategorized, website | Tagged air, angels, anger, antuique, Appearance, aquaduct, aqueduct, Architecture, Avatar, bats, browser, bullit physics, Cambodian, canyons, chains, clockwork, core, coyotes, Craft-the Friendly Grid, culture, dante, dirt, eagles, eamon Kuhn, earth, Edgar Allen Poe, Egyptian, es-cape, eternal, exploitation, fire, Firestorm, foundries, Freebies, gears, geometry, GeR Orsini, guano, Harbor, Hypergrid, Imprudence, Inferno, Inventory, Jurrasic, Khumer, Lag, landing point, Licu Rau, lightening, Lum-iere Noir, meditation, music, Newbie, Newbie Advice, Oberon Onmora, ocean, Opensim, Pines, PITCAIRN, politics, Prims, punlic domain, reactor, readings, rebel-lion, regions, Roman, Ruben Haan, Sesostris, smoke, song, stone henge, stone monuments, stonehenge, struggle, Suq, sweet grass, Swords, Tai Chi, The 4 Ele-ments, The Assembly Line, Tosha Tyran, violence, vol-cano, vulnerable, Water, weapons, website, Wind, work | Leave a comment

JOIN VIRTUALCHRISTINE IN THE HEART OF THE VOLCA-NO!!! MONDAY MARCH 4 @9:30 CET SEE THE FOURTH AND LAST PART OF CRAFT GRID’S BIG WIERD IMAB EVENT!!! BASK IN THE GENTLE BEAUTY OF RUBEN HAAN’S SURPRISING PART 3!!! CELEBRATE DIRT!!!!!ATTN NEWBIES!!

Posted on March 2, 2013 by virtualchristine Here I am, on the Water region of Craft grid, in the belly of an active volcano, perched atop an enormous stone that is screening an endlessly kneading giant hand, looking out on a huge dead tree festooned

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CRAFT WORLD IMAB events: VOLCANO, Eamon Kuhn

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with dangling swords in a lightening storm, situated over the main ventilator of a pulsating underwater reactor system, that are each chapters in a four month art project styled on a macabre surrealist parlour game . Love my metaverse.

Hello my dearest dears! How marvelous, here we all are again, ready for another whirlwind adventure on OpenSim, the software platform that hosts hundreds of independant grids! Many of these worlds are con-nected by an amped up teleportation system called the hypergrid, which allows you to traverse these brave new worlds, exploring, meeting people from all over the world, and bagging oodles and oodles of cool free stuff !

If you do not know how to get on OpenSim( and be-lieve me, you are not alone) please see my ” How to get on OpenSim in Six Easy Steps” page at the top of this blog. And don’t forget my Newbie Glossary, also at the top of this blog.

For today’s adventure we will be staying in my beloved home grid Craft-the friendly World for the fourth part of our Inter Metaverse Arts Biennial or IMAB event: Vulcan- Artists in Connection. For those of you who haven’t been following all the cultural whoha, here are the broad strokes: IMAB is a massive unprecen-dented arts and culture festival that covering grids, that has been going on for about nine months now!

Craft Grid has had several events. This one takes place in side a big freaking volcano. The whole thing is just dripping in classy symbolism; Vulcan and his forge have represented creativity for thousands of years, the volcano itself, reaching out from deep in the earths heart to create and renew her children’s home… al-right, I was bummed that it wasn’t a Star Trek refer-ence. Do you think you’re the only person who tweets

Leonard Nimoy??? Multiculturality is the cornerstone of the Open Simulator project, and if the Europeans want to grind this bloggers hopes into the virtual mud with an 8,000 year old cultural monster truck, then the needs of the many outweigh… I have had way too much coffee.The Vulcan event is being staged in four parts, because it is something called an Exquisite Corpse; based on an early 20th century parlour game of writing part of a story, or drawing a picture, then folding the paper over, so the next participant had to create the follow-ing piece blind. Surrealists obviously loved the effect, and it eventually entered the artistic mainstream.All of the Vulcan artists have worked in secret, so the first three parts have only been open to the public for three days at a time!! The fourth and final part, in a sur-prise substitution by Craft building competition win-ner Eamon Kuhn, will be be unveiled Monday March 4, at 9:30 pm CET. Legendary Ivory Tower of Prims creator Lumiere Noir opened the event by hollowing out the floor, and cre-ating a massive underwater reactor complex.Thus the wetsuits. This is a shot of the reactor core. Award winning artist Tosha Tyran’s part two was a wildly interactive story of violence and courage. And this is the opening of part three, one month ago! Just behind me, to the right, you can see the very distinguished free culture artist Ruben Haan ,whose work is about to be unveiled, and behind all of us, you can see the volcano. Follow the stairs to the top… And jump in! This thing is a bear to get in a wide angle photograph. Here is another shot. You can also see the entrance to the underwater chamber, and the giant reactor ventilator in the mid-

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dle of the room. The new piece was titled ” dirt( free as in public domain)”Ruben just said” Not so much color this time. I wanted to play in the dirt.” Event organizer and primary monster truck driver, GeR Orsini was in hog heaven, happily flying here and there, chattering about the creative fire and Vulcan’s mighty forge. He loves art events, and would never just see a pile of rocks, a wierd ass film and a big floppy red arm. And neither would this gutted trekkie, actually. I may know squat about art, but I have always instinctively loved Ruben’s work; I even had the great pleasure of interviewing him for another IMAB event, which launched me into the mirror universe of being the person in the volcanic chamber who knew the most about the artist.GeR Orsini : You have worked with natural elements?Ruben Haan: Yes. It is(textures) from my garden, off the grid(RL).virtual christine: The garden with the clay!Ruben Haan: Yes!:) Ruben’s website says”Free Culture “artist, and he is not kidding. Ruben’s work is not just a PART of free culture, it is ABOUT it, which includes reusing and remixing his RL and virtual work. Outstretched and supplicating, giving, offering, helping, sharing hands, particularly these lovely, friendly red ones, are one of his biggest repetitive themes. Another one is identity and spirit; the area between where we present ourselves and who we really are. He does alot with glasses, goggles and eyes,which he calls the mirror of the soul, and these big ol’socket shapes were ones I absolutely recognized. He also creates his work with an eye to the viewer remixing it. His usual bright colors are normally set against a white background, but the stone textures

did pretty well in my Brazilian windlight setting!Now, I had a bad headache, and had to go offline shortly after the start of the event. So I came back the next day to get my head around Ruben’s seemingly unprepossesing pile of rocks. I had honestly wondered, at the opening of Tosha’s event, how Ruben’s gentle style would fit in with the rumbling of the reactor, and the fire and blood of To-sha’s angry statement. What a stupid thing to wonder. At Ruben’s opening I had seen Tosha spend a long time inside the sockets, and wondered what she was doing. I had seen everyone slowly flying in and out of the stones themselves. mm I looked Ruben up a few days later.virtual christine: Ruben, How the heck did you come up with such a beautiful, peaceful work for the vol-cano?Ruben Haan: Ow.virtual christine: Are you hurt?Ruben Haan: Nope.virtual christine: Why are you owing?Ruben Haan: Like; I have to think how did that happenvirtual christine: Oh, it’s your thinking sound!Ruben Haan: Yep haha!They asked me to make some-thing at that collaboration. Its a nice project so I said; “okay”. Then started like ow! No! What am I going to do now? Hehe! I had no idea. A vulcano? I have nothing with vulcanos- never been to one.virtual christine: But you did think of something even-tually:)Ruben Haan: I wanted to do something with soil or dirtvirtual christine: I love the name, dirtRuben Haan: I like playing with it, more than playing with mesh on grids.Ruben Haan: those textures were from my garden,

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which is a little poisoned. That is badvirtual christine: poisoned?Ruben Haan: There used to be a paint factoryvirtual christine: Oh, nastyRuben Haan: Maybe it is a homage to dirt.virtual christine: The way you could see inside the stones was fantastic; and the sockets, when you sat in them and looked out, it was like being in the Grand Canyon .I`ve spent a lot of time in the desert, lots of dirt and sand.I thought you really caught the spirit of the canyons.Ruben Haan: Wow! I’ve never been there!virtual christine: Not in this life, you haven’t:)Ruben Haan: It was hard to find my place in the col-laborationvirtual christine: Really?Ruben Haan: but I hope its clear that vulcanic soil or mater or so is a link o_ovirtual christine: oh yes! You were the only artist to cel-ebrate the stone. It was just masterful!Ruben Haan: Thanksvirtual christine: The forms in the stones, was that the souls?Ruben Haan: There was no architecture behind the shapes; more just expression.virtual christine: so it is whatever we want it to beRuben Haan: That’s okayRuben Haan: I just like to play with dirt. I hope more people do.virtual christine: Why?Ruben Haan: It’s importand to love dirt, instead of “cleaning” it away. Its where we live from!The plants, the little anmals, bacteria; in the western world we learned to call it dirty and think thats bad. But dirty means its alive!virtual christine: Unless we have polluted it!Ruben Haan: Polluted places have less dirt- look at the wastelands we call farms! they have no dirt anymore! Thats why our food is bad, no nutrition

virtual christine: If they have no dirt, what do they have?Ruben Haan:They have dead soil with oil.virtual christine: Oil?Ruben Haan: They use oil to make the plants grow and remove animals they call pests. All pestisides are made from oil,so basicly we eat plants grown on oil unless we eat organic.virtual christine: Can you recomend any reading on this?Ruben Haan: You can read a lot ,but playing in the dirt is a more nice way of learning hehevirtual christine: Haha, yes! I lived on an organic farm for a whileRuben Haan: nice virtual christine: The soil smelt soooo good!In the early morning picking veggies, it was a wonderful to smell and touch!Ruben Haan: It’s that sensation what I wanted to show with this work!virtual christine: You said at the opening that the indi-ans had a fantastic way to live with volcanoesRuben Haan: I had just taken a course about permaculture,and there was said that the indians had a fantastic system.virtual christine: What is permaculture?Ruben Haan: Permaculture is a permanent culture, it means designing so that the culture can be 100%du-rable: It comes from an agriculture movement started in Australia. It looks at woodlands to learn how eco-systems work, and use that as inspiration to design. I find it inspirationalvirtual christine: And you took a course on this for the inspiration?Ruben Haan: Yep.I have a garden too.virtual christine: Oh, for the garden, to heal the poor thing! Is it working? are you restoring the soil?Ruben Haan: Yep, it happens pretty fast. But I hope someday the poison from the old paint factory will be removed.The plants and fungi have some work to do, haha!

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virtual christine: Those fungi are hard workers!!So you are using plants to purify the soil? And composting?Ruben Haan: Yep and bringing on more mulch mate-rial.virtual christine: Do you use seaweed?Ruben Haan: I heard about that. Did you?The composting conversation went flat out poopy, and ultimatley contained a little more personal in-formation from Ruben and I than you probably want! Anyhow, on Monday evening, if you have some time to kill before the event, it is worth checking out one of Crafts newest regions! Just plug ESOC into your world map, and teleport! Craft’s own meister builder, creator of the UNESCO sim, Darmstadt and the incredible Tin Museum, Yo-ster Allen, and grid owner Tao Quan are a great team! I wish I had time to do a proper post right now- this build is FASCINATING!! Grab your camera, and swing on by!And now my dears, I must love you and leave you! Thank you Tosha and Ruben and GeR and Yoster and Tao and of course Leonard, who vividly remembers me from the 1974 convention, but doesn’t want to hurt his other 436,769 followers feelings by returning my tweets. What a guy! And thanks to all of you, for joining me on my small adventures; your company means the world to me! The sweetest of dreams and the brightest of days to all of my beloved readers! Un-til next time,Adieu!!

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JOIN VIRTUALCHRISTINE IN THE VOLCANO !!! IMAB-MANIA IN CRAFT CONTINUES MONDAY FEB. 4 @9:30 CET WITH RUBEN HAAN!! PART 3 OF THE EXQUISITE CORPSE, WHICH IS NOT AS GROSS AS IT SOUNDS!!! BE ASTOUNDED BY MULTI AWARD WINNING ARTIST TO-SHA TYRAN’S PART 2 !!!

