L1Aura Loire & Sage Duncan talk about about some pieces in the fabulous SLon des Refusés, part of the BIW Year One Festival, curated elegantly by Mab MacMoragh, Moncherrie Afterthought, Dekka Raymaker, and Arahan Claveau.
See the SLon show here for an extra extended week, until August 30: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Magoo/128/128/2
We discuss pieces by: Azdel Slade, four Yip, Man Machinaga, and Robin Moore.




Thank you for this thoughtful review, L1Leopard-Official-Spokesmodel-of-Soup, L1Aura, and Sage! What a nice surprise! Thank you for the compliments. The SLon des Refuses is a group effort and everyone has worked together to make it a success.
A few remarks:
1. four Yip’s Magritte Therapist–Take a Seat can be had by anyone for free if you go to her shop. The landmark is in the ‘tinfoil’ litter at the foot of the work. There are lots of delightfully imagined conceptions there and none of them have a price tag. They’re priceless!
2. Robin Moore’s pictoramas are made so the avatar can enter into them, literally. They are phantom. The blue ball that was inside his box was an accidental physical intruder from a nearby and unrelated artwork and not a poseball.
3. Man Michinaga’s wrist-camera zoetropes combine sequential images of life and inanimate things inside the same spinning axes of movement and time (which is necessary for uniform motion to occur). To the left and coming forward are images of that which is born, grows, and dies, without exception; to the right going away are objects, primitives in the real world, if you will. They disintegrate eventually but without sentience, without suffering, and can be copied. Even if they are made to resemble the human figure (the enormous oil-derrick football player art sculpture), even if they are made to encapsulate a human idea (the small run of machine-made dominoes). In contrast the photographed moments of a life and love and loss can never be recreated.
4. Azdel Slade’s piece includes actual running chat text onscreen from her performance when she was confined and chatting with various avatars over that period of time. As you might expect from the context and duration of the performance, the Becoming Dragon conversations are wide-ranging, sometimes poignant, sometimes provocative, sometimes mundane- but always very human. It’s interesting that her box conjured a discussion on things that are missing in SL, such as smells. I had the same Proustian thoughts sitting there and don’t think it was a coincidence. She recreated in the virtual space the physical space (almost exactly according to her!) that she inhabited and lived in, a place where she embodied her avatar to such an extent the experience informed the senses, making their presence real in the mind and by extension nudging the imagination of the attentive observer.
Left by Mab MacMoragh on August 24th, 2009