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2 min

My city is Istanbul

I may have found a way to put my street photos to some use. Not in terms of creativity, or design. I still have no ambitions or confidence in that regard. But there is something else that has been bugging me for ages, and there I may be able to do something with them. Which is trying (against all odds) to change the perception that people have of my city by starting a Facebook page (awful design, but nothing to be done about that, it is the thing that has the reach) where I s

2 min

Intimate Spaces for Metaverse Avatars?

I am going to Porto in a few days to make a presentation at the Consciousness Reframed 2019 conference. It is a trip that I am looking forward to especially since I will also be getting together with CapCat Ragu (Catarina Carneiro de Sousa in RL – and we have met before). But this time I will also be meeting with her mother SL artist extraordinaire Meilo Minotaur (Sameiro Sousa in RL) – and that will be a first time encounter which I am anticipating with a lot of pleasure. I

1 min

Going back to minimal?

While I was putting together images for the new ShapeShifter 2012 site I re-rezzed some of the stuff that was on that sim in order to photograph it (yes, don’t ask – I was inexperienced and silly enough not to have made an OAR). And I remembered that I really liked what I had done back then. I am not sure if this stuff was as popular with visitors as the more ‘storyworld’ type of stuff that I also do. I am fairly certain that when this stuff was rezzed at alpha.tribe there w

2 min

Self Evaluation in SL

The new island is more or less done. It looks OK, but it is nothing like what I achieved with Fool’s Gold in 2015. The dark sky level is probably the best part visually speaking, and the ground level seems to work, if not entirely from a design point of view (lots of flaws that I see but can’t figure out how to fix), then in terms of being a weird little playground. However the thing that makes me write this is not really about my building skills. It is the way in which the

1 min

Arcadia’s avatars…

As I wrote before I have used Arcadia Asylum’s prims for many builds. Fool’s Gold, the best sim I think I ever built was made almost entirely out of them, and this new one has quite a few as well. I am a big believer in remediation, in reworking and modifying things to make my own stuff. Not to make everything from scratch but to build upon the foundations that others have set for me. Which is actually called Produsage, and I have even written academic papers on it. That sai

1 min

Midnight Wastes

I have gone back up to the towers that I had started to build a few weeks ago. But, like most of what I do, things did not go quite as planned and I ended up adding things that I had not thought of when I was first thinking about this level. There is a legendary builder in SL called Arcadia Asylum. She built many many different things, from avatars to whole cities. And she had this thing about giving it all away for free – to be used and redistributed as one saw fit. With on

1 min

The crazy cat lady parlor

A while ago Eupalinos Ugajin gave me the sofa as a gift. And I was so delighted that I immediately rushed out to get the matching arm chair and put together a special parlor for cat lovers on the island. And so, these were among the first things that I rezzed in this re-build. They are on a special platform that is actually above water. I did of course build a ramp to terra firma so that the cats can come down and wander around when no one is around. After all, everyone know

1 min

I have decided to build a playground

From the sky tower city, which I am leaving alone for now, I have moved to ground level to put together an amusement park of sorts. Ferris Wheel, carousel, bumper cars, some rides and a shooting gallery. Or rather a grab-a-duck gallery – no killing on my land – you just get to grab a duck and if you catch it the kiosk will give you a gift. So, I am back to “play” as a basal concept. We also have magic lantern show, a gym, and a Chemical lab. No gold – I am sticking to that.

1 min

But, it isn’t just the gold

I am finding it quite hard to rebuild the island. Nothing seems to work quite how I want it to. And the truth of the matter is that the island that I built 3 years ago is probably the best thing I have ever made in Second Life and it is quite hard to even try to get close to that. Gold or no gold, the place had a mood. And it told a tale. Which is quite a hard thing to pull off – as I am finding out, trying to set up another “mood” now. Which is probably why I put off rebuil

6 min

Decapoda goes to the Forest

From the very first time that I heard it as a child I have had strong (almost gut) feelings concerning the tale of Little Red Riding Hood: I was horrified by the killing of the wolf. Inconsolable, in fact – to the point where my father had to invent a whole new ending to the story so that I would stop the tantrum that the actual tale had provoked. So, when storyteller Heidi Dahlsveen, with whom I have collaborated on wonderful projects before, asked me to work on “the other

1 min

after a long silence – goodbye Syncretia

I had been thinking about letting go of Syncretia for quite some time. An announcement by Linden Lab stating that non-profit/educational sims would be expected to pay the full price starting from January 2011 catapulted me from apathy into taking a final decision. And although Linden Labs reneged upon their initial announcement very quickly – within a matter of days in fact, for me the decision was taken and I am not going to be renewing the lease, which is up on November 25t

6 min

The Tales of Ruysch

It would probably never have occurred to me to construct the nonsensical/non-linear web tale which I am cobbling together out of virtual imagery and Shakespeare’s quotes and sonnets, had it not been for the pose library which I was given by storyteller Frigg Ragu in Second Life. Initially I was using these to take photographs of the output of alpha.tribe for display purposes. Even on the very first occasion that I wandered back and forth between them I became aware to what an

7 min

Confronting bogeymen…

Recently I have made two things. And I am realizing that with both of them I am actually confronting fears or in the case of one of them, if not fear itself a very strong repulsion. Jellyfish. I have loathed them for as long as I can remember. They have managed to totally sour up my childhood holidays by the sea. We used to have these huge deep blue ones along with the smaller white variety and basically whenever they were in evidence I would not go into the water. They neve

2 min

The avatars of alpha.tribe

Something I was going to add the other night and then forgot to do. Or rather, I could have done so obviously, even after posting the thing but then chose not to after all. This seems significant enough for a separate entry: My alts. I am at the point where I am feeling them as completely separate persons. They are standalone entities with different pre-occupations and thoughts. Which is very strange. They originated from some part of me, surely they are me? But, it is defin

2 min

A feeling of not belonging

Dedicated to the anonymous reader of this blog… … There is a woman playing the piano. You probably cannot hear the notes but you see her from far away. She is playing Claire de Lune. It takes a long time for the notes to emerge, she has to start over and over, from the very beginning. Little did she know it at the time, but it turned out that she was giving a recital to an audience of only one. I suppose she did have an inkling of sorts… That sense of knowing when someone el

5 min

Narrative

There is something wrong with contemporary art. People have gotten killed for saying less, but I’m saying it anyway. And I have been thinking this way for ages too; in endless wanders around Biennials, taking in video loops imprisoned in an endless “now”, grainy documentational photographs, badly cobbled together installations, accompanied by reams upon reams of text – all about what exactly? And also of course, my job as an instructor. How difficult it seems to be to get my

2 min

The Shadow

So, what happened to the story? The fairy tale, the “maerchen”? When did narrative become so “un-cool” then? I think it happened in the aftermath of the second world war, after humanity came too close to the edge of the abyss and saw the “Shadow”. The Dadaists still had it, the narrative, as did the early Surrealists. A narrative that originated from the subconscious mind, that sprang into being in the collages of Max Ernst and the poetry of Paul Eluard. But there inside the

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