Posted on February 2, 2013 by virtualchristine Here I am one month earlier in my good friend Tosha Tyran’s wildly interacive contribution to Craft Grid’s IMAB Project: Vulcan- Artists in Connection. Amazing-ly, the corpse in front of me is NOT the exquisite one in the title, it is the most tireless and dedicated grid manager in the whole darn metaverse, Craft co owner Licu Rau, who was moaning at the moment I snapped this ” Great! Now who is going to run the grid ?” Teary eyed at this last expression of his selfless devotion to our little community, I did my best to comfort him with my word of honor that the next day the whole of Craft would gather on the main plaza, then head over to the OS Grid Goreans and buy another slave.

Hello my dearest dears! How marvelous; here we all are, ready for another whirlwind adventure on Open-Sim, the software platform that hosts hundreds of independant grids, many of which choose to be con-nected by the hypergrid;an amped up teleportation system that allows you to travel from world to world, endlessley exploring, making friends, and snagging enough freebies to make the idea of organizing your inventory slightly less enticing than the prospect of simultaneously having a root canal and a full colonos-copy , while filling out your tax returns with a yellow crayon and no sharpener. Sob.

For those of you who have no idea how to actually get on OpenSim ( and you are not alone, believe me!) please read my ” How to get on OpenSim in Six Ridic-

ulously Easy Steps” page at the top of this blog, and don’t forget my Newbie Glossary, also at the top! What are you waiting for? Come on! Spread your wings in the free metaverse!

For today’s adventure we will be staying on my be-loved home grid Craft, my personal recommenda-tion for the OpenSim Newbie. At 158 regions, Craft is small enough to be very warm and personal, while big enough to have lots of cool stuff to see and do. We are the smallest grid to participate in the ground break-ing six grid InterMetaverse Arts Bienniel, but we are more than holding our own! Head on over to Craft’s welcome area, Hydra Station, and get yourself a landmark from this poster! As you can see Ruben Haan is the THIRD artist participating in our really big flaming IMAB event! And don’t be put off by the all the exquisite corpse talk; that is just a term used for an early twentieth century parlor game, where you write a part of a story, or draw something, then fold the paper over and give it to the next player, who then has to contribute something etc. It became so popular that artists, most famously Andre Breton and William Burroughs, began using it in their work. Craft achieves the corpsey secrecy effect thing, by only opening each exhibit for THREE days, so you have until Wed Feb 7 . to see what Ruben has cooked up! So, no actual dead bodies, but, We weren’t kidding about that volcano! These events are actually being shown inside this bad boy, which is actually a profound experience if you come from an 8,000 year old culture that is rife with fire metaphors and ancient gods. For the rest of us, chugging that last brew and hurling ourselves into the molten lava screaming “BAAANZAAII!!” will get the job done.

The volcano opened with a surprise from building legend Lumiere Noir, who hollowed out the floor, and built a massive fantasy reactor to “power” the other

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exhibits- it was very strange and cool.The pictures in this post are from the second event, which featured the work of my dear friend Tosha Tyran. Now let’s go up that big wooden staircase, and jump into the vol-cano! Yes, that’s a sword tree. Tosha’s work can be tricky to write about at the best of times, not because of any sentimental ” we’re so close, it’s hard to be objective” twaddle, but for the simple reason, she will not refer to herself by that handy little descripitve noun” art-ist”. And despite having a completely original three region game on Craft, her own jam packed nine showroom freebie region and workshop that she created from the ground up, a building competition award, an avatar of the year award, and three fashion boutiques, she gets hissy around the words builder or designer. Up until the Volcano event, the best you would get out of her is the word “bricklayer”,which is less than helpful “JOIN VIRTUALCHRISTINE IN THE VOLCANO WITH A BIG HONKING KNIFE TREE AND A BRICKLAYER!! ATTN NEWBIES!!!” I think not.

So imagine my delight when Tosha made this really coherent little speech at the beggining of the event!” I just wanted to say hi to everyone, and thank you for coming. A word before you go inside the volcano: you all know, I don’t consider myself an artist…. I am more a worker and maybe a story teller. So – I have tried to make an interactive story.Go inside, and I hope you have fun.” Worker!! Storyteller!! At last, something spinnable! It is a lot to take in. It was my second time in the vol-cano, but the scale was still overwhelming. Lighten-ing is crashing, smoke is rising, and there is a mas-sive gyser thing of photo cubes swirling up into the distant cavern ceiling. I was standing there, gaping upward like a turkey in a rainstorm, when I noticed

Ruben Haan… … was floating away on one of the cubes. I looked around, and people were starting to interact with the exhibit, by clicking on things! But I’m me, so I went to read the ribbon of golden letters that were encircling the edges of the build. They spellt out a line from the ancient Greek legend of Damocles, the courtier who was allowed to take the king’s place on the throne for a day, only to discover that amidst all the fabulous luxury, there was a large sword, tied to the ceiling by only a horsehair, dangling over his head. Damocles was unable to enjoy his new life, and begged to be allowed to leave the throne. The story was more often used to jusify the opulant lifestyles of those “burdened” with leadership, but the expression,”the sword of Damacles” has come to mean any close threat , or impending doom. These strips were running all over the floor, dedicat-ing the whole shebang to a Nicola and Bart. I was surprised, because I usually get what Tosha is talk-ing about, and I had no idea who these people were. Tosha seemed equally surprised I didn’t know them and explained they were two Italians immigrants who were hanged by… Aha! say no more: Sacco and Van-zetti! The short version: In the United States, before the communist witch hunts of the 1950′s, there were the anarchist witch hunts of the 1920′s. A shoemaker and a fishmonger, who, like many in their community, had ties to anarchists, were the perfect targets for a shoddy case that was tried in the yellow press, and led to both men’s executions amidst international clamour. Today, there are three memorials to the un-fortunate pair in their home state of Massachussets alone. When I asked Tosha, why specifically, THEM she said “Because they are great heroes of mine. They fought for freedom – not only for themselves. and they must have done something right, because the claim

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for their freedom was international. and because they were such humble people, but so strong.”

Fair enough! Now all that is left is to go around the exhibit and start clicking! You wind up in the most amazing places. I noticed that the photos were all women of all ages.Virtualchristine: what are the female cube pictures do-ing?

Tosha: Men’s stuff is the violence, women can and should stand against it… maybe. I was very unsecure, to tell you the truth… I didn’t know if it was under-standable at all… I meant it to be telling a story about swords and violence and coming out of that… or something like that.. at some point it just “acted”…Virtualchristine: Acted?

Tosha:Yes, like the whole thing steered me and not the other way around. you know, like it came alive and told me which way to go The swords are everywhere, surrounding you, in-volved in everything you do. Playing… .. tucked into your bed. .. .relaxing… …chatting with a friend. …and then even the pretense of normal daily life is dropped, and you are spinning out of control … …in a forest of blades and smoke.

It takes a while to experience the whole story. I am very interested to see how Ruben will connect his

gentle images of giving hands and angels wings to Tosha’s bold and bloody statement. If you have some time to kill before the event starts, or you want to make a night of it in Craft’s humming art scene, plug SUQ into your world map and teleport!

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VIRTUALCHRISTINE BACK IN INWORLDZ!!!! MORE ON NAVIGATION!!!! 400 FREEBIES!!!! STUNNING ART AND FANTASY EXHIBITS!!!!! MORE LIBRARIES!!!! IMABMANIA !!!!ATTN NEWBIES!!!Posted on December 9, 2012 by virtualchristine Here I am, looking out over one of the most extraor-dinary builds I have ever seen anywhere. And I get around! I wandered in by accident, after once again completely failing to get a handle on Inworldz teeth grindingly hideous navigational system. In spite of my slightly deranged old lady blogger tenacity, I was about to burst into tears and log off when I tried one more angle, and wound up ……Hello my dearest dears! How marvelous! Here we all are again, ready for another whirlwind adventure on

OpenSim, the software platform that hosts hundreds of independent worlds, many of which are connected by an amped up teleportation system called the hy-pergrid, allowing you to endlessly explore the free metaverse, making friends, having adventures and snagging enough freeebies to force you to clear your calendar for an entire week before you dare open……okay, even I can see that is probably just me. If you do not know how to get on OpenSim(and you are not alone, believe me,) please read my “How to get on OpenSim in six easy steps…” page at the top of this blog! And don’t forget my Newbie Glossary, also locat-ed at the top! Come on, its’s easy; come spread your wings in the free metaverse!!

For today’s adventure we are leaving the hypergrid, and having another crack at OpenSim’s second larg-est commercial grid, Inworldz! Because you cannot enter through another OpenSim grid, you have to create an account, and put together an avatar from scratch. I have blogged about this grid before, the link will take you to a guide I wrote, which explains how to get started. It is free, and very simple. The broad strokes of the first post were, top notch communities, fantastic and wonderfully diverse art scene, apalling navigation and information for the newcomer. I had been pretty sick the last couple of weeks, not really up to doing interviews and photo shoots for one of my usual ginormous posts, or even sorting out my re-gion on my beloved home grid Craft . This bummed me out completely. So between crying jags, I wrote the book reviews and messed around in a different environment,(where I am beginning to know some re-ally great people), posted on Facebook, and tweeted like a crazed old fat canary. And although I am still not up to writing one of my usual tomes, a few things have become clear to me about Inworldz that I wanted to share!1)The Phoenix Firestorm browser works fine in In-

4.2 IMAB events INWORLDZ

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64 metaverse artbie info. Turning to my right… … are the Inworldz cultural announcements! Every board has landmarks and a notecard! See the eleva-tor in the back? That will take you upstairs- the Library has three more floors, as well as large grounds, which host various cultural events! At the moment, Delphi is hosting a fantastic IMAB art installation, featuring the work of seven of this grid’s top creators, as well as a fantasy build by the incomparible Elven Clan,( the sec-ond group you should join on Inworldz! Read my first post for more details!) Let’s go upstairs! The first floor seems to house a conventional art ex-hibit… …an impression that goes out the window… …rather quickly. Upstairs… … all hell breaks loose. Inside are fantasy creatures, books, and interactive exhibits, while outside, to my right.. …is the entrance to the Elven Clan build! This is where I went to a really cool storytelling event.( You can read more about it on my Facebook page! There is a link at the top of this blog!) Follow the tree-house walkways around to an ice bridge. Cross the bridge, and look around carefully! Then jump! No pic-tures; I don’t want to ruin the surprise! Now let’s go back to the Library main entrance! Across the courtyard are the IMAB exhibit teleports! Why don’t we check some out? This is Alizarin Goldflake’s Lair of the Silvery Snakes. You’ll see the snakes, don’t worry. It is in the lagoon behind the IMAB teleporter. If you are facing the tele-

worldz! Initially use Imprudence, to let your computer get it’s head around the new setup, then you can go back to more user friendly Phoenix!2) The navigational and information sytem is in-comprehensible to the outsider because Inworldz is somewhat inward looking. Most of the community has come straight from Second Life, and have never really ventured out onto the hypergrid. I noticed the first day that I came to Inworldz the other Newbies in the welcome area were all accompanied by residents. I think word of mouth counts for ALOT here. This, of course, can render unaccompanied sightseeing dis-turbing to the point of a psychotic break.3) I have been away from Second Life, out on the free content oriented hypergrid for over a year, and am no longer used to a commercial grid. I blew off a lot of landmarks because they had the word “shop” or “mall”in them, which proved to be a big mistake. Also, they TIP at free performance events, DJ’s etc. I would feel awkward continually going to these things and not tipping, so I guess I will need to get a little cur-rency at some point.4) After landing in the Desert Island Welcome Area, putting together an avatar you can live with (which isn’t difficult thanks to the generously stocked freebie mall), picking up your landmark folders( a hidous mish mash I partially sort out for you in the first post, with more info coming here!), you never need to go back there again. Enter the word DELPHI into your world map search engine, and just teleport! Welcome to the Community Library at Delphi! As a newcomer and tourist, this is the essential second stop on this grid. Get yourself a cup of free coffee, and join the Library Group! Now you can set this location as your home! There are is a beautiful lounge, looking out on the bay, surf crashing over an old ship wrecked on the rocks, and a siren, or mermaid.. well, you’ll see! The bulletin board has useful, non commercial new-

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port panels, look over your left shoulder! The very brilliant Alizarin has this other, much weirder, exhibit, which for some reason is not on the teleport panel. It is over the bridge. Go on inside! Look up and click float! Isn’t this unbelivable! Quadrapop’s Dark Side, is a very artsy, and tiny bit lag-gy haunted house. Note the Jabberwoky- the rooms are wonderfully themed…. But like Alizarin, what I found to be her best work here didn’t have a teleport panel. You go here, on the main walkway, and click the lights. You follow the staircase up this truely behemoth mod-ern art exhibit, to a surprise ending! Elwing Qendra’s dazzling Faery Sanctuary, is where I would like to demonstrate a neat trick to get interest-ing landmarks, hehe! If something looks interesting, hit edit! Then go into the creators profile(the blue oval button on the right)… Go to the fourth tab, which would be called picks, or choices in english. See how there is a list of locations, with descriptions, AND A TELEPORT!!! All the artists have a list like this to their home regions, or galleries, or favorite places! Pretty slick move for an old canary, isn’t it? You can get more great landmarks over the bridge- see the white sign?

