New World Notes

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:

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:

 

These Stunning Images Inspired by Degas' Famed Ballerina Paintings Actually Started as Second Life Screenshots

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

I saw Scylla Rhiadra’s stunning "The Dancer VII: Les coulisses" and immediately recognized it as an homage to Edgar Degas and his series of paintings of dancers. Scylla doesn’t just focus on the same subject matter, she captures his use of light. (I have written about her facility with light in 2020 and 2021.) 

She has a fascination with light and shadow that reflects Degas' own. I love how she makes her work seem like a painting you could find at The Louvre. I asked her about her project and about how she creates her painterly effect. Her answer was so well done, I decided to just turn the rest of the column over to her and get out of the way:

I enjoy dancing, in both RL and SL (I’m better at it in the latter), and I have produced more than a few images on the subject, but I also like the way that dance, and most supremely ballet, transforms the human body into kinetic art comprised of shapes in motion, without losing the "human" that is defined by that body. It is also sometimes one of the more complicated and interesting ways through which we connect with one another, whether it is through a choreographed dance performed together, or expressed more intimately through romantic or sexually-charged couples dancing.

For the rest of Scylla’s story, click on:

Second Life Artist Exports Her Latest Experience to Unreal & Steam -- Here's What Bryn Oh Learned Along the Way!

Above: Lobby Cam in Steam/Unreal. See below for the SL version

Lobby Cam by Bryn Oh is a free new game experience on Steam, and like the name suggests, it's actually created by famed Second Life artist Bryn Oh. Since publishing it to Steam last Friday, it's garnered 7,2000 downloads -- quite a lot, for an indie developer on the platform, and a bit better than the visits her experiences get in Second Life. (Which range from 300-1000 a day, she tells me.)  

Steam only publishes games, so Bryn added a mini quest, but also decided to keep it free to play: "There are things such as a HUD for the letters you find and you can pick up and inspect some models on tables, lots of little things," she tells me. "I was able to monetize it but I chose to make it free. I figure people can support me on my Patreon if they like what I do."  

This is a really exciting move. I'm a huge advocate of Second Life creators expanding to other platforms so they can build their audience and market. It's also very cool to see her SL creation transformed to Unreal. (Compare and contrast the pics in this post.)

"Most of the changes involve aesthetics," she tell me. "Unreal Engine is a really powerful tool where you can spend lots of time on the minute details ranging from how shadows should bounce off an object to creating dozens of layers of ground textures."

While Unreal's graphics are incredibly powerful, her Second Life version has an innovative feature that couldn't make the transition to Steam (possible spoiler ahead):

 

Second Life Avatar Featured in Legendary Opera House -- On The Continued Cultural Reach of the Virtual World

In case you missed it over the holidays, the New York Times' story on the use of contemporary art displayed in major opera houses casually mentions that "the Chinese-born multimedia artist Cao Fei is showing a female avatar — a dystopian, pale-white head so imposing that signs have been put up all over the [Vienna] opera house to alert spectators to its presence."

That avatar is actually China Tracy from Second Life -- she still has an active account in SL, look her up! -- who's been showing up in Cao Fei's art projects since 2007:

In a really great early machinima (watch below):

Watch: Second Life Image Creator Wins Award in Flickr's Photography Contest!

Watch: Virtual photography award announced at 24 minutes in

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

Angelika Corral recently won Flickr/Smug Mug’s World Photography Day category for virtual photography with this photo at right, “I’m not just what you see.” You can watch the contest announcement here or above, cued to the Virtual World Photo award 23 minutes into the video, but the other images are wonderful so you might want to watch the whole thing, especially where the hosts talk about Linden Lab's participation in the awards, and how impressed they are by the genre's overall quality.

This category included gaming, 3D graphic arts, and, of course, Second Life. There was an interesting discussion of the complexity of judging the category. I certainly understand why she won. The portrait is exquisite with great care. Look at how she used depth of field fading into shadow. Of course, this sent me to her stream to discover her experimenting with her SL shots. 

For more images from Corral, click here:

Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei for ArtNet's Podcast

What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy, whose SL-based art I briefly covered here.

Here's some highlights (though of course the whole thing is a good listen):

• 4:25: History of the Metaverse starting with Habitat in the 80s, ActiveWorlds in the 90s; flowing into its origins in Snow Crash, and my working definition based directly on the novel. From that I talk about Snow Crash's early influence on Second Life, to the founding of Second Life and my writing in it, and the first metaverse hype wave in 2006-2008, when major universities and companies put stakes in the virtual world.
• 13:45: I talk about the art world of Second Life, from the Flickr photographer community that Cajsa covers so well, to acclaimed artists Cao Fei (aka China Tracy) and AM Radio (aka Jeffrey Berg)
• 24:00: My take on blockchain-based metaverse platforms, and the categorical mistake I believe they're making.
• 32:20: The valuable social potential of the Metaverse, versus social media. Fellow guest Tina Rivers Ryan points out some serious potential downsides which I also happen to agree with. I've written frequently, for example, about avatar-based racism that is also problematic in the virtual world.
• 40:15: Second Life's influence on current metaverse platforms, especially VRChat.

Cao Fei's first SL art project below, the machinima I.Mirror, along with links for more reading, and highlights from AM Radio's career:

Today's Flickr Pick: Ambre Singh Creates Comic & Conceptual Images in Second Life

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

Can I love a Second Life photographer simply because her pictures make me giggle and sometimes even laugh out loud? Yes, yes I can.

Ambre Singh’s picture is cute but when you add the title “Sitting on the Duck of the Bay” it goes from cute to hilarious and memorable. It made me want to do a deeper dive into her photostream. She’s not that fond of clothing, particular bras and shirts, and beach living gives her the freedom to live comfortably au naturel. However, being humorous does not take away from her artistry. 

For a fabulous SL homage to a classic painting and more, click here:

Pioneer Metaverse Artist Jeffrey "AM Radio" Berg on the Future of Art in the A.I. / DALL-E Era

From AM Radio's Flickr

Update, 7/15: Bumped up as long-ish weekend read and conversation for the weekend!

Jeffrey Berg, the artist and technologist who became famous as the Metaverse artist known as "AM Radio", a Second Life avatar who created profoundly surreal and poignant immersive installations like "The Faraway" (above), a rusty train lost in the wheatfields, recently discovered a surprising thing:

It is now possible, using programs like Craiyon, a text-to-image generation tool powered by AI (a variation of OpenAI's DALL-E), to automatically create images strikingly similar to the Second Life installations which took him many hours if not days to create in 3D.

See below:

"Was messing with Craiyon today and I wondered the impacts it could have on metaverse space creation," as he mused to me recently, sharing the results above. "3D geometry rather than a generated image from plain text input doesn’t seem like a huge stretch."

That started a long, fascinating, and -- this being AM Radio, after all -- moving conversation with Jeff on the future of art in the era of DALL-E, AI and machine learning in general, and promising AI-based art like that by Dr. Nettrice Gaskin:

Shop for Great Virtual Paintings by Teleporting to Second Life Galleries -- A Metaverse Art Walk Curated by Acclaimed Photographer Whiskey Monday

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

There is a new event in town: Acclaimed metaverse photographer Whiskey Monday has created a new shop-and-hop event focused on art. It’s called Curated and goes for ten days a month. It’s covered here at Seraphim, the event guide blog with all the details on just about everything. Click here for pictures of all the items and links to to hop around to buy a copy of your favorite works for your virtual home.

I love several of the artworks featured this month, so picking two to feature is going to be so hard. But here goes:

For my picks, click here: