New World Notes

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: The Intriguing & Beautiful Conceptual Images of Celestial Demon

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

My first glance at Celestial Demon’s untitled picture of a man laying on the ground, I thought he was a boulder. But of course, a closer, slower look revealed a far more interesting picture. I love how he uses the body as landscape. It is his lighting that makes the body look so much more a part of the landscape, making the body more abstract. It’s reminiscent of Carl Warner’s Bodyscapes, an amazing exploration of the geography of the human body and Celestial Demon’s is as well. 

For more of Celestial Demon’s conceptual art, click here.

This Artist Heavily Post-Processes Second Life Screenshots to Look Like Striking Pop Art. Her Name is Flo.

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Flo’s “catch up” is a good exemplar of her work - modern, minimalist, and oh-so-graphic. She creates half-tones that seem fresh off the printing press, negative images, duotones, and so much more. With layers and filters, she takes a screenshot and turns it into neo-pop art. 

For more great art, click here:

Metaverse Memory: My Story of a Man Who Built a Virtual World Museum to Hold His Dying Father's Art

From "Sander's Villa: The Man Who Gave His Father A Second Life" (2011):

As death approached, the artist’s son did an extraordinary thing: He began to build a place that would live on after his father, made with particles of light. That is to say, Sander Vos logged into Second Life, and made a gallery of his father’s work in digital 3D.  

“I started building a 3D version of one of his drawings, ‘Villa Insight’ in Second Life, while he was ill, because building makes me calm in a way,” Sander tells me. “I had to think practical all the time, like: How on earth am I going to make this little ink bottle with prims? And I was busy with him at the same time, ‘cause it was all about him of course."

Read the rest here.

These Utterly Stunning Images Look Like Wyeth & Hopper Paintings. They're Actually Screenshots from Second Life.

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Claire Vuissent’s depiction of Wuthering Heights character Catherine Linton is so magnificent, I didn’t have to glance at the title to know she was running “out on the wily, windy moors.” (Yes, I know this is the original but I prefer the cover.) Claire embodies the spirit of Cathy searching on the moors for Heathcliff. To be honest, I love the song, admired the book, but have always disliked Cathy and Heathcliff. They are not good people. 

For more fantastic images from Claire Vuissent, click here:

This Artist Uses Layered Second Life Images & Wireframe Screenshots to Create Breathtaking Works of Abstract Expressionism

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Thus Yootz’ “Exodus to Air” is exquisite. There are multiple shots that have been layered to produce this otherworldly scene. It’s a distortion of reality that expresses emotion which suggests abstract expressionism. After all, it’s just some trees with clouds scudding in the distance. Add some screened flowers and some text in a different alphabet and all sorts of context becomes possible. 

Is it a parallel multiverse or a dystopian future here with black chlorophyll and a red, red sun, or is it a mood? She chose “The Ballad of John Henry” by Joe Bonamassa to accompany the picture, a connection I don’t see, but I enjoy Bonamassa any day of the week. Unlike an ordinary landscape, this picture is not just beautiful, but also confounding. What does it mean? 

The original screenshot was taken at The White Armory and Sylvan Moon Designs.

For more Second Life screenshots as abstract expressionist art, click here:

Incredible Second Life Screenshot Photos Inspired by Emily Dickinson & Other Poets

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

Emily Dickinson

Becca Ordinary’s image “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” is anything but ordinary. I love how she captures the idea of the poem in a way that takes note of the birds, but goes in another direction. It’s imaginative and truly captures the spirit of the Dickinson poem. And poetry is what inspires Becca’s work. 

For more poetical pictures, click here:

 

Metaverse Artist AM Radio on Second Life as the First "Giga-Artwork"

Image via AM Radio's Flickr

Jeff "AM Radio" Berg was watching my recent interview with Philip Rosedale, and AM Radio being AM Radio, sent me this pretty profound thought:

I wonder if what he created, when considered as a whole, is the first giga-artwork. An artwork so large it has an economy. An artwork as a grand experiment on the nature of our existence, as evolving typologies of identity and taxonomies of spaces, and communication. As if it was an innate instinct in each of us to reject randomness, a clamoring for order when we recognize something like Second Life as a well structured lattice designed to catch up with the unfolding entropy of the universe, find new ways of being, classify each discovery, expand our perceptions, and add it to our phylum of ways of being alive.

He's saying "giga-artwork" as a play on "Gigafactory", a facility which manufactures electric engines. (Or more broadly, a factory which makes other factories.) Adding:

Why couldn’t a whole meta world be a unique artwork, the artist as world builder. Maybe there is a specific set of qualifiers to define something as a giga-artwork? But qualifiers might get lost in semantics. So maybe a giga-artwork needs just one, and Second Life is the first one I’ve seen capable of it. Think of it as a sort of analog to Turing completeness, call it meta-complete, when a world is capable of spawning child worlds capable of emulating other worlds.

Here's what he means, in terms of Second Life's architecture:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Stunning Photos of Virtual Nature Turned to Abstract Art

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

GoddessWhispers [Prettyflower Vale] has created a few abstracts in her feed that make me want more. Take this one from 2019, “Abstract: Gazing Through The Ice” has these deep, rich blues and greens in which we can discern shapes such as the trees she mentions in her description, but also we can see things that are not there. For example, on the right-hand side, the black and white shapes seem to be a woodpecker landing, but I think that is all in my head. She describes the picture, “Winter trees viewed from below the icy pond's surface. Using "miniaturize" filter to give a bit more depth and pop the colors.”

For more abstracts, click here:

See in SL This Month: "“Transcend Struggle”, a Powerful Art Gallery Show

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

There is an exhibit at Dido Haas’ Nitroglobus Gallery that might intrigue and fascinate many of you. It’s called “Transcend Struggle”. You want to go soon as it is only for the month of March. [To teleport to the gallery, click here] 

The show features the work of Yann Gyro, who does most of his work for in-world exhibitions rather than Flickr. The exhibition is about illness, struggle, and transcendence. The artist wrote a poem, which you can read by clicking through to the picture on his Flickr. 

Here is the first verse for the above image: 

You faced the fear, when you heard the news

But I was here, and I saw you rise and choose

To find your power, and stand tall with grace

And embrace the challenge, with courage in your face

For more by Yann Gyro, click here:

How to Make Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Now that's we've all marveled at Scylla Rhiadra's stunning tributed to Degas paintings, Scylla pulls back the curtain to explain her techniques for turning raw Second Life screenshots into an image like the one she created above.  (Original here on her Flickr.) While these images include multiple avatars, they are actually all her:

My basic process is to start with a composition that is, most often, comprised of multiple figures – because part of what I want to capture is the relationship between the young dancers, which must have been simultaneously close and supportive, yet also fiercely competitive. Rather than using a small army of alts or friends, all of these figures employ my own avatar, and the images are produced by a composite of multiple shots of each. I take separate depth maps for each, as well as supplementary shots to deal with things like clothing glitches and subtle lighting effects.

“The Dancer VII: Les coulisses” (above) includes six figures, and was composed of nearly 20 different shots merged or worked together in different ways. (Interestingly, Degas began his own training as a painter by producing paintings from photographs, and he remained interested in photography throughout his life.)

Next comes post-processing in Photoshop and running it through a free Adobe app: