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.

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Amorina Ashton has placed a gallery of twelve of her works of fractal art. One side has Garden of Shadows, Heart so Blue, Twist those Blobs, Say it with Flowers IV, Give you my Heart, and Say it with Flowers II; the other has The Twist of a Shooting Star, Petal in my Eye, Feathery Tickles, Flowery Flow, Let there be Light, and Planet of Emotions. I included one picture of each side of the gallery in this post; to see all twelve works you have to move around to the back or move your camera there.

By their appearance, I believe that the artist has taken fractal renderings, colorized them, perhaps composited elements from more than one fractal, perhaps applied some Photoshop effects (like the glowing areas in many of them), and uploaded the results to Second Life. They are very pretty examples of what they are; the artist has made good choices of composition and colors. Seeing them all together gives us a good overview of the artist’s work. They don’t have much to do with creating art within Second Life — they’re simply uploads of art created outside — though they are not the first examples of such at Brooklyn is Watching.

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The past few days have kept me very busy taking pictures at Brooklyn is Watching! I counted up the things I’ve uploaded to Flickr in the past three days — 41 pictures, only one repeat, and one picture not taken at BiW! (I uploaded two different pictures of Tower of Power / Wall of Sound.) Make sure to visit often — some of the works I photographed just a couple of days ago are already gone.

The latest mini-trend seems to be artists putting up galleries of their work. Today’s set of pictures includes four: Ahmad Hosho, Lanne Wise, Amorina Ashton, and Nur Moo. That means that the number of pictures actually understates the amount of new work that has been showing up, as I took single pictures of these collections rather than separate photos of each one.

Today’s set of pictures was taken on the laptop, so they’ll be a little lower-resolution than usual.

I’ll try to comment on a few of the new works tomorrow.

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Jay and I also talked about this set of works in the podcast. Unfortunately, neither of us know the chronology of their placement; please comment if you know! The two written signs are pretty basic visually; the interesting thing about them is the statement they make. Pavig Lok’s work is more fascinating as visual art; I really like the way that the brush strokes evoke the feeling of words carelessly written with a large paintbrush, as the other objects in the work suggest. Finally, Dekka Raymaker’s work is the blank sign with weathered wood textures; the title of the work and it’s blankness indeed add up to a puzzle!

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The Italian Invasion of BiW continues; this week we see a new artist (or at least new to me), luce Laval. We talked about this work on the podcast; I really like it, though Jay seemed less enthusiastic. I enjoy the way that the curves fit together, and the way that the piece suggests a staircase to climb to the heavens. I also like the shiny bits at the edges; they remind me of the bling that is often seen on Second Life jewelry, but they’re more subtle, rotating rather than blinking. The entire piece rotates, slowly enough so that you can look at it closely, yet another good thing; it’s dynamic without the dynamic element being distracting or interfering with the viewer’s ability to appreciate the form of the work.

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This was a difficult piece to photograph. It’s more characteristic of Gleman’s work; a single prim scripted to move and change colors. But this work is more subtle than many of Gleman’s works; in particular, the delicate lines that radiate from the center area are difficult to see and tend to disappear in photos. (You really can’t see them at all in the reduced-size image on this web page; if you go to Flickr and look at the full-sized image you can see them, barely. When the piece is in motion, as it is when you view it in-world, the lines are easier to spot but still subtle.

For me, this was a move in the right direction. I liked the fact that you had to look carefully into the work to appreciate it, and that it doesn’t make abrupt transitions from one form to another. Yes, it’s yet another colorful swirling thing, but it’s a good one; see it in-world to get the full story.

I tried automatic translation on the title, and it drew a blank on the middle word. My best guess for the entire title would be “Discontinuous feelings and sensations, or perhaps “The disconnect between feeling and sensations”; better translations welcome!

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Visually, this is a simple piece. The main body is a black rectangle. On each of the four sides (not the top, and presumably not the bottom), the phrase “THE INABILITY OF MEN.” is spelled out in holes, in the Courier typeface (the one typically used by typewriters or by computer output that is trying to look like typewriter output) or a similar typeface. Inside the box, there are colored boxes that bob up and down; sometimes we see the colored boxes through the holes, sometimes we see the holes on other sides of the box and through those the surroundings of the work.

The artist offers this description: “Underlying the inability of men and women to communicate is a deeper truth: all people are essentially alone. Men cannot communicate with women, but they cannot communicate with each other, either. The “battle” between men and women is simply the most visible demonstration of how isolated people are from one another.”

This piece raises questions about the nature of communication between people, or the lack thereof. Many authors have opined on gender differences, all the way from Freud’s question of “what do women want” to the pop psychology of books like “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”. Authors like Deborah Tannen (”You Just Don’t Understand”) and women’s studies scholars like Nancy J. Chodorow have theorized that the differences in men’s and women’s communication styles are real, and are at least part of the cause of difficulty. I’m not going to attempt to answer the question here, but I believe that Gleman’s work is an effective visual for the discussion.

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