These are teleports to to library, or rather librarian re-lated locations. Sendalonde is one of two regions librarians Prax and Alex have in the Elven Clan regions.. It is really big, goes up the hill into the sky. The library is, of course, completely charming, with incredibly de-tailed little books that actually open! I had a great time exploring this region, and am really looking forward to visiting Mallinde!Now, reserching these very impressive librarian ladies, turned me onto another good source of landmarks: The Inworldz News Network has a list of freebie lo-cations in the world section. Someone told me that you can copy the addresses, paste them into the chat window, and teleport. This did not work for me. Sigh. And of course I couldn’t get a damn thing on my search engine ( which works better with imprudence), and couldn’t get a hit with the world map on what I thought might be the region names. Forget that too! I did eventually work out a couple of things. On the website list:The Dragon freebies have a landmark in your Attrac-tions folder,(that you got from the Desert Island wel-come area.) under Dragon Isle, Dragon.You can get a landmark to the Town Hall in the library entrance area, on the bulletin board I think!King’s freebie shop, which seems to be the biggest, has a landmark in the points of interest folder, under Freedom business park, landing point. You land here! Walk down to the big white building store, and turn left. This is King Blindside’s freebie store, where over 400 freebies from across OpenSim have been packaged up for you to enjoy here on Inworldz! Thank you King!Now, I would like to end this post by taking you to the

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landmarks featured by a couple of the IMAB artists, just to show you what little treasure troves they are! This is Quadrapop Tree Gallery,in region Dolphin Bay. It has a landmark in your art folder under QT Isle, Dol-phin Bay. This is the main store; a teleport is in this spot, go up to the gallery.. Don’t just click everything, stand and look at it! Things are in motion and changing color… I spent a long time in Dolphin Bay. I was so encour-aged, I went back to the library( my home, remem-ber?) and clicked on something by Soror Nishi, a nice artist who had friended me, whose pretty little un-derwater exhibit was in the lagoon next to Alizarin. I clicked edit on a rock, went to her picks in the profile, and chose Rainbow Country, on soror Nishi Isle.(soror has just told me it is under Transubstantiation in the picks! Whoops!) Just when you thought you’d seen everything! If you see one thing in Inworldz, make it this build. I can’t get a search result on this, or find a landmark in any of the folders. Astonishing.And now my dearest dears, I must love you and leave you! I would like to thank all my new friends , espe-cially Soror, Alizarin, librarians Prax and Alex, and my friend from OpenSim City, Minethere Always, for her all her help! And of course all of you, for once again joining me on my small adventures. Whether you are an old or new friend, your company means the world to me! The sweetest of dreams and the brightest of days to all my beloved readers! Until next time, Adieu!

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VIRTUALCHRISTINE ON OPENSIM’S METROPOLIS GRID!! COME DISCOVER THE HYPERGRID’S HIDDEN GI-ANT!!! ANCIENT HISTORY!!! MODERN EUROPE!!! ABSO-LUTLEY FREAKING MASSIVE CULTURAL SCENE!!! TONS OF COOL FREE STUFF!!! ATTN NEWBIES!!Posted on January 25, 2013 by virtualchristine Here I am taking a break in Newbie City on the quiet leviathen, Metropolis Grid, where it always pays to look below the surface…

Hello my dearest dears! How marvelous! Here we all are ready for another whirlwind adventure on Open-Sim, the software platform that hosts hundreds of in-dependant grids, many of which are connected by an

amped up teleportation system called the Hypergrid. This allows you to endlessly explore these brave new worlds; having adventures, making friends and snag-ging so many freebies it will permeate your psyche to such an extent, that when the clerk at the cheese counter pauses mid sample to inquire “Will that be all?” you launch yourself over the Manchego wheels screaming “NEEEEEVEEEEEER!!!!!!!!!!”

If you have no clue how to actually get on OpenSim,( and believe me, you are not alone) please read my ” How to get on OpenSim in Six Ridiculously Easy Steps” page at the top of this blog! If you do not understand any of this posts terminology, don’t for get my Newbie Glossary, also located at the top!

For today’s adventure, we will begin to explore Me-tropolis Grid which, at 1000 plus regions may not as staggeringly huge as the 6,000 region OS Grid, but is still massive enough to be hard to miss. So why have most of the people I talk to not heard of it, or only seen one or two small areas, which they think comprise the entire grid? My theory: I am usually speaking Eng-lish. Metropolis started out five years ago as a small German speaking community, who set out to create an environment where art and cuture could thrive!( I get the impression it was actually kind of their al-ternative to the somewhat anglocentric and very technically oriented, OS Grid). And although it has obviously grown like gangbusters, becoming more international everyday, it was predominantly German speaking for a very long time. This is why I think Me-tropolis still remains somewhat invisible to the Eng-lish speaking metaverse. It can be really weird. I had been there often visiting friends, but when Hypergrid Business Editor Maria Korolov tweeted that Metropo-lis Grid had just reached the 1000 region mark, I had this total” What The Fudge??” moment! How could I have been somewhere so often and missed that herd

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92 metaverse arttices for the art events, parties etc. and putting them in the OpenSim City Calender! As you can also see in the window to my right, Metropolis has it’s own radio station! Big grid, big ideas! The music is great, and ME-TRORADIO is in English and German, so be sure to play the stream! The station is not a conventional welcome area, in fact, it seems to double as a kind of train museum. There are surprises tucked away everywhere, so have a good look around. And be sure to click everything to see if it can be copied. In this room for example, you can take home these marvelous sections of the Berlin Wall, and these classic posters from German cinematic genuis Fritz Lang`s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, after which this grid is named. Never heard of it? Well the film is in the MOMA cinematic library, as well as in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. So have a gander at my Metropolis the movie link, slap up some posters and act like you knew what Yoshiwara, Rotwang and dys-topian meant the entire time. If challenged, sobbing and/or drooling usually works for me.

Now let’s take a tour around the rest of the numbered areas!2) This is the public sandbox. Hey, somebody left the keys in this thing!3)Newbie City is a very pretty and oddly non urban re-gion to be explored CAREFULLY.4)The Regierungs Viertel ( government quarter) has sev-eral beautiful structures from Berlin’s RL center, includ-ing the Brandenburg Gate, this impressive Reichstag, and the Siegessäule(victory column) which you may remember President Obama speaking from on his first campaign. This is all kinda in of my RL neighbor-hood . On a clear day, if I stand at the top of the main street one block from my apartment, I can see the col-umn. I can ride my bike to the Reichstag and Branden-

of elephants? So I began seriously exploring the grid – I met an extremely saavy ( Linux. Need I say more?) OpenSim veteran there the other day, who had cre-ated an account on Metro to visit somebody, because she hadn’t realized it was on the hypegrid! And as I talked to new residents and visitors, I heard over and over ” My God it is massive, there is such a huge cul-tural scene, I HAD NO IDEA ALL THIS WAS HERE! ”

This seriously needs to change. Metropolis is an in-credibly dynamic cultural resource, and as OpenSim’s fifth largest grid, and the hypergrid’s third largest member, the possibilities for exploration and adven-ture have a delightfully limitless feel. If you love tra-versing the free metaverse, you need to get Metrop-olis Grid on your radar in a very big way. Today we will just go over some basic points to get you up and running; but I plan to come back and write about this vibrant collossus again and again! I will start, as I am wont to do, from the welcome area of my beloved home world Craft -the Friendly Grid. You can also get to Metropolis from the Sanctuary Eld, or Hyperica. The Metropolis teleport panel, located just behind me, will drop you … Right here in Centerworld! See the big red dot? You land on that spot in front of the train station, which I have numbered 1! Let’s go inside! This shop is your left when you enter the station. The big red button in the center of the room is a teleport to a freebie region! This is the Metro Event Calendar, which is in German, as are the courses offered by the Metropolis Academy, which compromise a large part of the listed events. As I now have so many english speaking friends who have moved to Metropolis, I am translating the no-

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burg Gate in 20 minutes.5)I wish I could ride my bike here. This is the Metropolis Summer of Arts Festival 2012, called SoA on the world map.You are probably, correctly thinking that summer 2012 is long gone. True, but this outstanding venue just keeps getting extended by popular demand!A person really needs to set aside a serious block of time to deal with this exhibition; it is so damn big……and every building… every individual piece is so……completely……riveting, I haven’teven been able to make it through the whole thing yet!!6) The Centerworld Garden sports a German beer gar-den, and Eiffel Tower, and this square with the green benches, across from the train station. It may not look like much, but this fountain square is quite the little so-cial hub. Can you see the support sign I am looking at? You can click that for English speaking greeters, there is a counter that tells you how many are online, there is another calendar, you can join the newsgroup for an English newsletter AND, greeters tend to hold court on these benches.

And now I am going to give you an enormously im-portant piece of information! Do you see that black object on the right edge of the picture? Let’s take a closer look. Okey doke; you’ve crammed your inventory into an-other state of rampant chaos( shudder), seen some pretty neat stuff, and are eager to explore more of the grid! So you think, “Where are the teleport pan-els? Showcase? Landmark folders?” Answer: There are none! You can also forget the little building behind

me with the information flags, and the tower with the maps at the west end of the train station. Their information is dated. Metropolis is in the midst of a major overhaul on their welcome area, and are put-ting all their considerable talents into the new builds, rather than updating the old ones. So why no land-mark folders? This very good question brings us to an important fact to grasp about Metropolis Grid: A lot of the regions are NOT continually online! The adminis-tration has told me that there are usually about 600 online at any given time, with no warning or sched-ule, nothing. They just pop on and off. So a landmark folder would actually be kind of pointless. Metro’s answer is this rather ingenious black box you will see all over the grid. Click on the green “Click here” sign, and it will open a webpage on your internet browser which has a running list of all the online regions.This list is updated every quarter of an hour BY HAND. No pictures or descriptions, but at least you have some-where to go! If you click on a name, a little window opens and asks you what you want to use to connect to the region. Hyperica uses this logging- on- inworld- from- your- internet- browser- system as well, and I can never get it to work for me. So I just plug the name into the world map search engine, which works beautifully on Metropolis! If there is a listing such as region x 1, region x 2, region x 3, you can plug region x into the search engine and a list of all three will show up! You can also get a teleport hud on the side of the black box, which will open the browser page if there are no big teleporter boxes around. The hud also has a handy translator !

At this point I had plans to visit a few regions I picked randomly from the list, to show you how kick ass Me-tropolis is as a travel destination! This got torpedoed by the administration, who informed me it is grid pol-icy you CANNOT PUBLISH PICTURES FROM METROPO-LIS REGIONS UNLESS YOU HAVE THE REGION OWNERS PERMISSION! I was more than a bit taken aback by this news, but they patiently explained that they had ex-

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96 metaverse artperienced some nasty legal problems in the past , and were therefore extremely cautious. They were all very nice, and told me I could print pictures of Metropolis Grid public regions, and gave me permission for some other things they were personally involved with. So while the rest of the permission stuff for the Martian landing, New Mexico Pueblos, and giant frog lagoon is being sorted out, let me share some other great des-tinations! Cyberbohemia is a real life and virtual artists collective that has moved rather recently to Metropolis from the OS Grid. Several people I talked to had made this migration; they felt an artist was in a much more sup-portive environment here, rather than the techy OS Grid. The group is German , green, and very accom-plished. I am standing in the hub of this wonderful collection of landscaped galleries. There is info about the group and individual artists as well as conven-tional teleports to the exhibits. And do you see those carpets rolled up on the ground behind me? There are magic carpet rides to TWO locations. I am such a sucker for this sort of thing! After a nice long scenic flight, which one took me to the top of the tallest peak on Cyberbohemia, (which is incredibly freaking high by the way) I had a look around . There are charming little scenes tucked ev-erywhere; the descent to the valley was a blast, jump-ing down waterfall after waterfall while exploring the peaks. The valley below is fascinating … …to explore… …on foot. Some of you may recognize the work of artist H.J.Kaeppler, theoretical physicist, philosopher and elected member of the German National Pho-tographic Society. Kaeppler is well known in here in

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metaverse art 97 Germany, so I assumed they just created this gallery because brainy green art types, and, well- me, tend to admire the guy’s work. But noooo, Kaeppler himself is actually involved in the Cyberbohemia group! I haven’t had time to explore the whole Cyberbohe-mia set up yet. I was fooling around in the hub when I accidentally teleported to here. I am definitly coming back and checking EVERYTHING out! And obviously blog about it! Oh, and before I for-get; Cyberbohemia head honcho Galen Dreamrezzer, also runs the most excellent Google + community, Arts in Virtual Worlds. I have been in it from day one and feel totally at home as a non artist. Galen is very funny and down to earth, not to mention well con-nected; after just a short time on his new home he is already involved in METRORADIO and event organi-zation! If you are at all interested in virtual art, come check us out!

