#3 Madcow Cosmos and Loren Tone

Bye Pathfinder we will miss you greatly. The arts have lost a wonderful supporter.

Madcow Cosmos is probably the most prolific builder in Second Life. He makes everything from avatars to massive dinosaur bone graveyards. His work is almost always humourous and fanciful, yet sometimes has an edge of dark humour. Such as his teddy bear whose belly is a toothy mouth for all the wee little children interested in hugging him. Lorin Tone has long been a supplier of sound to SL. Many of the builds we see here owe part of their success to those sounds he has found and isolated for us.

Last year my Elevensies choice was for a build Madcow began then lost interest in. You can see that post here... http://brynoh.blogspot.com/2009/01/11.html
Well for his IBM show he reworked that build and added a whole new one. It is a loose narrative about a boy who discovers music. I think what I liked most about this build was the variety for the viewer. First I went into the zoo from outer space and read all about his funny creations. Each creature had a unique national geographic style write up about them explaining their traits and habits. All products of Madcows fertile imagination. When you left this area there were two other huge areas to exlore. It took me hours, actually days to fully explore it.

What I think was particularly successful was the switch in scale. The zoo was a relatively small area with lots of detail to observe but once you began the story for the child who finds music you are in a whole new scale. It rises far into the sky and in my machinima I have attempted to show its scale by jumping off the top. I actually had to cut portions of my fall to make it fit within the length of the song. Generally in a build people keep to the ground but in Madcows case he rose well into the sky.

Its hard for me to explain all of this build as it also included things such as the ability to play music through combining loops etc. The music side was lots of fun to play with. I think in the end the sheer enormity of the build was what staggered me and left an impression. It was the James Cameron build of SL (even had some floating pre-movie islands) and ironically we explore it with avatars.