Direct SLURL teleport to the Garden at this link.
When scholars write the history of the metaverse-based art movement (and they will), I deeply suspect they'll name May 2008 as its first milestone. Not only is it the month DanCoyote Antonelli launched his "Kiss the Sky" hyperformalism exhibit (which I hope to write about soon) and Douglas Gayeton's "Molotov Alva" premiered to a mass audience, it's also when Bettina Tizzy and her circle unveiled The Garden of NPIRL Delights, a sprawling continent of interactive art installations that could only exist in a metaverse like Second Life.
A kind of Web 2.0-era Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Bettina (pictured here in the green dress) and her NPIRL group have orchestrated wonders. Loosely inspired by Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights", construction began just a month ago, and it's already flowered into a seemingly endless space of surprises. When it opened late last night, I took a two hour tour, and only explored just a fraction. Here's a video showing just a few highlights. I was too overwhelmed to take complete notes, but it includes glorious and vivid works by Jopsy Pendragon (the glowing green soul bath), Truthseeker Young (the alien meditation chamber), and Eshi Otawara (the dress shaped like a rising phoenix) among many more.
Of course, as with any collection, some installations work better than others.
A few exhibits are beautiful but mostly non-interactive 3D sculptures, for example, while others are not that much more fantastic than what you might already see in a real world art installation-- these were less successful, in my view. (Then again, I just caught The Whitney Biennal in New York, and out of some eighty exhibits, just two truly moved me. I'm not even kidding.)
More often, however, the artists working in the NPIRL Garden are struggling against the limitations of the medium itself-- a fancy way of saying Second Life is still too damn laggy to get decent sound propagation or consistently good frame rate, has an interface that's still too complex to design fully effective camera control, and runs on a server network that's still too kludgy to fit an audience larger than a couple dozen at one time.
Apart from
those technical challenges, I think the next goal is coming up with a
language of metaverse art criticism. What makes for a profound and essential work, and why? Right now, it seems we're still groping at
that question on an intuitive level. In my view (and I'm totally serious) any new aesthetic theory of metaverse art should encompass the possibility that its audience may include a surprised chimpanzee with a pet raccoon who'll wander through a chamber of souls after apparently shopping for groceries.
In any case, here's the SLURL teleport link to the Garden, and here's a dedicated website from Rezzable, sponsors of the site (and former advertiser on this blog.) Please share your own experiences and favorite installations in Comments.
Background music from my video by Torley Linden-- "Darkest Rose", from his vast library. The surprised chimp is Naxos Loon, who appears here with his generous permission.
thanks for visit and great vid!
Posted by: RightAsRain Rimbaud | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 04:08 AM
I'm just curious about how far the art movement will bloom if a picture of a fully clothed adult man standing next to a fully clothed adult woman is banned from SL5B.
When SL goes completely PG, I predict that most of the art community will leave.
http://razorblade-cookies.blogspot.com/2008/06/hes-cold-hearted-snake-look-into-his.html
Posted by: silverdrake sparrow | Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 06:32 AM