playground space was first placed last week; I took some pictures at the time but didn’t post a comment because I was still trying to figure out how I felt about the piece. When luntsberg candy castle went up, I posted on that and noted that it would have complemented the now-missing playground space; it looks like Selavy and Ichibot listened, because it’s back. Unless, of course, I just had a weird viewer issue the first time I looked at the castle and didn’t see the playground. SL is SL, it could have happened. In any case, both are there now, and Ichibot added a colorful striped pathway tying the two pieces together; the pieces of the path are named “cick” and “lunt”, so they are clearly intended as such, not that there would be any confusion anyway!

I’m ambivalent about playground space. On the one hand, I love the idea of it, and I like the way that the two artists have worked together on it. (The base build is by Selavy; Ichibot contributed the table and chairs in the third photo, and the ice pops on the raised platform.) The grass texture is really nice. There is some potential for interaction with the space; the swing operates, and you can kick around Selavy’s signature cubes. (For those of you who are new here, many of Selavy’s works include standard size cubes that have been used in creative ways.) There is even one of Arahan’s super happy fun balloons left over from the Injustice installation last week.

On the other hand, a lot of the execution left me flat. Selavy was probably trying for a minimalist visual style, but I think she went too far; a bit more detail in the build would have made it more evocative for me.

The photos of this piece presented some interesting challenges. The highly detailed grass texture foils JPEG compression; as a result, I had to compress these pictures more aggressively than usual to get the upload size below 300K. (Flickr doesn’t seem to like uploading images larger than that, at least not from me.) The third picture, the closeup of Ichibot’s table and chairs, also had to be cropped quite tightly, in addition to the higher than normal compression. The Windlight time of day was changed for best effect on each; the big overview picture (the one that shows the castle and the playground) is at 7:00am, but the table and chairs are at 4:40pm. The first picture (the one showing the entire playground, but not the castle) was from last week’s shoot.

There is a bug in the release candidate viewer that sometimes make the display screen / photo frame on the raised platform look washed out and blank. Oddly, photographs of the scene are fine even when it doesn’t look right on your screen.

Posted by Shirley Marquez on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:15 am.