I’ve known Dancoyote Antonelli for a long time (since mid-2006 or thereabouts). We first met when he did an exhibit at The Bluffs, a nature preserve, art area, and general nice hangout that is next door to my house in Lappet. I went to a couple of performances of the Sky Dancers, and a couple of my friends were performers. So I’m not an entirely unbiased observer; now you know.

Dancoyote has never been one to do things in a small way. The Bluffs exhibit was a multi-level sky platform thing that filled half the sim, and other exhibits of his that I have seen have also filled the space as well as the imagination. His exhibit at Brooklyn is Watching, Reactor Core, is no exception. It’s actually a much smaller number of prims than many of his past creations, but that’s because it is made of 256m megaprims (sculpted, I believe, but I can’t verify that without edit rights). Dancoyote’s description: Reactor Core is an evolving algorithmic monolith 500 meters tall. March 21 2008. No, this one isn’t new, but (as I said earlier) I’m also going to have a look at some of the existing work.

Reactor Core is displayed about 600 meters up. There are two sets of four chairs at ground level that take you up; all the chairs take you to pretty much the same place, so the choice isn’t important. Sit on any of the chairs and pick 1 from the menu to ascend; you’ll go through a couple of other sky exhibits during the ride up.

You’ll need patience once you arrive. On my system (Pentium D, NVidia 7600GS) my frame rate drops to under 2fps when I look at Reactor Core with my normal settings; it rises to over 20fps if I look away from it. The frame rate hit is not as severe in a non-Windlight viewer (I got about 6fps with the OnRez viewer, which is based on 1.18.5.3), but you’ll want WindLight (1.19.1 or later) for this exhibit; it’s much more beautiful in a current viewer with atmospheric shaders enabled. (In the OnRez viewer, the color lost a lot of its richness.)

What you see is worth the wait. Reactor Core is a rich, ever-changing, glowing mix of greens and purples. It rewards long observation and repeated viewing. A minor gripe: Dancoyote hasn’t provided any way down, so you’ll have to teleport back to ground level or walk off the edge of the observation platform.

Posted by Shirley Marquez on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 5:02 am.