Right now there are two towers on the BIW sim…. er… well three if you count the one that is always there.

Shelina Winkler’s “green tower” and

Oberon Onmura’s cube test.

I find myself really liking the white cube tower more. I enjoy its simplicity. The green tower seems stuck in an uncomfortable in between place between seeming to just be about beauty and seeming to be about reason and repetition. I realize that sounds a little vague, I feel like there’s more to why I don’t like it but i’m having a hard time putting into words.

Oberon’s white tower is more satisfying to me because it goes up exactly as high as Popcha’s big advert in the sky and no further and because it is just one element repeated over and over.

It could be that part of why I like that is just spillover from liking Sol LeWitt.

Or maybe I enjoy the same thing in both Oberon’s work and Sol’s, that one simple form just taken through a change, in this case rotation has a real beauty to it that I enjoy with my eye and with my mind.

It also has a note card that teleports you to a show by Oberon which is very much worth seeing.

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I don’t remember seeing anything by Juria for a while; he’s back with Tunnel Vision, a collection of brightly colored rings that form a tube or tunnel. The textures on the rings move and various parts of the tubes glow (in reasonable amounts) and the rings are slightly transparent so you can see other things through them. A sound loop which sounds like an atonal collection of found sounds and musical fragments plays inside the tunnel. I’ve given a few different views of this work here; other angles (including looking at the rings from the side) are also worth trying.

For me Tunnel Vision works well both as an immersive work (if you walk into the tunnel and let the colors surround you) and as something to observe from outside.Try it both ways and let me know what you think!

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This is one of the first two works by Josina Burgess that I have seen at Brooklyn is Watching. (She has a second work, widows, on display in addition to this one.) In the past I’ve pounded out the theme of making sure you have at least basic shaders enabled so you can see glow; this work is the exception that proves the rule. This is a nice enough work, but the artist has the glow turned up much too high; on my system, at least, the colors completely wash out. These pictures were taken at midday, but changing the time to midnight made no difference.

I discovered what was up with this work by happy circumstance. I first came back in-world tonight on my laptop; on that system I normally have shaders turned off because that makes its frame rate a bit more tolerable. (It’s a dog at any settings, just a bit less of one that way.) So I first saw this work as it is in the second picture, with colors that you can actually see. Later I went to the fast computer (with an NVidia 8800GT and the graphics settings turned up mostly to Ultra, though I use Reflection Detail/All Avatars and Objects rather than Reflection Detail/Anything because the latter setting makes watching video very laggy) and saw what you see in the first picture. The second picture was actually taken on the fast computer as well, but with Basic Shaders unchecked in Preferences/Graphics.

The rendering of glow in the Second Life viewer varies between systems; video card and driver version are the main variables. It’s possible that this work will look just fine on your system, and I assume that it does on Josina’s computer. Josina, I suggest that you have a look at this work on another computer, and perhaps make adjustments to the glow level.

Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did I like the play? Quite well; I enjoyed the play of color and shading in the overlapping boxes (although the artist calls the piece “light cubes”, the boxes are not all cubical). Welcome to BiW, Josina; I hope we see more of your work here in the future.

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Usually I write about Second Life art here, but today I’m going to branch out and talk about an RL artist, Tara Donovan. She has an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston that ends Sunday; if you’re in or near Boston I highly recommend going to have a look before it’s gone. Many of her works cannot be transported; the artist has to recreate them on-site for each exhibition. (The cups and drinking straws and so forth DO get reused in future exhibitions or recycled.)

I found Donovan’s work to have a strong relationship to the kind of art that people create in Second Life. Here’s a quote from the ICA site: “For over a decade, American sculptor Tara Donovan has transformed huge volumes of everyday items into stunning works of phenomenal impact. Layered, piled, or clustered with an almost viral repetition, these products assume forms that both evoke natural systems and seem to defy the laws of nature.” Her works are constructed from large numbers or quantities of everyday objects: Styrofoam or plastic cups, drinking straws, Scotch® tape, toothpicks, pins, buttons, and so on; in many cases, held in place by gravity alone. Recreating her works directly in Second Life would be impossible (the prim counts would be prohibitive!) but I see the same spirit in the way that SL artists create art from simple objects.

The image above (of a work made of metallized Mylar) is from the slideshow available on the ICA site. Another set of Donovan images is available from the ACE Gallery, and an image search on Google will yield even more. Sadly, the ICA does not permit photography in its galleries so I can’t bring you any pictures of my own. No still images even approximate the impact of these works, but perhaps they will inspire some of you to go see the real thing!

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I need a little help from everyone out there today- what do you suppose this means? Do you like it?

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I’m writing in response to Amy Wilson’s excellent essay “Kitsch and SL, a first try” most of which I agree with but there’s one thing I want to argue with and that is the word “inherently”.

I think that it’s Kitchyness is an accident of history and it will change as time goes by. As Amy points out Linden Labs only enforces “community standards” based on people’s complaints and the complaints or lack of complaints depends on the crowd you hang with. I think that the constitution of who is there to hang with will change over time and so will the effective community standards. (not the official ones, mind you, but the effective ones.)

Basically I think as the total number of avatars rise SL will become less and less like disneyland (where its a safe bet that the majority is there is there for escapism and to not be troubled by anything) and more and more like Cleveland. I mean it will be like Cleveland in that, sure, there will be lots of tacky shopping malls, many of them will be filled with people who love Thomas Kinkade but there will also be “bad parts of town” and dive bars and little known music venues where obscure bands play music including one band that even the most jaded music critic in new york or london would like if only he or she were there to hear it and maybe one art school where offensiveness is considered a good thing, and some churches where mini-skirts are a scandal as well as many where they are not… you get the picture. (please note that i’ve never actually been to Cleveland, i’m just guessing.)

What is happening now in SL, I think, is a similar historical accident to that which is illustrated in this chart:

…as you can see in the early days of the internet as the number of people who knew how to make websites went up there was a HUGE spike in the percentage of all websites devoted to Chess and Star Trek. This was not a result of there being anything intrinsic to the medium of the web that encouraged the creation of websites about chess or Star Trek but rather a coincidence of interest within the subset of the world population that were likely to have heard of HTML as that knowledge filtered out from a hard core of a few thousand scientists to the few tens and hundreds of thousands of more average consumer-level techno-nerds. A large percentage of those people also liked Star Trek and played chess.

It is not shown on this graph but if you looked at a chart of the percentage of websites about Britney Spears or Pokemon or Usher the height of the spikes would never reach the very high peak that the Trek/Chess line makes because the internet is so big now and has been for 10 years that no one subject or subculture will ever dominate it.

Right now, I agree that SL is a Kitschy environment and saying that making art there is like making art within Disneyland is a really clever and accurate comparison. As SL becomes more and more mainstream, however, the percentage of people who want to use it as a way to escape will go down and the percentage of people that want to use it as a communication medium for all kinds of purposes will go up and with it the over all variety of attitudes. As that happens Linden Labs will change their marketing strategy to be less bullshit-utopian and their community standards will loosen and acknowledge different sub-communities with their own standards.

OR…. maybe more likely… Open Sim or something like it will take off and there will no longer be one company and one set of standards but thousands.

There’s already a nice little ecosystem of people and blogs ready to enjoy, critique and bring attention to non-kitschy art in SL and its only expanding, as it expands the degree to which it is true that the kitsch of the environment directly effects the work and its reception will lessen as other factors take precedence.

NOTE: Hollow Prim makes a good case for the tools of SL being intrinsically Kitsch-producing, or at least that its easier to make Kitsch toward the bottom of this earlier post on a related topic. Not sure about that part yet. Maybe the title of this post is wrong after all. This post is mainly about the community standards / corporate standards argument that Amy puts forward.

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some might consider this artist, Corbett Howard, to be an “outsider” but judging by the prices for his work at the Avatrait gallery he’s an “insider” when it comes to commercial success within the second life art scene when that scene is considered very broadly

There are two really interesting things over on Amy Wilson’s Blog, “See-Through” One is this whole discussion that got going about “insiders” people with MFA’s and “outsiders” people without and then went from there to a discussion of Clement Greenburgs essay “avant-guarde and kitsch” which is one of those things that everyone who goes to art school has to read.

The other thing is amy’s essay Kitsch and SL which you can guess the topic of. I eagerly await what amy has to say more about Camp.

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