We will now leave Cyberbohemia(sob) and travel back in time ( weird backgound music kicks in) This Metrop-olis public project is still under construction, but you are allowed to wander around.

This build is a reconstruction of Pompeii, the Roman city that was famously destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 62AD. The lava and ash pre-served the city and unlucky populace remarkably well, and when it was rediscovered by archeologists almost 2,000 years later, it provided one of the most detailed accounts of life in Roman Italy that has ever existed. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of Italy’s top tourist attractions.

The teleport to Meropolis Grid’s Pompeii drops you here, and I am warning you now, I could not walk through that open door behind me! I had to trot out my nosey old bloggers trick of standing in the door-way, using my camera to view the interior and sitting

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on something. I later realized I could have… … gone around the right side, through the vinyard, into that gate...or flown around back to the open terrace.However you get your pixilated butt inside, it will be worth the effort.If you are a builder, and would like to get involved, you can contact the Reconstruction of Pompeii group on the Metropolis Grid Website. This is a map of the build-ing I am in. Huge isn’t it? It is one of several builds…..this beauty is in another one of the Pompeii regions…Be sure to read the details on the maps and scrolls!And to go through every door. It may be crazy, but I think what I like best were the views of the vinyards, temples and rolling hills from the marvelously detailed windows. These buildings are surrounded by crypts and fortress walls and farms- this is a very ambitious project that is expected to take years to complete, so keep coming back!Now, OpenSim having somewhat choppy water on the best of days, I like to have a back door exit when I am out exploring. I mean gates to other grids, espe-cially Craft, or one of the teleport hubs, like Hyperica. This is region minethere, and the lady on the right is my friend , Minethere Always. We are standing in her teleport hub, which goes to every grid where she has an office, like Craft, and the OS Grid. Miney is one of the lucky individuals who is able to spin some money on the Hypergrid; her business Re-gion Creations creates and sells RAWS, or beautifully terraformed(landscaped) regions in various themes, that Miney installs for you for at a total price of about 15 bucks. A steal. Here we are in Miney’s office, and there are more re-gions on the website! I am going to get one of these

babies at some point, I know it! The problem is how to choose which one!!! Miney also does a little building on the side. She has set up her home region, which is a sanctuary RAW, with freebies from around the Hypergrid… … where you would never guess she has actually not been very long. Which brings us to the main reason why you should show up and say hi- Miney is the best networker I have ever seen, period. Look up the word” connected” in any online dictionary, you will see a pic-ture of this Texas whirlwind . She knows everybody and everything. If there are free parcels going on Me-tropolis, or a new freebie region on the OS grid, she is all over it. She is always laughing, and always has time to chat, or lend a helping hand. You are very welcome to kick back on her region. There is a sandbox, lots of stuff to copy, groups to join, hypergates, her workshop region where she does her terraforming(interesting), Miney;s charms, and next door, under construction is the new inworld home of my favorite OpenSim so-cial network site OpenSim City! Which means a Linda Kellie Mall and god knows what else to jazz up your OpenSim life from City founder, Marisa Giancarla! Do yourself a favor, and landmark these ladies!

My next, and final destination on this post, are a group of regions belonging to the Cybernetic Art Research Project or CARP, a group founded by Velazquez Bonet-to,( who calls himself Fritz Lang on Metropolis) and Jo-sina Burgess. Since 2007 they have been staging beau-tiful, sophisticated, thought provoking free events on a cross grid basis, which has culminated in the IMAB art festival, that has had an unprecedented six grids – Second Life, Inworldz, Metropolis, The OS Grid, Craft, and Franco Grid, buzzing non stop for the past seven months. Vela and Josina are without a doubt one of metaverse culture’s most important partnerships. And

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for that reason CARP will be getting it’s own post in the near future. For now, here are the broad strokes!

Plug CARP into your search engine. There is Carp-1 to Carp-4. Carp 1 and 2 encompass one build for IMAB by Josina Burgess. The exterior is a showcase of her mesmerizing 2D digital art and the interior is, well, a very personal statement. The incredible scale of the CARP builds has one teensy disadvantage- you can wind up doing a couple of region crossings in the same exhibit. So be prepared to stop and wait sometimes until everything settle down. See the big metal thingie to the right of Josina’s build? To enter Rebeca Bashly’s Fabrica build on CARP-4, you have to go under water and find this ladder… This is part of IMAB. Rebeca Bashly always chooses pretty wild themes.In Second Life she once built Dante’s Inferno for the Linden Endowment for the Arts. Literally. The nine circles of Hell. If you feel you just can’t take anymore wearable kittens and blingy fashion shows, for heav-en’s sake, follow this artist! Next door to Fabrica is Carp- 3 Vela, or Fritz’s, ebullient contribution to IMAB. The lights on his “relaxation ma-chine” may be shooting and flashing…but if Vela isn’t in there with you, it isn’t actually turned on! The whole thing is a spectacular celebration( light show doesn’t really do it justice) of color and sound- that’s right, the lights and colors move to music! So if you want to see what this bad boy in action,you have to find Vela and convince him to set it all up up. And, as I found out after the damn show, you can plug in any music and the program will follow it! Tip: request

Voodoo Child! On the other side of Josina’s build is Yoshiwara, which features a store of Josina’s wearable art, as well as Me-tropolis and IMAB tshirts. There is also the metaverse art info center. The little boxes are teleports to the dif-ferent levels.Or you can just walk up the ramps. The center displays the large CARP e book collection(which is free), And posters from various group RL and virtual events.The other half of the building is in region Rotwangs Labor. ( Labor is laboratory) May I suggest the orange teleport?Love……my…… metaverse.And thus concludes our little introduction to really big Metropolis Grid. I would like to thank Galen, Vela, Jo-sina, Zack, Lena, Wanda, and Miney for taking so much time with me. And Of course, all of you, for waiting so patiently while I rewrote this post! I am always so stunned at how many of you there are- your company on my small adventures means the world to me! The sweetest of dreams and the brightestof days to you all! Until next time, Adieu!

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VIRTUALCHRISTINE IS BACK ON METROPOLIS GRID!!! TOUR THE CYBERNETIC ART RESEARCH PROJECT RE-GIONS!!! MINDBLOWING BUILDS!! INCREDIBLE IDEAS!!! COOL FREE STUFF!!! BEAUTIFUL BOOKS!! MAD SCIEN-TISTS!! IS THAT JIMMY HENDRIX??? ATTN NEWBIES!!!!!Posted on February 27, 2013 by virtualchristine Here I am, being engulfed by a pulsating fluid golden emerald flowering reptilian behemoth that was loom-ing on the lawn the last time I popped into Yoshiwara, one of 6 regions on Metropolis Grid belonging to the cultural powerhouse Cybernetic Art Research Proj-ect… where indescribable light creatures… are commonplace, but by no means the main attraction.Hello my dearest dears! How marvelous! Here we all are again ready for another whirlwind adventure on OpenSim, the software platform that hosts hundreds of independent worlds, many of which choose to be connected by an amped up teleportation system called the hypergrid, that allows you traverse this great frontier, exploring, making friends and amass-ing free content at a rate that will eventually have you in front of a judge, charged with assaulting the two hundred and fifty euros an hour Jungian psy-chologist who insisted you were both connected to a “collective unconscious”, yet remained completely unable to tell you which inventory folder contained the twenty seven metal clad non rigid dirigibles you snagged on that dystopian standalone last July.If you do not know how to get on OpenSim, and be-lieve me , you are not alone, please read my ” How to get on OpenSim in Six Ridiculously Easy Steps “ page located at the top of this blog. If you do not under-

stand any of this post’s terminology, don’t forget my Newbie Glossary, also at the top of this blog!For today’s adventure, we will be returning to Me-tropolis Grid which I posted about a few weeks ago. As we toured some of the highlights of this 1000 region strong world, I breezed through the CARP regions, saying that founders Josina Burgess and Velazquez Bonetto were such an important partnership in meta-verse culture, that they reqired their own post in the near future- which has now arrived! Okay, it means we are all that much older, but I worked really hard on this thing, so try to show a little more enthusiasm than some over paid neo pagan tdoc, who cannot differen-tiate between an aerostat and a blimp… I need to get on with my life, don’t I? Sorry, but this is the best wide shot I could come up with. Deceptively empty looking isn’t it? Now, from where I am hovering in the picture, I am facing region Rotwangs Labor, CARP 1 is under my feet, CARP 3 is behind me, CARP 2 to my right. The big metal struc-ture in the water behind CARP 2, is the well known SL artist Rebeca Bashly’s moody IMAB build, Fabrica which I already covered in my last Metropolis post. Now take a look at the map I made you below! We will start our tour here,up in the far right hand cor-ner of region Yoshiwara. Where I go all Cheshire Cat on you; this region’s very odd name is taken from some-thing old that took it from something even older. Give up? The older something is the famous 600 year old Tokyo red light district Yoshiwara, but this region is named after the decadent nightclub in Fritz Lang’s 1927 cinematic masterpiece Metropolis, after which this entire grid is named; which may be a trifle con-fusing, but not nearly so much as Velaquez Bonetto’s decision upon moving to here from the OS Grid a few years back, to have his Metropolis, and ONLY his Me-tropolis, avatar name be Fritz Lang.OUR Yoshiwara is the simplest CARP region. It has…

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… free stuff. These very chic glass platforms are not quite finished, but a great many of the small contain-ers you see lining the edges have free textures, sculp-ties, and the like. The low flat building in the back left of the picture… Josina Burgess’ wonderful wearable art. In 2006 real life Dutch singer and professional painter Josina De Burger took her grandmother’s name and went to SL in search of yet another creative outlet- and did she strike gold! One of her many accomplishments in her new medium is being the first person in SL to use real life paintings as textures, making every individual skirt or t shirt a work of art! Bottom line, this little shop has some of the most sophisticated clothing in the free metaverse. Okay , now let’s skip down to CARP 1 the region that was under my feet, with the not- very- impressive- from -the- outside-big- red geometric shapes. You need to do two things to change this: 1) turn out the lights, 2) fly straight into the damn things. Josina calls Velazquez not only her best friend and partner, but her mentor. I can see that; he loves ideas, and is really good at explaining them. For example,Vela told me that our brains function by turning the mate-rial into immaterial abstract representations, soooo, the more immaterial qualities an environment has, the more the brain feels at home. He said this was cogni-tive psychology. Whether it is a genetic flaw, or our best defining feature,as human beings we are perpet-ually attempting to free our fantasies from the prison of our skulls. Hence, we make stuff like language and art. Vela contributed this next bit in Switch, the new media journal from San Jose(which non Californians know as Silicon Valley) University.“New media practitioners are experiencing many mir-acles today: Cyberspace, dematerialized virtual time-space, and a worldwide webbed society where people

surf around at the speed of light. Artists that are not approaching this virtual universe as a challenge and goal do not deserve the distinction, avant garde. ART space Diabolus CARP Team stands, since its founding as experimental art in 2007, as the most contemporary medium of art today and does deserve this distinc-tion. Our goal is to produce technically sophisticated and substantive art that explores all the possibilities of worldwide web virtual media. In one word, we call this: HyperArt.”

