Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Shui Shui [shosha.stransky] posted “The Last Tree” just this morning. It’s a poignant image, beautiful with that single tree silhouetted against a night sky with just three stars visible. It’s a gorgeous example of the Golden Ratio. It is a subtle way of highlighting a serious issue, the increasing desertification of the planet. Desertification is when soil becomes infertile through a combination of factors, erosion, wildfires, overgrazing and poor farming practices, and deforestation, the loss of trees. By the time there is a last tree, though, humanity will be long gone and trees might rebound.
It’s not a coincidence that many of the countries where there is armed conflict are also countries with devastating desertification. Loss of farmland leads to scarcity and precarity which lead to conflict. There are 168 countries experiencing desertification, a crisis that looms over our future. It’s good to see someone using Second Life to highlight this slow-motion emergency.
For more of Shui Shui’s time-tinged work, click here:
“When Time Ends” is a very literal capture of the end of the Anthropocene Era in the Earth’s history. Our great monuments and creations crumble into dust. But it’s not the end of life on Earth, life will continue without us.
“When all the beaches are closed, who will see the ocean?” is another picture warning us of the costs of environmental profligacy. We spend not only our own global inheritance but that of our children and grandchildren. Do we think technology will save us from ourselves? That would be ironic given that internal combustion technology has been a driving force in the looming disaster. Still, it’s possible. There are a lot of possibilities for life on earth, with or without us.
Shui Shui often asks big questions with her work. Her pictures are in sepia, giving them an aged appearance as though the time has already passed. She also frequently frames her pictures as vignettes, as though she wishes to convey the idea of seen through a glass darkly in a literal and secular sense, we can only surmise the future until it comes to pass. I love that she uses SecondLife to create art that reflects serious first life questions.
All images copyright Shui Shui
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Cajsa’s Choices is devoted to unique, artistic, and innovative virtual world-based images and screenshots that showcase the medium as an art form and Second Life as a creative platform. (Generally not images that fit on this Bingo card.)
Cajsa Lilliehook is a sixteen year resident of Second Life, where she owned a photo studio, spent several years as a DJ at The Velvet, and for her first SL job, cleaned up prim trash. She co-founded and runs the It’s Only Fashion blog with her best friend Gidge Uriza. She also has a book review blog, Tonstant Weader Reviews and a cooking blog, Single Serving Recipes. She spends a lot of time researching and reporting on Republican sexual predators. In her first life, she is a retired grassroots leader who has worked for economic and social justice issues most of her life. She is also the minion of a cat named Nora.
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