Juria had been away for a few weeks; it’s good to see him back at Brooklyn is Watching with a new work. The title seems to be something of a misnomer; I’m guessing that it’s left over from an earlier version of the piece. The wing thing works effectively with glow and transparency; it rotates, so you get a constant play of light and shadow. The scale is modest for Juria; it’s large but not overwhelming as many of his pieces are.

The moon is the standard SL moon and not retouched, but the time of day was manipulated in the environment editor to get it in the right place. The colors have been adjusted to make the web version a better approximation of what you see in the viewer.

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Ichibot’s episodic continues to change; what is on display today is very different from what I photographed on Tuesday. So come see it again!

This part of the exhibit is another of Ichibot’s human-like forms. The shape reminds me of the early Venus figurines that have been found in a number of places, with its big fertile breasts and belly. Ichibot’s figure also breathes… but somewhat disquietingly, the boobs breathe rather than the chest and belly. The juxtaposition with the giant candy canes suggests that this body is being offered as a playground; is this a natural form of play for children, who often play on and around their mothers’ bodies, or a further objectification of women? There is also a mound of whipped cream with cherries and some ice lollies nearby, so perhaps the body is being offered as a form of food; again, this raises questions of whether this is appropriate celebration of the oral pleasures of the body or not. I find this work alternately fascinating and repellant; not a bad combination for art.

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Robin Moore presents another of his layered pieces this week. FISH gone G-force is sort of an aquarium; there are fish swimming around in it and bubbles rising from the floor. both animated. There are also three lines of people posed as for a formal group portrait; they are static. Interesting things happen to the layering of this work with small changes of camera position and angle; in another example of artists making lemonade out of Second Life’s lemons, it appears that the artist has deliberately exploited the viewer’s problems with sorting of textures with transparency. It is another fascinating exploration of how depth can be created in Second Life with the use of flat layers.

The back of this work does not have the seed pods that we saw on back of a number of the artist’s previous exhibits at Brooklyn is Watching. There goes the theory that they serve as a visual signature for the artist.

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Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same
There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

Malvina Reynolds, Little Boxes

This collection of boxes is part of Ichibot’s monumental episodic installation. In context near the episodic.recreational.field one could view these colored blocks as children’s toys. But toys are rarely so perfectly laid out in a grid, and so my mind couldn’t help straying to the classic Malvina Reynolds song (best known as performed by Pete Seeger) about suburban sprawl. (The boxes don’t have any detail that suggests houses, but for me they didn’t need to.) They randomly change color, but the more they change the more things stay the same. Ichibot has struck home this time with an anti-capitalist statement about the deadening sameness of developments like this.

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Ichibot is back, and he’s given us a mega-installation. It’s still a work in progress as I write this, so what you see might not be identical to the photos. I’ve put a lot of photos of this work on Flickr — more than are linked into this post — so check that site for the whole story, or better yet, visit Brooklyn is Watching!

The scope of this work is substantial, and some of the parts were originally done for other works by Ichibot. Some of his past themes are also evident, including the puppets with the Hitleresque faces. So the big question is, does this work as a whole? For the most part, I believe that it does; I see a commentary on the potential dehumanizating effects of the Communist regime. (Big blocky architecture like the two social housing builds were one recognizable artifact of the Soviet era.) But Ichibot identifies himself as anti-capitalist, so I believe that we are also meant to read the dangers of capitalist excess as well as Communist excess.

Ichibot informs me that the placement of this work around artoo Magneto’s trees is intentional. He felt that the trees, although pretty, lacked the context they needed to be an effective installation, and so Ichibot supplied some context.

Some parts of this work are rather unsettling, and for me the most disturbing was episodic.social.housing.reterritorialization.01. The photograph above is a view of part of the interior. From the outside, episodic.social.housing.deterritorialization.01
and episodic.social.housing.reterritorialization.01 look like identical Brutalist buildings, but on the inside the latter work contains some rather blobby, vaguely human forms. The bodies look like the result of indulgence and mutation run amok. (They are hideously obese and deformed, and the faces with the truncated mustaches are here again.) If this is the kind of reterritorialization that Communism leads to, I can’t imagine that any of us will want any part of it.

I use the term Communism here to speak of the form of government that the Soviet regime of the cold war had, not what Marx wrote about or the ideal that many people still hold for socialist societies. However we might feel about the merits or demerits of socialism, we can probably all agree that Soviet Russia was not an entirely successful society.

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You could even say it glows!

Selavy’s latest piece doesn’t contain any cubes, but it has been placed to interact with Mencius Watts’s installation of cubes that duck into the water near the entrance of Brooklyn is Watching. Selavy’s work is a set of concentric (which isn’t really the right term because they’re squares rather than circles) half-squares. Collisions make the squares glow; you can just let the bobbing cubes do the colliding for you, or fly into the squares yourself. The effect is very op-art, plus the interactive aspect. As with all art using glow, make sure to use a Windlight viewer.

Selavy has an exhibit, nested cubes, opening tomorrow at 4:30pm SLT on DEsign Island. I won’t be able to attend the opening or be in the podcast tomorrow, but perhaps some of the BiW gang will be able to stop in. I took an advance peek; spatial anomaly is full squares there, not half squares (at BiW, I think the other half of the squares is inside the ground), and there are a number of other interesting works to see.

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I’ve got a picture of the visual part of this work here, but the real story is the audio. You can click the book for a link or use the one above; either way, you get to hear a low-fi recording of the song which had me checking my audio hardware a couple of times. (There are a few points where one channel drops out, making you think there is a problem with your audio connections.) The recording may be lacking in technical polish, but I think the rough sound of it is deliberate, and the performance has a pleasantly rough quality. The musical arrangement is also confused, again I believe deliberately.

The description of the item and the text inside the book give the author of the song as ArtWorld Talent, but the creator of the book is Neo Rebus. I do not know whether that means that Neo Rebus was actively involved with the creation of this work, or whether he was simply the seller of an SL book system.

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