Exploring Second Life and OpenSim worlds
Last year when artist Peter Vos lay dying of pancreatic cancer, his son created a remarkable memorial for him in Second Life.You can see four of the many works in the exhibit below, and you can read my examiner.com column about the exhibit and see more pictures at www.examiner.com/second-life-in-national/memorial-to-a-dying-artist.
 llustration of Harry Mulish’ “De Aanzoek” 3 |
 The art of distilling weird fragments out of nothing |
 “Pets” Cover “Haagse Post” may 1970 |
 The Inevitable: White |
In the old days, people occasionally would rummage through their attic or basement and find forgotten treasures. People probably still do. I don’t, but I do have old webpages and websites. This week I went rummaging through one of them, what I used to call my Thereography Studio – photographs from the now defunct virtual world There.com. You can visit it at hawk.frodo.tv.
There.com was the very first virtual world that I joined. Virtual worlds had interested me for a long time – I wrote my Masters thesis about future virtual worlds in 1995 – but I didn’t find one that really interested me until I visited Eugene, Oregon in early 2003 and met Don Carson, an artist working on a brand new virtual world, There, that was opening beta testing. I joined as a beta tester in March 2003. It wasn’t long before I began taking pictures. Here’s the very first picture I took in There, on March 23, 2003. It’s a self portrait of my avatar Hawk looking up at There’s moon and starry sky:
I loved There and still have fond memories of of the good times and the good people I knew there. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s true. However, despite how much I loved There, I was only active there for a little over a year, even though I remained a member for another six years, right up to the day it closed on March 10, 2010.
The reason was Second Life. Many people in There disdained Second Life. Movement in Second Life was choppy, avatars were ugly, and vehicles unruly. But Second Life had two crucial features that won me over immediately: a set of tools that made building easy and free, and even more importantly, it explicitly granted to creators intellectual property rights to everything people created in Second Life. I had been writing an “Ancient History of There”, but it bothered me that the company that owned There could assert ownership of it. I had no such worries in Second Life.
Still, There was fun. Vehicles were particular fun, especially buggies and hoverboards. Hoverboards were basically skateboards with engines that gave them a limited ability to lift off the ground. I became freestyle hoverboard champion, and then ran hoverboard championship competitions. Sadly when There closed its doors, I still had a good size jackpot of cash and inventory to distribute as prizes. It all vanished with There.
Here’s a picture I took in 2004 of my avatar Hawk riding one of my collection of hoverboards:
The closing of There highlights an important difference between a virtual world and the physical world: a virtual world can vanish in an instant, like There vanished in March 2010, and suddenly everything is gone, not just our possessions, but our friends too, unless we’ve established contact outside the virtual world.
I was talking with a friend today about the San Francisco Writers Conference and the need for writers to be skilled (or able to afford to hire the skill) to build a website, blog, Tweet, and use Facebook. My friend didn’t think it was fair. Writers shouldn’t need to deal with this stuff.
But are things really worse than in the days before the Web? A few decades ago, a writer needed to be a skilled typist, either that or hire a typist, in order to submit a manuscript. Learning to type on a typewriter must have been tedious. It’s not like a computer, where you can just backspace or move a mouse to correct an error. You needed to avoid them in the first place. That took skill, skill that was a lot less fun to acquire than skill in social media.
Was it any better before the typewriter? I don’t think so. How many people would have the proper penmanship to handcraft an entire manuscript by fountain pen? I certainly don’t. If I had to submit a handwritten manuscript, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Not even with a ball point pen. It was even worse before the fountain pen. Can you imagine writing a manuscript with a quill pen, dipping it in the ink well every few moments, constantly blotting your manuscript to keep it from smearing?
I’ll take the web and social media any day.
I spent almost three days at the San Francisco Writers Conference this weekend. It was excellent. There were some superb presentations in workshops, particularly by Tee Morris and Rusty Shelton, and Donald Maass made some very perceptive comments about genre that I welcomed, but I was surprised that not a single person I spoke with the entire time knew what a virtual world is or had even heard of Second Life.
I guess people see virtual worlds in movies and think it’s all science fiction. They don’t have a clue that for millions of us, including many schools, universities, businesses, and artists, virtual worlds are a daily reality. A revolution is happening, and people don’t see it… yet.
On Monday February 14, 2011 HBO will present the documentary When Strangers Click: Five Stories from the Internet. It includes machinima segments filmed in Second Life™.
The film features five couples who met over the internet, including one who met in Second Life The film’s website says “Kim packed a wedding gown and flew to Prague to marry a man she had only met online. Dave met scores of women before having to reveal a physical shortcoming. At 30, Beth had given up on love before going online. Ryan Googled “gay” to figure out who he was. And Jonas literally found a new life through his Second Life avatar. When these strangers clicked, their lives changed forever.”
Julie Perkins, who met Jonas in SL, writes about the experience, “My boyfriend and I met in SL in June 2007 and partnered in the game in August 2007. We met in rl in Jan 2010 and are loving every minute we are together. I wrote this for our ‘Soulmate Union’ which I created in SL: A soulmate is not someone you recognize at the beginning of a relationship. It is the reward at the end of the journey. It has to be earned. Worked for. Discovered. We started our journey together in a completely different place than where we are now. Where we were coming from we didn’t recognize each other as soulmates. We have both worked hard at the relationship and are always putting each other first before our own desires and wants. Caring more for the others happiness than our own. Through all of this, we have discovered we are each others half. What makes our souls whole again. We have earned this union. From this day forward, our love will be our strength. This marks the beginning of what is our real journey….. The journey of our soulmate union. (c)2011”
You can see excerpts from the film at robertkennerfilms.com/films/files/detail.php?id=22. The official website for the film is at whenstrangersclick.com. The film will premiere on HBO on February 14, 2011.
The Lost Gardens of Apollo is one of Second Life’s treasures. It’s also one of its oldest attractions, dating all the way back to 2005. There isn’t much in Second Life that’s been around this long.
It’s a place of seductive beauty, a place for lovers and for lovers of beauty. The sheer complexity of the build is stunning. Covering an entire sim, it contains lush forests, hidden places to relax with a lover, an imposing temple-like structure on the harbor, and a “Bridge to Nowhere” floating high above. Former members of the now-defunct virtual world There.com will feel at home in the floating islands that conjure a feeling of the magical place Saja in that extinct world.
Second Life members can visit by using either of these slurls:
The Lost Gardens of Apollo has a Facebook page at /www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20573244932
Here are four photos I took on my visit there yesterday. I’ll have more in the future.
 |
 |
 |
 |
The many-colored space you are in appears vast. You turn, east, west, south, north, up, or down, and you see a world of shifting colors. Here and there, objects crumble while others remain steadfast. Even your avatar is shifting in appearance, at times appearing normal, other times seeming to glow in shifting colors.
It is Betty Tureaud’s Art Planet, an installation this month at University of Western Australia in Second Life. This is Second Life art on a scale you’ve rarely seen. For the next six months, the University of Western Australia in Second Life will host a series of full sim installation artworks by leading virtual artists. Betty’s is the first in the series and will be on display for the month of January 2011. The artists whose work will be featured over the next five months are Blue Tsuki (February), Anley Piers & Cherry Manga (March), soror Nishi (April), and Wizard Gynoid (May).
The scale of this installation is breathtaking. It’s an environment of ever shifting colors and moving objects, a place where you can very quickly lose your orientation. Betty says of it, “My art installation is made like a oil painting that evolves during the work. I use transparent color surfaces as flip themselves whichever direction you look. It allows you even to create your own paintings just turn and you see a new one. It is you who decides what colors and patterns, your picture will serve.”
Betty, a Danish artist working in both the physical and virtual worlds, provides a free car that you can rez and use for traveling around her creation, but this writer preferred just flying from point to point. She also provides a notecard with slurls for teleporting to the main points. You can learn more about her and her extensive body of work at her website www.bettys-second-life.dk .
Second Life members can teleport to the installation’s entry point slurl.com/secondlife/UWA%20VIRTLANTIS/104/72/276.
Be sure to check out the other slurls that betty provides for exploring:
Art Planet can be seen through the end of January 2011. Here are some scenes from the exhibit:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Fireworks are traditional on American Independence Day, July 4, and so when my sister was unable to see first life fireworks yesterday, I bought her a set of Henry deCuir’s Second Life® fireworks and we spent the evening on her waterfront land in the Second Life mainland with a friend watching fireworks.
The fireworks were beautiful and were a vivid reminder to both of us just how much Second Life has improved visually in the six years since I first joined. This picture shows me (as my Hawk Lightcloud avatar) in May 2004, when I was still a landless vagrant in this new virtual world, before I took advantage of the Land for the Landless program that Linden Lab used to offer and became the proud owner of a 512sqm parcel in Benten.
Second Life wasn’t a very interesting place in those days, with only about 4,000 members and graphics that we’d laugh at today. Clothes were basic, avatars were basic, and landscaping was basic. I had come from the virtual world There.com, a world where I had good friends and that I loved. There.com had a beautiful range of content and smooth operating vehicles (I was freestyle hoverboard champion) that Second Life just could not match.
But one of my friends in There.com, Swen_Wu_Kong, had migrated to Second Life a few months earlier as Lumiere Noir, the founder of the magnificent Ivory Tower of Primitives. In those days, Second Life wasn’t a very appealing world compared to There and I didn’t see what Lumiere Noir saw in it … until I got my Land for the Landless parcel and rezzed my first prim. It was one of those eureka! moments. Suddenly it all made sense. My former world was a world where creating original objects meant paying license fees, buying and learning expensive software, and signing over all intellectual property rights to the company that owned the world.