Now, since terms like ” spoiled brat” and “weak ass parenting”have gone out of fashion, we have all hear the word “hyper” rather alot. I personally had never thought of it as having another meaning. Okay ,there was the hypergrid, but I had always just bleeped over that one, as I am wont to do with any technical reference beyond “click here”. In the world according to CARP, hyper is unbleepable. Not only is their art “hyper ” they have a freaking CREDO about “hyper”functionalism, which basically lays out, how “hyper”form follows “hyper”function. Sooo we must look beyond the modern social dysfunctionality, and journey back to the ancient Greeks, to whom “hy-per” was a prefix that meant “over” “excess”or “exag-geration”; or perhaps the ancient Romans, to whom it meant “super”. Or we could just ask Vela.

Velazquez Bonetto: A simple example is gravity. In the real world you can’t turn it off. Here, it’s normal. Like Flying. Or drifting. There are many things that you can only do here . All is possible. That’s hyper.

The Credo is based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s beloved mentor, the father of skyscrapers and modernism, Louis Sullivan’s seminal “The tall office building artisti-cally considered“, published in 1896. It’s a credo that basically lays out how form follows function. Vela has tweaked it for virtual reality. For all of us.

“It is the pervading law of all things

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organic, inorganic or generic,Of all things physical, metaphysical or virtual,Of all things human and all things avatar,Of all true manifestations of the intellect,Of the heart, of the soul,That the life is recognizable in its expression,That form ever follows function.This is the law in the real world.That hyperform ever follows hyperfunction.This is the law in the metaverse.”virtualchristine: So can you give me an example of form following function?Velazquez Bonetto: Naturally! A Dolphin can’t be a cube and be able to swim quickly. So it has a stream-lined form.virtualchristine: Cool !I had a swordfish metaphor in my head!Velazquez Bonetto::)))virtualchristine: So how does that apply to virtual real-ity?Velazquez Bonetto: In the metaverse, the physical rules don’t really apply. You can fly, and walk through walls. We can actually immerse ourselves in objects, put information in them, with scripting and anima-tion. We can decide what their form is with no rela-tion to physical laws. The dolphin can be any shape we want and still swim. Whatever we can imagine we can create, at least visually.virtualchristine: So where is the form?Velazquez Bonetto: Everywhere. What else is there in virtual worlds other than our dematerialised ideas? The form only follows our brain’s output.virtualchristine: Our imagination is the function?Velazquez Bonetto: Yes.virtualchristine: Hahaha! I can’t believe I got that!Let’s leave on this note of somewhat hysterical tri-umph, and meander over to the left side of Yoshiwara! This beautiful, wide open edifice has two entrances,

the western one on Rotwangs Labor, and this eastern one, on Yoshiwara, where we will start. Both entrances have rows of colored cubes. Start here, by clicking the little green cube by itself on the right! This is a totally different set of teleport cubes! The green cube is a return teleport. Zoom out. These are the V jazz stages, another groundbreaker from CARP, where musicians improvise not only mu-sic, but objects that are steered by the music. Here is a blurb from a 2011 Virtual Jazz show that appears to have been sponsored by IBM, who do like to have their fingers in SL’s artistic A list. The cubes take you to the various stages, where you can fool with the controls, hehe. Back down at the main eastern entrance, the rest of the teleport cubes zap you around the eastern side of the wide open building.I preferred walking to the teleports… The sculpture is another one of Josinas flowers. The posters are… …book covers. And not just of their personal work. Vela and Josina have collaborated with a serious chunk of metaverse art heavyweights. There are three floors of these covers, which do not represent the en-tire NINETY volumes. Free volumes. You don’t have to join anything, or pay a cent. These sumptuous testa-ments to a living, vital metaverse culture, OUR culture, are all online. You are also free to print them out.— — — — — — — — — — — — — — > H E R E I S T H E -LINK<—————————————–Now let’s hit the Rotwang’s Labor entrance! Rotwang is, you guessed it, a character from the film Metropolis,the mad scientist who became a cinemat-ic archetype; and Labor is, correct again, laboratory! There are quite a few teleports here.

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The purple cube that says 4000 takes you to the ar-chitecure studio on the purple sign behind me. The red cubes area different type of teleport, you sit down, and click for a menu. Then you can teleport to any of the studios listed on the signs behind me, while sitting on the cube! The studios… … are in fact way the hell up, and each contains one or two pieces from the main set,a reproduction of the film Metropolis, which you get to with the orange teleport cube… You will not believe the scale of this thing. And sorry, I am not sure if they have made a film or whatever with it yet or not. Now, back down on the ground at the teleport cubes… These teleports take you around the eastern part of the wide open building.Let’s go see the first man! Isn’t he friendly? These four floors are an academic pa-per written by mathematician and system designer, Klara Geher, with an epilogue by Vela under his RL name Lazlo Oerdoegh. You will see this name alot, be-cause avatar history and Vela are rather intertwined . Yes, that is Hendrix.Unfortunately, the text is mostly in German, but there are chunks of English and lots of pictures. I can walk you through the broad strokes. You have to follow the page numbers, but on every floor the new chapter begins where the writing is, and then you go around the BACKS of the panels, and fol-low those arrows. This is all very interesting, and rather important if you spend a lot of time in virtual worlds. The pre history of avatars is the history of computers. The 20th century changed society, and the legend-ary 1960’s gave birth to much of the modern world. After the hideous trauma of the second world war, the holocausts, and the first use of weapons of mass de-

metaverse art 111 struction, a world longing for normality and hope, put it’s faith in science, which enjoyed an unprecedented period of freedom, which led to unprecedented scien-tific achievement, and an escalating faith in the con-cept of progress that spread to the social sphere. It is not a coincidence that virtually every society on the planet gave birth to various civil rights movements in the 1960’s. John Lennon is there, because Klara thinks the word “Imagine” epitomizes the era; and the gentle-man below Yoko’s main squeeze is Vela’s big big hero, Nicholas Schöffer, the massively important art theore-tician, architect and father of cybernetic art. Schöffer said the 1960’s were the second phase of the french revolution, which laid the groundwork for the con-sumer society. That society no longer fought for ma-terial goods, but for immaterial cultural and aesthetic goods. It fought for a new dignity. Nicholas Schöffer’s legendary tower of light was the first artwork conceived as a symbol of pure intellec-tual power. It wasn’t possible to build it at the time, and then too expensive and politically incorrect. (Af-ter his death Schöffers widow, who is active in SL, ran across Vela’s work, and you know who built finally built a virtual tower, don’t you?) Computer generated art started almost by accident, but as academic disci-plines continued to cross over, accelerating computer development almost to light speed, cybernetic art was born.Cybernetic Serendipity at the London Institute of Contemporary Art ,was the first “cybernetic” art exhibi-tion in history, the participants read like a who’s who of western culture( John Cage, Schöffer…), and my buddy, the first man, was introduced to the public. Walter Fetter called his creation, ” Boeing Man” as he was created on one of those big honkin’ old school computer mainframes, to work out cockpit design for Boeing pilots. Remember, back then they actually took off and landed manually. They had to be able to see out the damn window. Boeing man could only sit, and was the first digital human representation on

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computer.The second big leap forward in avatar history, came when a young Hungarian engineer/artist got a contract to design an airport safety sytem. Oscar, who could stand, and be programmed with various charachteristics was the first avatar for the Personal Computer, or PC. It was created by Lazlo Oerdoegh. As were, Anybody (1988-1990), Anthropos (1991-2001), Ergonaut (1996-2001), Ergomax (1999-2001), IDO:Ergonomics (2002-2009), and CharAT Ergonom-ics (2002-2010). He also took part in the development of RAMSIS (1999-2001) at Techmat GmbH Germany. Vela designs industrial,or useful, avatars, for the rela-tivly new field of ergonomics, which is the science of “work”- studying the effect different machines, from industrial tools to wheelchairs, have on the human body. Ta Da!! English speakers will now officially have a clue in hell what all the pictures are about! Now let’s hit CARP 2!! This is the entrance to Josina Burgess personal IMAB installation; the group opened the Inter Metaverse Art Biennial by staging an opera about the life and work of Nicholas Schöffer called The Change. Why did they open it? Well, this unprecidented multi grid nine month long celebration of the arts, was their idea!virtualchristine: How did you come up with the idea for IMAB?Velazquez Bonetto: We brainstorm alot.Josina Burgess: Thinking out loud. Happy accident. Vela was thinking of a grid wide exhibition, and it grew from there.virtualchristine: Are you satisfied with the outcome? It is like thewhole metaverse has IMABmania!Josina Burgess: Oh yes! It is still growing like crazy! People are still sending us entries!!virtualchristine: How much say do the two of you have? I mean, would you ever say, “No, that is too stu-pid to be in the Bienniale”?

Velazquez Bonetto: If we really thought that, sure. But I always think , in matters of art, you have to be very lib-eral. Art history clearly shows this. How many people said Van Gogh painted ridiculous bullshit? Look how time changed that! virtualchristine:These paintings hanging on the walls, are they your RL paintings?Josina Burgess:No, it is all digital art. I build 3D sculp-tures, script them and let them anime; move, rotate. change. I photograph it on high resolution, then re-work that. Vela says they are Emot-icons.virtualchristine: And inside the black box? What is that called?Josina Burgess: Alienation. Last September my mother died, and this installation was the only thing I could make in honour of her. It’s like mourning. When it opened, Vela streamed Mozarts requiem.virtualchristine: That must have been very powerful.Josina Burgess:Very. Everybody knows how it feels to lose someone loved, so the emotion is the same, and the music even makes it stronger. Every emotion is an emotion and Vela and me both like to work with emo-tions, and try in also virtual work to trigger emotions. Color, forms, movement and music, all bring up emo-tions. It’s called synethesia.Let’s go inside. It is very beautiful and stark. You sit in the rings.. …which toss you and turn you in the cold forest. The rings ascend… …slowly lifting you… …out of the gloom… …and back into the world, where you can see explo-sions of light and color. That is CARP 3, Vela’s installa-

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tion. virtualchristine: What the heck is this called? Velazquez Bonetto: “VJ. Virtual Jockey. This is like a gi-ant light organ, and I am a musician of light. There is an automatic programm that is always running, but I can programme more sequences it from my computer. For a proper show I have to be here. This is my relaxation machine.” Excuse me… …while I kiss… …the sky.Last little gem.Vela, who calls scripts the soul of the avatar, wanted me to tell you, that if anyone is having trouble with scripts for their artistic creations, or needs other technical advice, to just swing by and ask him. Really.

And now my dearest dears, I will love you and leave you. I hope you find this post to be of some use, as usual I had a blast writing it! Thank you Vela and Josina for taking the time to talk to me, and of course, thanks to all of YOU for joining me on my small adventures. Your company means more to me than I can express in mere words. The sweetest of dreams and the brightest of days to you all! Until next time, Adieu!!

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.....und nun ist das Summer of Arts 2012 offiziell eröff-net worden. Das war eine tolle Veranstaltung gestern abend! :) Vielen Dank an Alle, die dabei waren!

Einen ganz lieben Dank an Zak, der unten im Mas-chinenraum mit dem Ölkännchen rumgelaufen ist. Während der Veranstaltung hat er noch Optimierun-gen durchgeführt (quasi am offenen Herzen operiert), damit die tanzenden Avatare oder die sehr anspruchs-vollen Scripte und Animationen nicht die Region zum Absturz brachten. Irgendwann um 4 Uhr morgens ist er dann wohl auf seinem Bett ermattet eingeschlafen: mit dem Ölkännchen im Arm, und glücklich, dass alles geklappt hat! :lol:

Ganz herzlichen Dank an die Mitglieder des CARP-

Teams für ihre tollen Darbietungen. Ich bin voll auf be-geistert! Ich wusste garnicht, dass so etwas überhaupt möglich ist! Fritz stellte in Aussicht, dass er demnächst noch mehr Objekte nach Metropolis bringen wird. :D

Das Grußwort unseres Betreibers und Sponsors Peter Jacob wurde etwas plötzlich eingespielt, sodass viel-leicht das eine oder andere untergegangen ist. Daher der Wortlaut nochmals hier zum Nachlesen:

Liebe Ausstellerinnen und Aussteller,liebe Besucherinnen und Besucher,

herzlich Willkommen zur Eröffnungs-Veranstaltung des Summer of Arts 2012 auf dem Metropolis-Grid!

Diese Veranstaltung findet in diesem Jahr erstma-lig im Rahmen der Feierlichkeiten zum 4-jährigen Grid-Bestehen statt, und wird bis Oktober 2012 der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich sein. Aufgrund der großen Resonanz haben wir uns entschlossen, dieses Event jährlich zu wiederholen. Mehr als 20 internationale Künstler stellen in den Galerien und auf den Frei-flächen ihre Werke aus. Darunter finden sich CyberArt-Objekte, Fotografien, Gemälde, audio-visuelle Instal-lationen, Theaterprojekte, Lyrisches und Poetisches, wie auch reale Kunst. Eine sehr spannende Genre-Mischung, die Lust auf mehr macht.

Es sind auch weiterhin alle Künstler herzlich einge-laden, die sich an diesem Event mit ihren Werken be-teiligen wollen. Eine Teilnahme ist bis zum Ende der Veranstaltung im Oktober 2012 jederzeit möglich.

Mit diesem Event möchte das Metropolis-Grid die fan-tastischen Möglichkeiten der virtuellen Realität nut-zen, um Kunstprojekte einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit zugänglich zu machen und zu fördern. Bislang wur-

4.4 IMAB events Metropolis

SOA

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den solche Events mehr im „geschlossenen Rahmen“ des SecondLife durchgeführt, und waren so nur einer eingeschränkten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich. Dieses Manko wollen wir mit dieser Veranstaltung beheben um auch die Nutzer der OpenSim-basierten Grids in den Genuss der virtuellen Kunst kommen zu lassen.

An dieser Stelle möchte ich einigen Mitgliedern des Metropolis-Teams Danke sagen. Dank an Zak Spot, für seine unermüdliche Arbeit der Verbesserung der OpenSim-Plattform, der Überarbeitung des tot-geglaubten Hippo-Viewers, und der Weiterentwick-lungen der Inworld-Funktionen. Denn gerade bei den Funktionen gibt es gegenüber SecondLife noch einiges aufzuholen. Durch seine Arbeit war es aber möglich, dass im weiteren Verlauf der Veranstaltung die CARP-Truppe um Velazquez Bonetto aka Fritz Lang erstmalig ein Theater aufführen wird, welches so bis-lang nur in SecondLife möglich war.

Dank an Wanda Shigella, für die Betreuung und Ein-weisung der Künstler, sowie die Einrichtung und Ausstattung der Ausstellungsflächen. Sie ist auch die „gute Fee“ im Grid, die stets ein offenes Ohr für die Belange der Einwohner hat. Und sie hilft, wo sie nur kann. Danke dafür!

Dank auch an Uwe Furse, der für uns die Aufsteller auf den Ausstellungsflächen erstellt hat.

Dank auch an Lena Vanilli, die seit nunmehr über 3 Jahren mehr oder weniger eigenverantwortlich die Geschicke des Metropolis-Grids geleitet hat. Für das Summer of Arts hat sie die Wiki-Seiten erstellt und sie sorgt während der Veranstaltung dafür, dass die Technik reibungslos funktioniert. Lena hat in der Ver-gangenheit viel Verantwortung übernehmen müs-sen. Womit sie nicht immer glücklich war. Denn viele Entscheidungen mussten nach Gutsherrenart gefällt

werden, weil es dazu keine Alternative gab. Aufgrund ihrer Initiative und der bereits vor vier Jahren durch die Betreiber getroffenen Festlegung, sollen die Ge-schicke des Metropolis-Grids zum Ende des Jahres 2012 im Wege eines Demokratisierungs-Prozesses in die Hände der Einwohner gelegt werden. Es wird sich ein Parlament aus Regions-Eigentümern und eingeschriebenen Avataren bilden, welches über die generelle Ausrichtung des Grids und auch über seine ethisch-moralischen Grundpfeiler entscheiden wird. Es wird aber auch um die Festlegung von Prioritäten im Umfeld des OpenSim gehen. Denn gerade in letzter Zeit musste festgestellt werden, dass viele Dinge un-erledigt bleiben, die dringend benötigt werden. Dage-gen werden Funktionen in den Vordergrund gestellt, die eher in Richtung Kommerz weisen.

Wir hoffen, dass wir im Rahmen unserer Möglichkeiten entweder direkt eingreifen können oder aber unsere Position gemeinschaftlich beim OpenSim-Konsortium vertreten können.

Dank an Velazquez Bonetto und seine CARP-Truppe, für die tolle Unterstützung und auch die künstlerisch-en Beiträge, von denen wir heute Abend noch Einiges zu sehen bekommen. An dieser Stelle darf ich auf das Mega-Event IMAB 2012 hinweisen, welches vom CARP-Team veranstaltet wird. IMAB ist die Abkürzung für „Intergrid Metaverse Art Biennial“, einem Grid-über-greifenden Kunst-Spektakel, das auf den Grids OSGrid, InWorldz, Metropolis und SecondLife stattfinden wird. Spannende, gridübergreifende Veranstaltungen sind in diesem Rahmen geplant. Start des IMAB ist der 06. September 2012 im SecondLife. Damit ehren die Kün-stler den Vater der CyberArt „Nicolas Schöffer“, dessen 100. Geburtstag an diesem Tag begangen wird. Das Metropolis-Event „Summer of Arts“ wird dann mit seinen Ausstellungs-Regionen zum festen Bestandteil des IMAB. Desweiteren wird das IMAB-Projekt vom Metropolis-Grid mit weiteren 6 Regionen gesponsert.

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Gestatten Sie mir noch ein generelles Wort zum Me-tropolis-Grid und seiner Ausrichtung:

Das Metropolis-Grid ist offenes, freies und nicht-kom-merzielles Grid. Jedermann kann sich an dem Grid mit eigenen Regionen beteiligen, oder sich auch nur an der sehr lebhaften Community beteiligen und sich an den Bauten und Objekten Anderer erfreuen.

Dabei ist festzustellen: Das Grid ist Nichts, der Ein-wohner ist Alles!

Wir als Grid-Betreiber dürfen nie aus den Augen ver-lieren, dass hinter Allem der Mensch steht. Und der Mensch hat Wünsche wie auch Ängste, die wir ernst nehmen und denen wir mit Respekt begegnen müs-sen. Es geht also im Wesentlichen um Verantwortung.

Verantwortung gegenüber dem Künstler, der berechtigte Ängste hat, ob seine Urheberrechte auch gewahrt bleiben. Hier müssen wir alles tun, um seine Rechte zu schützen und eventuellen Angriffen aktiv entgegenzutreten. Dabei geht es nicht nur um technische oder rechtliche Absicherungen, sondern vielmehr um die Förderung der Bildung eines ethisch-moralischen Verständnisses. Hier setze ich auch be-sonders auf das Metro-Parlament, das sich zum Ende des Jahres bilden wird.

Wir haben aber auch Verantwortung zu tragen für diejenigen Einwohner, für welche das Parallel-Leb-en als Avatar mehr oder weniger eine der wenigen Möglichkeiten ist, sich am öffentlichen Leben zu be-teiligen oder sich einer Gemeinschaft anzuschließen. Denn so mancher Metropolis-Einwohner hat mit physischen oder psychischen Handicaps zu leben, welche die Bildung sozialer Kontakte im realen Leben erschweren können. Wir wissen auch, dass dies ver-einzelt auch zu Mobbing führen kann. Auch hier setze

ich auf das Metro-Parlament, um solche Übergriffe zu vermeiden.

Bei Aller Verantwortung und allem Ernst der Dinge wollen wir nicht vergessen, dass die virtuelle Re-alität spannende und faszinierende Möglichkeiten für uns bereithält. Und die machen auch einfach Spass und Freude! Diese Freude wollen wir im Me-tropolis-Grid vermitteln und damit auch die virtu-elle Realität populärer machen. Aus diesem Grunde unterstützen wir auch die Konzeption und Instal-lation von Projekten im Bildungs- und Jugendbe-reich, in welchem Wanda Shigella und Zak Spot derzeit sehr aktiv sind. Ich hoffe, dass das Metrop-lis-Grid mit seinen langjährigen Erfahrungen dazu beitragen kann, spannende und sichere Projekte im Jugendbereich zu durchzuführen.

Schließen möchte ich mit einem Zitat aus dem Buch „Die Feuerzangenbowle“ von Heinrich Spörl. Zu den Fragen „Was ist Realität? Was ist Fiktion?“ bringt es der Autor mit folgenden Worten auf den Punkt:

“Wahr sind nur die Erinnerungen, die wir mit uns tragen,die Träume, die wir spinnen,und die Sehnsüchte, die uns treiben.- Damit wollen wir uns bescheiden.”

Gibt es einen schöneren Schluss-Satz?

Doch den Satz der „Monty Python“-Truppe:„I declare the Bar as open!“

In diesem Sinne wünsche ich allen Ausstellern und Besuchern viel Freude beim Summer of Arts 2012!

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Metropolis events: Josina Burgess

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VIRTUALCHRISTINE VISITS RUBEN HAAN’S IMAB EXHI-BITION ON THE OS GRID!! VERY IMPORTANT FREE CUL-TURE ARTIST SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON, MOTOWN, AND ANGELS AND MATHEMATICAL CONUNDRUMS!!!!! AND OBVIOUSLY YOU CAN LOAD UP ON RUBEN’S WONDEROUS CREATIONS!!!!!! ATTN NEWBIES!!!!

Posted on November 11, 2012 by virtualchristine Here I am about a year ago , in one of my happiest places, at the very start of my OpenSim adventures. I was almost fresh out of SL when I took this picture, I understood nothing about the structure of OpenSim or the Hypergrid…I didn’t even know where I was most of the time. I had the most convaluted route to

find my way back here-it involved a long walk where I always got lost, and hopping four grids, which usually crashed me. But it made me so happy to have found something this unusual and sophisticated all by my-self on this often daunting virtual frontier, that I kept staggering back day after day. This was my best, first, big discovery on OpenSim.

Hello my dearest dears! How enchanting! Here we all are ready for another whirlwind adventure on Open-Sim, the software platform that hosts hundreds of independant worlds! Many of these are connected by an amped up teleportation system called the Hy-pergrid, which allows you to endlessly explore these brave new worlds, meeting people, making friends and snagging enough free stuff as to cause an acute physical sensation of crushing weight if you so much as toy with the idea of opening your inventory…this is just me again, isn’t it?

If you don’t know how to get on OpenSim( you are not alone, believe me) please see my “How to get on OpenSim in Six Ridiculously Easy Steps” page, located at the top of this blog. If you do not understand any of the terminology I am using, remember to check out my Newbie Glossary also at the top. Come on, spread your wings in the free metaverse!!

I have a lot of happy places now, but I have never for-gotten that first place. This picture was taken about three weeks ago in what is actually artist Ruben Haan’s OS Grid region of Kleideraar, with IMAB core organizer Velazquez Bonetto. Thank God he was using an avatar with another name the first time we met; I had researched Vela for another post a while back, and if I had known who he was I would have done some-thing screamingly age appropriate; like burst into tears and log off- I don’t really understand 9/10ths of his CV, but this man has enough letters, achievements,

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blank Caribou eyes just homed in on this sculpture in the main plaza. I had spent a lot of time in Kliederaar. Ruben loves these big red arms. Now why the hell were they sitting out here covered in goo? I clicked edit. The creator was indeed Ruben Haan, and the name was ” All I could do was draw on my Gnu Pad”. Well, that made things a LOT clearer. I sat in the hand, set up a word pad page, and started googling.

His website is called Ruben Haan, Free Culture Artist; nuts- I had been clawing through the reams of materi-al about free culture lately, and still didn’t really under-stand much. Why couldn’t these people do a for dum-mies version? I just decided to bleep over that and go to the tiny, yet moderatly confusing, main menu, located to the left of the three big sketches of arms ( told you!) and eyeballs ( back to the first picture)! The menu works like this:

2D takes you to Ruben’s paintings, where wings and goggles join the fracas.

3D is Ruben’s RL and virtual sculpture, which can be a trifle dicombobulating, as they share the same themes and distinctive clay like texture. How often have you seen something that looks virtually EXACTLY like it’s RL counterpart? The little plus and minus takes you on back and forth between 2D and 3D. Contact should read” the other half of the website”. It contains:Ruben’s email address Ruben’s very simple, but in-formative CV The Diaspora Project is a fascinating looking OpenSource alternative to commercial social networking I will probably join. Downloads is a good collection of OARS and other stuff for OpenSim, e books and interesting videos. Ruben is indeed versa-tile. GaleriAle is a Dutch gallery Ruben is involved in, although I am not really sure how. They are mentioned in his CV. ideti.ca is a Montreal based microblogging service run on GNU software that, doesn’t have Dias-pora’s pizzaz, but still looks kind of neat. The black button with the green square goes to a hunky dutch

and awards behind his RL name to choke a Mamen-chisaurus. I originally said anaconda, but for some metaphors you have to go Jurrasic. Before the penny dropped, I had casually mentioned I had a blog. Hey, if I didn’t fish around, what would I write about? He took a look , kind of dropped his other name and asked me if I would like to interview Ruben Haan. Had I heard of Ruben? Not for the first time, I was delighted avatars can’t actually throw up. They are, however, capable of frantic,hysterical bursts of semicoherent typing to the tune of they are not now and have never been real writers, have no higher education in any form what-soever , know jack diddly about technology and even less about art and culture.

A man who produces international opera as a hobby is not fazed by one old lady blogger’s ego issues.I wound up meeting Vela at Kliederaar. We chatted about this and that, and I got Ruben’s email address.

This is the result. SOUL MAN

“…angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the ma-chinery of night…” Allen Ginsberg“What is a soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.” Ray Charles You can get to the first part of Ruben Haan’s IMAB exhibition by going to any OS Grid upper address, plugging IMAB into your world search engine, then hitting teleport. I was so deer- in- the- headlights the first time I went there to try and prepare for the inter-view, that I completely missed the really, really really tall flouresent white building with the words ATELIER RUBEN HAAN on the front in gigantic letters. My big

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artist named Jorek’s website. After that is Ruben’s Twit-ter page, where he retweets people like Stephen Fry. Classy.Ruben’s You Tube Page is a very interesting collec-tion of his work, and that of people he admires. Worth spending time on.

So, I had read this man’s entire website oh, 20 times, looked up all the big words, and not written down one decent question. I got to cry a bit, which is always ca-thartic, but probably useless in an interview situaition unless you are Oprah. I was actually thinking I would just apologize and leave before I began sobbing too hard to type, when I went to meet Ruben Haan. The very serious looking gentleman, who scared the hell out of me by arriving in the same moment I did, turned out to be a fellow artist who came to see the IMAB exhibition. A marvelously scruffy little dude with knock knees and bad posture landed in the dis-tance, and sauntered over with a walk animation he describes as ” clumsy”, where he falls flat on his face with every step. He was oh so polite and good natured. THIS was Ruben. Questions started occuring to me.

virtual christine: Can you tell me, what on earth is a gnu pad?

Ruben Haan: I have a tablet which runs the operating system gnu-linux. I use it to draw; it has a touchscreen and a pencil. Pretty handy for spontaneus electronic work. Its originally a face, but a bit distorded by the shape. virtual christine: A face? Ruben gave me a link to the 2D menu.

Ruben Haan: It’s a picture of one of those. I remix my works all the time. So handmade and digital blurs to-gether.

virtual christine: Oh I see! And I was wondering, is there a story behind the red arms? You seem to like them.

Ruben Haan: I wonder that to myself! Somehow they become red everytime! I was searching for a way to handle the gesture of sharing. This is a sketch for that.I was starting to find this whole interview thing excit-ing. The sharing gesture explained so much! So I kept going.virtual christine: That is exactly what they look like. And that little black wing you put in the hand some-times?

Ruben Haan: I really love it when people share wings. I think its one of the most lovely thing one can give.Now at this point Ruben said that, although he isn’t at all religious, he thought angels were very beautiful, and I made my first mistake, and got a little too enthu-siastic about spiritual beings.Thanks to the election, the American religious right had been in the European media a lot. Poor Ruben couldn’t see my Democrats Abroad registration or my voodoo books, so I changed tack.

virtual christine: Okay Ruben, when you call yourself a free culture artist, what exactly does that mean?

Ruben Haan: There are some great artists that are called free culture artists! Like for example Nina Paley and DJ Spooky. They are an inspiration to me, the way they make sharing and reusing and sampling part of their work. Its one of the things we as artists of this time must stand up for. The freedom to share and be creative-is that difficult to understand?Okay, I thought, I’ll just say it.

virtual christine: If everyone is sharing, how does any-one make a living?

Ruben Haan: In practice, it has to do with the fact

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160 metaverse artthat many big companiess and governments make rules trying to limit your freedom to re use imagry or information. If this freedom is gone, everyone will be a slave!virtual christine: So it is more like freedom of speech?Ruben Haan: Sort of. I learned drawing and painting when I was a kid by making copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh’s stuff. Some idiot governments and com-panies would call that stealing. But that’s what gover-ments are for. Repression. But talking about digital works, its wierd to talk about ownership, when in the end it all looks like this 11001010010100101001. So it’s just math! You can’t own math! Put your sign on work…….. it’s like stealing freedom from the public commons!

virtual christine: Okay, so you are saying that digital work is a mathematical ether that can’t be owned.

Ruben Haan: I do! But this is as real to me as the paint-ings I sell; imagine if I own 1+1=2! I could beat up all people who buy two breads and say that they are two! Becouse I own that! Code is everywhere, it’s so basic.

virtual christine: I see everywhere that code is poetry, and people definitley own poetry!

Ruben Haan: Nope, they own paper. They share po-etry. The poet that don’t want to share is the one you never heard.Admit it, that gives you a lot to think about. It had me crosseyed- When Ruben suggested we go inside the gigantic white structure with his name on it that I had finally seen, I was hoping to give my brain a chance to cool off with a different set of questions. Found it.

virtual christine: Why do you like this goggle form so much?Ruben Haan: I find the area between who people are

OS GRID IMAB Event Ruben Haan

metaverse art 161 and how they present themselves interesting. I think this must be where comunication happens. Many times it’s been symbolised by masks. I found this glass-es or goggles an inspiring template to work with. I am not totally interested in realism.virtual christine: I guessed. And here your wing is white!

Ruben Haan: It’s fun! You can remix my work by chang-ing lightsettings Then came my second big screw up. Ruben began talking about the eyes being the windows of the soul. And instead of letting this very intelligent, interesting and genuinly nice young man finish his train of thought, I jumped all over him. Do you know how sometimes things sound so much bet-ter in your head?

virtual christine: Do you believe humans have souls?

Ruben Haan: I believe that we are human. virtual chris-tine: Humans with souls?Ruben Haan: Isnt soul something from a christian tra-dition?

virtual christine: No, it is most certainly not just chris-tianity!

Ruben Haan: If we call the song and the warm hug a soul…what do I know? A friend of mine collects old soul music. It’s nice.

virtual christine: Like what?Ruben Haan: Baby love my baby love… Stop! In the name of love….

virtual christine: Hahaha! Next Ruben brought me into a room called the ” knut-selhoek” which is Dutch for work or creative space. Ruben Haan: Those pictures here are handy for me if


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I am looking at some crazy ideas I am working on. At the moment I am more focused on placing works liter-ally in the public domain. Like this http://rubenhaan.nl/3D6.html. Not so much OpenSim or SL. Those so called virtual worlds are interesting, to see how peo-ple deal with the fact that what they are and how they represent are two things. But this is happening every-where; its nice to play around and explore.

virtual christine: what is your favorite thing here?

Ruben Haan: Umm… I like Kliederaar more than this.virtual christine: It is warmer.Ruben Haan: It is more finished, hehe! Outside the huge un missable white building , in the main square, are teleports to Kliedeaar, and Cyberbo-hemia, the other exhibition here. So back we went to warmer, more finished, Kliederaar.

Ruben Haan: Its interesting if you want to understand the idea behind free software and free culture to lis-ten some speeches of Richard Stallman. He started the free software movement which freed the hacker culture.

virtual christine: Are you a hacker?

Ruben Haan: That would be a compliment I would love to get! At least I love to play!There was a moment of silence. Vela had told me about a technique called space graphics that Ruben had not invented, but had definitly taken to the next level. It was apparently how he got that very striking paper mache or clay look…. Oh, why the heck not?virtual christine: Your stuff could be clay. It looks that way.

Ruben Haan: Looks like. But it is code! But then maybe

real clay is just code too; I am not so much into science that I know that for sure.

virtual christine: Yes, it probably is.

Ruben Haan: Clay is lovely.virtual christine: Mmmm…. yes it is.

Ruben Haan: I have a garden which is on heavy clay. Sea clay. The ice used to be covering where I live, also where you live. The ice age brought the clay here from the sea…… No fancy graphics, just ancient ice and sea clay in his garden. And you notice how, went he went all metaphysical, I managed to shut up and lis-ten! Interviews are tons of fun, I can`t imagine why Oprah cries so much!

Well my dearest dears, I must love you and leave you! Oh almost forgot, here is the link to Question Copy-right a Nina Paley( who is really neat) website that is the closest you will get to Free Culture for Dummies. And DJ Spooky’s name is deceptive-he has degrees in French literature and philosophy, is resident artist at the Met, does gigs at the Tate, is a University Professor in Swizerland, and his book, Rhythm Science, was pub-lished by MIT press. I now officially no longer consider the term “turntablist” silly. Okay, NOW I have to get some sleep. Thank you Vela, for being so open, and for laughing when I called you “smarty pants”. Thank you Ruben for changing the way I see modern culture, and the way I see your work, which I have always loved ; because I thought it was unusual and sophisticated, and I had discovered it . Now I understand it is pro-found. I have discovered it again.

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Eschatological Landscapes

Welcome to the opening of my exhibition Eschatolog-ical Landscapes. Let me first explain the meaning of this exhibition title. The word “Eschatological” comes from the Greek eschatos meaning “farthest, last, ul-timate” and logos meaning “word, doc¬trine”. Thus, “Eschatol¬ogy” is the theological doctrine concerning the “Ultimate Things”, the end of the world and the fate of mankind. Eschatology also is used in connec-tion with questions such as pro and contra God and the fate of the individual. Eschatological Land¬scapes hence are pictures of “fantasy worlds”, which try to ex-press philosophical thoughts on such subjects.

I started my work on the subject of Eschato¬logical

Landscapes 27 years ago, first with con¬ventional photography in my studio, arranging setups on a spe-cial studio “table”. Since 2003 I compose pictures on the com¬puter, using my numerous photographs as element sources.

Many of these pictures, particularly the early ones, have to be classified under Surrealism. This art disci-pline was founded in the early twenties of the last cen-tury; its manifest was for¬mulated by the French poet André Breton in 1924. In their work, the sur¬realists follow a “dictate of the subcon¬scious”. Contrary to classical Surrealism, which has a close association with psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud, my un¬derstanding of this art follows the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung and his asso¬ciates with its parallels to Zen Buddhism. My work is further-more inspired by the paintings of Marc Chagall and, particu¬larly, Giorgio de Chirico.

A typical example of a surrealistic picture is the first one in this exhibition, showing a sand area with a Ve-netian mask and a tree fragment. When I finished this picture I could not at first fathom it’s meaning. Only af-ter a lengthy contemplation I realized that this picture without a title expresses an eschato¬logical meaning. At the end of the world there is the entrance into the realm of light and man has finally shed his last mask, his persona. However, this ultima maschera leads its own life in the picture and always looks at the spec-tator, regardless of the angle from which it is viewed. The reason why I did not find a title for the picture may be seen in the statement of Zen that you cannot ex-press something funda¬mental by words.

My later pictures, especially those created on the computer, mostly pertain to Fantastic Real¬ism. This art discipline can be best explained as follows: While in Surreal¬ism art emerges from the subconscious,

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tree” Yggdrasil rests on three mighty roots. At each of the roots there originates a spring. At the Spring of Fate Urdarborn live the three Norns Urd, guardian of the past, Verdandi, guardian of growth and Skuld the guardian of the future. In the branches of Yggdrasil lies Asgard, the realm of the gods, which more and more became a symbol of discord and murder due to the fight between the Asen (Nordic gods) and the Giants. The Norns are quite disturbed by this and fear the coming of Ragnarök (The Fate of the Gods)1.

Note: Ragnarök is mostly known as „Götterdämmer-ung“ (Twilight of the Gods). This is an incorrect trans-lation of Ragnarök. The poet Michael Denis originally introduced this term in 1772 to describe the end of the world and the perishing of the gods in Nordic mythol-ogy. The correct translation is „Götterschicksal“ (The Fate of the Gods).

Now back to the story. The Norns seek a way out of this dilemma. Finally Skuld has a vision that to avert the final fate can only be found in a newly grow-ing world tree, in the branches of which there is no more room for Asgard. Rather its branches will spread protec¬tively over a peaceful humanity. I created these pictures in a late attempt to overcome my encounter with Nordic ideol¬ogy during my younger years.

With these explanations I leave you to ex¬plore the pictures in this exhibition. They require an intensive engagement in order to fathom their meaning and each visitor should find his own interpretation.

the followers of Fantastic Realism can be regarded as experienced in the psychology of the subconscious. They create their work in a controlled rationalization. Despite the fact that these pictures show a resem-blance to those of Surrealism, they are still “thought out” with an “academic” character.

I cannot discuss all pictures of this exhibition in such a short introduction. Furthermore, I con¬sider it essen-tial that the individual visitor himself/herself tries to find personal mean¬ings and impressions. Neverthe-less, let me comment on three series in this exhibition.

The series World of Tiers of which three pictures are presented refers to the science fiction novels by Philip Jose Farmer. Welt der Ebenen shows a fantasy world arranged in tiers. In Die Tore der Dimen¬sionen there are three different gates to and from such ficti¬tious uni¬verses: open, closed (by a portal) and virtual (fe-male figure emerging from a virtual gate). Welten wie Sand is a paraphrase on Farmer’s novel The Gates of Creation, where Urizen has kid¬napped Chryseis, the wife of his son Wolff, and brought her to his private universe. The chess figure bishop represents a father sym¬bol, a symbol of authority. The flying bird is a symbol of transcendence, a symbol of lib¬eration.

The series with the Chimera is created around this creature of Greek mythology. It is a lion in front, a goat in the middle, and a snake at the end. Its symbolic meaning is threefold. The lion stands for strength and aggressive¬ness and the goat for cleverness. The snake is a demonic-godlike creature, combin-ing the animalistic and spiritual, consciousness and subconscious¬ness, life and death.

The four pictures Das Schicksal von Yggdra¬sil (The Fate of Yggdrasil) are a fantasy nar¬rative with ele-ments of Nordic mythology (Edda). The “World Ash-

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English

Second Life has been and is for me a very im-portant experience. The starting effect of curiosity for this metaverse soon turned into the wish of saying something tryingtocreateadefinitepersonality.

Building gave me that chance, that is the ability to creating objects of any kind, from the simplest to the most complex. All that after attending some courses offered by the school of Building at Secondlearning. Later on, after exploring this metaverse far and wide, I realized I wanted to do something that would go beyond the usual rule of structures or classical framing; so I tried to express my ideas through different sculp-tures. I started creating geometrical shapes then

I used more difficult techniques such as “theshade”, which gives the possibility to manipulate a unique prim in a very complex way. As a re-sult I obtained unexpected and different shapes quiteunliketheonesanyonecanfindaround.

It is clear that I’ve been working hard to get this result trying to get the good ones a and long nights spent trying to understand how to frame at my best some works that could convey an emotion.... even the simplest, and that it could attract people to an idea I had in my mind or just to share my message with them. In October I had the honour to be at “Virtual Renaissance” in Florence, with 5 of my work printed on 2 curtains decorating one of the room of Museum of Natural Sience - Anthopological Section.

In March 2009 some of my works has been ex-posed in big monitors at Rome in the Adriano’s Temple during an exhibition about Digital Art.I have partecipated for three years at the Burn-ing Life in SL an exhibition made in the same time at the Nevada desert in USA called Burning Man.

in this 3 years of sl i have partecipated at many exhibitions and exposed to the most important Museum of SL : Pirats Gallery - AHO Museum - Primtings Museum - Delacroix Hall - Crescent Moon Museum - Piramide Art Gallery - Museo del Metaverso - Diabolus Art Space - UWA (University West Australia) Gallery - Aeonia Arts and many other important gallery.

4.5 IMAB events Secondlife

Solkide Auer

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Italiano

Secondlife e’ stata ed e’ una esperienza per me molto importante.L’impatto iniziale di curiosita’ per questo metaverso si e’ trasformato con il tempo con la voglia di po-ter dire anche io qualcosa cercando di crearmi una identita’ ben precisa.

Questa opportunita’ me l’ha data il Build, ossia la ca-pacita’ di costruire oggetti di qualsiasi genere dal più semplice al piu’ complesso, naturalmente seguendo i corsi messi a disposizione dalla scuola di Build di Secondlearning. Con l’andare del tempo e dopo aver girato in lungo e in largo questo metaverso, mi sono ritrovato a voler fare qualcosa che andasse oltre i soliti canoni delle strutture e costruzioni clas-siche, provando ad esprimere le mie idee attraverso delle sculture di vario genere. Iniziando da forme geometriche sono approdato poi all’uso di tecniche piu’difficiliqualiloshade,chepermettedimanipo-lare un solo prim in maniera complessa e dando forme inaspettate e dissimili dalle solite cose che si possono trovare andando in giro. Naturalmente alle spalle c’e’ un lavoro di tentativi su tentativi e in-tere serate a cercare di capire come meglio forgiare delle opere che potessero dare una emozione an-che la piu’ semplice..ma che potesse far soffermare su una idea che io ho in testa, e poterla condividere con altre persone.

In ottobre 2008 ho avuto l’onore di essere presente al “Rinascimento Virtuale” a Firenze dove 5 miei lavori sono stati impressi su tende a decorare le sale del Museo di Scienze Naturali - Sezione Antro-pologia.

Nel marzo 2009 alcune delle mie opere sono state esposte su dei grandi monitors a Roma al Tempio di Adriano, in occasione di una mostra sull’arte digi-

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tale.Nel marzo 2010 ho esposto al MUSEAVV di Nizza si occasione dell’esposizione Vritual looking glass.Nel settembre 2010 ho esposto alcune mie opere al GOGBOT 2010 in olanda al Festival internazio-nale di arte digitale.

Ho partecipato per quattro anni di seguito al Burn-ing Life su Second Life, una manifestazione che si tiene in contemporanea al Burning Man nel de-serto del Nevada negli USA in cui i partecipanti esprimono la loro arte.

Ho partecipato a innumerevoli mostre ed espo-sizioni in SeconLife presso i principali luoghi es-positivi piu importanti tra cui : Pirats Gallery - AHO Museum - Primtings Museum - Delacroix Hall - Crescent Moon Museum - Piramide Art Gallery - Museo del Metaverso - Diabolus Art Space - UWA (University West Australia) Gallery - Aeonia Arts e molte altre importanti gallerie.

Français

Second Life a été et est pour moi une expérience très importante.Le premier effet de curiosité pour ce metaverse bientôt c’est transformée en la volonté de dire quelque chose essayand de créer un personnalité biendéfini.

Le Build m’a donné cette chance, c’est donc la ca-pacité à créer des objets de toute nature, du plus simple au plus complexe. Tout cela après avoir assisté à des cours offerts par l’école du build à Secondlearning. Plus tard, après la découverte de ce metaverse dans tous les bou, j’ai réalisé que je voulais faire quelque chose qui irait au-delà de la règle de l’élaboration de structures classique,

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alors j’ai essayé d’exprimer mes idées parmi dif-férentes sculptures. J’ai commencé à créer des formes géométriques puis-je utiliser plus difficiledes techniques comme que le “shade”, qui donne la possibilité de manipuler un prim en maniere très complexe obtenent un résultat différent de ceux que tout le monde peut trouver autour.

Il est clair que j’ai travaillé dur pour obtenir ce ré-sultat, essayant d’obtenir des resultats et beau-coup de nuits passées à essayer de comprendre à la façon de mon mieux à certains travaux qui pour-raient transmettre une émotion .... même les plus simples, et que cela pourrait attirer des gens à une idée que j’avais dans mon esprit ou tout simple-ment pour partager mon message avec eux.

En octobre 2008 j’ai eu l’honneur d’etre a “Renais-sance Virtuelle” a Florence avec 5 de mes travaux imprimé sur 4 tableau a decorer les salle du Muse-um of Natural Sciences - Anthtopological Section.A mars du 2009 quelqun de mes oeuvres ons eté exposé sur des grands écrans a Rome au Temple de Adrien pendant une exibition de Digital Art.

J’ai partecipé pour trois ans a le Burning Life sur SL, une manifestation qu’il y a au meme temp d’une exposition au desert du Nevada in USA.J’ai partecipé a beaucoup de exibitions sur SL au pres des plus important place de l’art de SL : Pirats Gallery - AHO Museum - Primtings Mu-seum - Delacroix Hall - Crescent Moon Museum - Piramide Art Gallery - Museo del Metaverso - Diabolus Art Space - UWA (University West Aus-tralia) Gallery - Aeonia Arts et beaucoup d’autre gallerie.

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Espanol

Second Life ha sido y sigue siendo para mí una experiencia muy importante.El efecto a partir de la curiosidad por este meta-verso pronto se convirtió en el deseo de decir algo tratandodecrearunapersonalidaddefinida.Con-struir me dio esa oportunidad, que es la capacidad de creación de objetos de todo tipo, desde los más simples a los más complejos.

Todo eso después de asistir a algunos cursos ofre-cidos por la escuela de Trabajadores de la Con-strucción en Secondlearning. Más tarde, después de explorar este metaverso a lo largo y ancho, me di cuenta de que yo quería hacer algo que fuera más allá del habitual estado de las estructuras o la elaboración clásica, así que traté de expresar mis ideas a través de diferentes esculturas. Comencé a crear formas geométricas, luego utilicé las téc-nicas más difíciles, tales como “la sombra”, lo que da la posibilidad de manipular un único Prim en una forma muy compleja.

Como resultado obtuve formas inesperadas y muy diferentes a las que pueden encontrar por ahí. He trabajado duro para obtener este resultado, tratan-do de crear buenas piezas y pasé muchas noches tratando de entender cómo enmarcar de la mejor manera algunas obras para poder transmitir una emoción .... incluso la más simple, y que podría atraer a la gente a una idea que tuve o simple-mente para compartir mi mensaje con ellos.

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Solkide Auer CHROMANOVA 2012 IMAB

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Artist in Residence Fish Fishman (whose SL avatar, Tuna Oddfellow, lends his name to the studio) is a lifelong professional magician, hav-ing taken up the art about the time he learned to read. With a performing arts education at a performing arts high school in NY, and then Em-erson College, he has gained acclaim not only from crowds all over the US, but also from his peers, gaining Best Magician from the Boston magic community, and travelling as far as Des Moines to speak on virtual magic.

His work with graphic arts began with his involve-ment with Second Life in summer of 2005. By 2007, his work got him the title of “Most Talented Avatar” in Second Life from American broad-cast network NBC, who awarded him a million linden dollars (about US$4K). Tuna Oddfellow

appeared on America’s Got Talent twice in the summer of 2007, to a total viewing audience of about twenty million, for the original broadcasts. His work in art and perception gave rise to the firstoftheOddfellowStudiostechnologies.

Imagine:

Technology that lets you play a computer game, relaxing you so you can go to bed without medi-cation.

Software that helps people overcome addic-tions.

A program that draws on ancient practices of meditation for inspiration — to help our genera-tion of have-it-now folks to lead better lives.?

The basic tech is a specially crafted visual pre-sentation that changes brainwaves — we be-lieve it induces theta and alpha by visual stimu-lus alone — while the participant seems to be in the middle of a music video in 3D animation in a game engine, on a home computer or mobile device. Theta is similar to hypnosis, and alpha is peaceful and restful. Together, they produce a state that is used therapeutically for relaxation, addiction therapy, and any number of reinforce-ment therapies.

For healthy people, alpha/theta is a mild eu-phoric, a pleasant altered state, and an aid to learning and concentration. We have hopes that regular game play will have many of the same homeostatic effects (self-regulation in the body) as meditation practice.

People pay a lot to relax. World wide sales of Ambien topped US$2.5B in 2007 and continue

4.5 IMAB events Secondlife

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to rise. If we can replace even 10% of that market, we’ve got a pretty good thing going, and we expect we will. If it all tests out, we’ll be able to deliver an all natural replacement at 10% of the price to any decent computer, with or without broadband.

Our technology creates, essentially, the same effect in the body — by the body — that is produced by mindfulness meditation. Nothing enters the body but light from a computer screen.

And, it’s fun!

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Tunaverse Oddfellow ODD BALL 2012 IMAB

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Metaverse Art 2011-2013 Nr 4. IMAB events

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Metaverse Art 2011-2013 Nr 4. IMAB events