Up in the sky near the peak of the Brooklyn is Watching tower, Dekka Raymaker has built a merry go round. It has a rotating platform with six things on it; going around clockwise, they are a horse (hovertext: memory), an airplane (dream), a flamingo (laugh), a car (play), a rocket (lover), and a boat (father). The horse is somewhat realistic in shape; the flamingo looks very much like the classic lawn ornament (though it’s not pink; all six riding objects are in shades of white and gray), and the other four things have the blocky style of wooden toys. The platform has a reddish weathered wood texture and is semi-transparent, so you see the structure of the merry-go-round and the ground through it. Over it all is a semi-transparent pink canopy, supported by semi-transparent white poles; just below the canopy is a circular banner that says “Brooklyn Is Watching - Merry Go Round - Frills and Joy for All”. The center support pole has a green ring that starts the rotation, a red ring just below that stops it, and at the base there is a blue ring that gives out notecards. In the base below the platform, there is a semi-transparent music box that plays a short looping sound clip.
I was able to sit on the horse and the flamingo; each has a different sit pose. Try as I might, I was unable to sit on any of the other four things. Most attempts at sitting put me on the horse; it took numerous attempts to get on the flamingo.
There is a notecard dispenser at the center of this work; here’s what the artist has to say about it:
Untitled, 2008 - Dekka Raymaker
I couldn’t give this piece a name, as I was completing it and thinking what to call it I had flash backs of many memories. It is about loss and discovery, childhood and old age, sadness and happiness.
My own observations: the semi-transparent nature of the entire build gives it a ghostly feeling, as if it is something you imagine is there rather than something that is really there. The toy-like riding objects make it seem like a toy on a giant scale rather than a real merry-go-round. It is certain to bring up childhood memories; it did for me.
Make sure to try anchoring your camera on different places. If you in the normal view (the one you get by pressing Escape) while standing, you appear to be still while the merry-go-round spins. If you are sitting and in the normal view, you and the merry-go-round appear still while the rest of the world revolves around you. Finally, if you anchor on something outside the merry-go-round you get the outsider’s view of the experience.
Yes, I’m riding the horse in the picture; I usually photograph sittablle art while I am sitting on it.
Yes, sitting on the various rides is a problem, but it is doable. In my work in Second Life I often find that I have to look for solutions to make what should be relatively simple, actually work. Then usually those solutions become an unexpected part of the work.
In this case if you click on the prim with the ’sit pose’ in it, you have a good chance of sitting on that particular ride. I’m not a great lover of hovertext, although it does sometimes have it uses, so my solution was to add the hovertext to those prims and although it’s not perfect, my assumption is that people are more likely to click near the hovertext than not. Maybe a better solution would have been to colour those prims?
At first I was going to use conventional wording such as ’sit’, but part of my inspiration to make this piece was on a childhood memory of always ended up on the boat on these rides, never the spaceship or the car or motorbike, these would have been my preferred rides, but not the boat. So I choose words that were associated with this memory, I did make a typo with ‘lover’ it should really have been just ‘love’.
So why the bloody boat? well this is one of those questions in my life I will only ever be able to guess the answer to now.
Left by Dekka Raymaker on August 30th, 2008