That first day of rezzing prims opened my eyes to a whole new way of doing things. I had been skeptical in Second Life’s beta days about Philip Rosedale’s vision of a world of user-created content. I just didn’t think it would work, and the starkness of Second Life compared with the rich beauty of There.com seemed proof. But the moment I began rezzing prims, modifying them, linking them, creating objects, all without any previous skills, without buying software or paying license fees, and with Linden Lab granting me all intellectual property rights to what I created, I suddenly understood the brilliance of Rosedale’s vision. I still loved There.com, and I missed my friends there, but the combination of easy-to-use building tools and intellectual property ownership rights convinced me immediately that Second Life was the right place for me.
It’s significant that a few months ago There.com went out of business while Second Life thrives. I doubt whether we’d see the intense creativity or the involvement of major businesses in Second Life without those two things that convinced me six years ago that Second Life was the right place for me.
You’re walking in a desert through an extravagance of imaginative builds on all sides, but then you see something strange, a rectangular build, orange and yellow in color, with some spheres and other shapes inside. If you enter the property and hit the "Play Media" icon on your Second Life viewer, the magic begins.
Music plays and every surface comes alive with video. One brief moment is captured in this picture, but it’s only one moment. It’s constantly changing. You can see more moments of it in the slide show that follows this article. It’s "Personal Video Dome" by an Australian, 1Earthling Rang (say it aloud), "Unique SL Video/Color Experience … designed to play video from all surfaces." This writer found it mesmerizing.
Nearby, you’ll see the colorful "Rainbow Serpent Lodge – R/SL" in the camp of Sundog Branner, whose self description is "Creative soul in Oz … Colour alchemist, rainbow warrior, cosmic composer". Words fail to describe Sundog’s build. His own description of it is, "13:20 Time = Art The Dreamspell – 13 moons : 20 tribes r/evolve – r/sl".
You’ll find "Honest Punky’s Used Cars and Foreclosed Buildings" a little south of Sundog Brenner, in Noiz Noyes’ camp. It’s a petrol station with fuel pumps, a space ship between pumps, a collection vehicles, a machinima you can watch, and boxes, piles and piles of boxes containing items such as "Nashville Tomb of the Templars" and "Nashville Stonehenge", virtually all of which you can get copies of for free. Most of the items being given away were created by Punky Pugilist.
Nestled between Sundog Branner’s and Noiz Noyes’ camps you’ll find "Candlemania" in the camp of Arrow Inglewood. Here you’ll find a variety of flames, including a candle headlight in the basket of a "@Delux Hobo Bicycle". The bicycle was created by Athos Murphy.
Return to 1Earthling Rang’s Personal Video Dome just north of it you’ll find a very different camp, "Beyond my lifetime", in the camp of zeusdinne Baroque. At one end, a spaceship blasts off while at the other end, a mammoth stands over a camp with a campfire, an animal skin stretched out to dry, and fish hanging from a framework of tree branches. In the middle, between mammoth and rocket, there’s a rug with meditation pose balls. There’s picture of the campsite in the slide show below, but it was taken a few days ago. Zeusdinne Baroque has added items to the site since then.
At the southest corner of the sim, next to the Burning Life-Elko sim, you’ll find the camp of Hellahond Nightfire. Here, gargoyles and dragons stand guard over several animals and what appears to be a bee perpetually raises and lowers a basket between the ground and a "Birds Dance Platform" overhead.
You’ll find ten more pictures of the builds mentioned in this article in the slide show below, and you can learn more about Burning Life at its website, burninglife.secondlife.com. The pictures in this article and slideshow were all taken in the Burning Life-Quinn sim. The sim is closed now while builders are still constructing their creatings, but you will be able to visit it from October 17-31, 2009.
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
Let’s agree upfront that visiting a virtual Chichen Itza can’t come close to visiting the real thing, but few of us will visit the real Chichen Itza even once in our lives. A virtual Chichen Itza has the advantage of being available to us every day to visit whenever we want. This writer has so far never managed to visit Mexico’s Chichen Itza, but has visited Second Life‘s Chichen Itza many times.
Mexico’s Chichen Itza, a Mayan city located on the Yucatan Peninsula, is over a thousand years old. The El Castillo pyramid, pictured on the left in Second Life at sunset, is probably the most well known and widely recognized monument at Chichen Itza, but it’s only one of the structures there. The pyramid has a square base and has one staircase on each side. Three of the staircases are 91 steps, and the fourth is 92 steps, for a total of 365, the number of days in a year.
A short walk from El Castillo, you’ll find the Sacred Cenote. Cenotes, limestone sinkholes, were essential to the Mayans in the arid Yucatan. The Sacred Cenote is one of two cenotes that remain today. It was probably used for human sacrifices to god rain god Chaac. Second Life’s Sacred Cenote is shown in the second picture.
On the other side of the El Castillo pyramid you’ll find the Temple of the Warriors and the Plaza of one thousand columns. The Second Life versions are in the third photo, showing the Temple of the Warriors in the background.
Second Life’s Chichen Itza is located in the Mexico sim, a project of the Mexico Tourism Board. Your avatar can teleport there at slurl.com/secondlife/Visit%20Mexico/197/70/39. The Board has a second Mayan area in Second Life, which I’ll report on in a future article.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |