Chris Marker, La jetée Artist & Sometime Second Lifer, Dies

Chris Marker's Second Life home near a jetty

Artist and filmmaker Chris Marker died over the weekend at the age of 91, I'm sad to say, though his long and accomplished career included making the classic short film La jetée (basis for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys), and toward the end of his life, regular visits to Second Life, where he went by the avatar name Sergei Murasaki, and experimented with SL as a new art medium. "I’m looking for new ways to use the avatars," Chris Marker once said during an in-world appearance. "Imagine that we manage to program them with all our memories and that once they may go by themselves, even when we’re not here." Chris Marker is no longer here with us, but as it happens, the traces of his presence in Second Life still exist -- click here to visit Chris Marker's SL office, which appropriately, is built to look like a jetty.

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Comments

[Osprey]

Oh, RIP Chris :(

[Bryndis]

I met his avi a couple of times, and he was never less than charming and delightfully sharp. I hope I am still that sharp in my late 80s!

[Sunny]

I was amazed when i first found out that one of the most influential film-maker ever was in SL. And even so amazed that his presence in SL was not recognized in RL whatsoever. It was actually the first hint for me that SL might work on a popular-culture base, but never as an intellectual or conceptual tool for RL work.
Same with Yona Friedman's short presence realizing his Ville Spatial which also stayed almost unnoticed in RL (considering the amount of books published in the resent years about his work even more astonishing).
If those two intellectual giants were not able to bring SL into RL (or to connect SL with RL) nobody ever can (not even Duran-Duran lol).
In this respect SL is a failed state (measured at Philip's initial concept) and its only future is mass-market pop. With Chris' death I see for the first time that SL's future only works as a "game" with all the consequences for an online-game. With Chris SL died as he and we oldbees knew it.
Now i need a shot of absinth.

[Eupalinos Ugajin]

We will take care of "GEE" (his orange fat cat avatar) and imagine Second Life is a beta of "The Invention of Morel" : http://www.flickr.com/photos/eupalinos/7676934342/

[foneco zuzu]

What matters is that the memories of the ones in SL will be preserved inside SL!