- Experiencing TwizT Ying’s work on the new BiW
The amount of new and transferred existing work in BiW’s new space @ Push is awe inspiring. Perhaps you’ve all been cooking up some tasty art at Bobbi’s Bakery! Fittingly, much of the work on the new space is about seeing Brooklyn is Watching from a fresh perspective. From Oberon Omnura’s taxi fare to the sky, Rezago Kokorin’s 10,000 Light Years From Home and the quiet works awaiting us on the seabed.
On a tip off from the blog, I first made my way underwater to experience Dekka Raymaker’s sound sculpture Dimensional Drift which was last seen in the parched desert environment of Burning Life as part of a collaboration with Penumbra Carter. Surrounded by a flurry of fish and coral this piece looks quite at home in its new landscape. Looking upwards in mouselook gives the work a new dimension and highlights the exquisite textures and detailing. Situated peacefully next to Raymaker’s work is DanCoyote’s Tomb Maze which reminded me, in formal terms only obviously, of Peter Eisenman’s Berlin sculpture. Its coolness, claustrophobia and colliding surfaces both disturb and quieten. The physicality of the piece makes it one of the most truly immersive works I have experienced in SL – the interaction so strongly transcends the keyboard. These two works are particularly suited to their underwater environs which characteristically gives the space they exist in an otherworldly, almost mediative, ambience.
Making my way to the surface, I am tickled by Solo Mornington’s whimsical rubber ducky floating beside me and Sunn Thunder’s Binder Hell ! I spent quite a lot of time with Snubnose Genopeak’s Digital Holography which are developed around fluctuations of process and described by the artist as “a holographic examination of consciousness”. The work demands time and close attention to appreciate the subtleties within it, which can become quite mesmerizing.
Oberon Onmura has presented a new work with minimal palette and form. A grid formation of twelve cubes form the base for the heavenly ascent of a plethora of taxi cabs – perhaps the ghosts of the artist’s previous work Taxi Stand seen on BiW earlier in the year. The motion of the cabs is actually more accurately described as an ‘inverted decent’, after morphing, birth-like, out of their cubed bases, embodying a resistant waggle as they do. Taking a fare I am lifted up wards as if on a Branson joyflight – experiencing the new BiW space from every possible angle!
Once in the air I toy around with TwizT Ying’s fireball, which is quite an experience from the inside, before teleporting to Rezago Kokorin’s epic work 10,000 Light Years from Home. Feeling like the man on the BiW moon I explore the immersive environment with its quirky sculptural creatures and landscape before heading, rather spectacularly, back to earth via the stair well exit.
I hope you all enjoy the new experience of the BiW space as much as I did!
Teleporting,
Diogenes Wylder
When I arrived in Kokorin’s piece above BiW I wasn’t expecting to be impressed, but they obviously have a brilliant sense of space and form, I was quickly drawn into walking around the space, exploring all the elements, my visit was cut short by clicking the door at the top of the staircase, but in such a pleasing way. I will visit this again.
Diogenes, thank you for mentioning my piece, however it wasn’t actually shown at Burning Life ‘09, it was only given out as a freebie there, packaged in a box. Although it resembles and is based on the central tower at BL09 this is in fact the first time it has been formally shown. At BiW it is my addition of coral and the fishes that made it work under the water, without them it appeared to be an alien object in the wrong environment and although it still is an alien object the additions gave it a new focus and now sits comfortably on that landscape.
P.S. Bobbi’s Bakery (not on BiW) is a set made for a machinima Penumbra Carter was working on.
Left by Dekka Raymaker on November 9th, 2009