World Expo - Island two - Entropy
Glyph Graves is one of my favorite scripters in Second Life. He always seems to be developing new and interesting ways to combine existing information such as wind variables into his work. At other times such as with the IBM build currently up, he partnered with Jules Rickenbacker to translate information taken from a petri dish into Second Life to move prims in accordance with the movements within the dish. Its unique scripting done by very few others. There are a handful of really talented scripters such as Ordinal Malaprop, Foolish Frost, Selavy Oh, Seifert Surface, Sasun Steinbeck and Desdemona Enfield who I am aware of and likely tons more who are working in obscurity creating fantastic things. Its really a part of the art in Second Life that doesn't get the credit which it deserves. Its a category no different from prim builders, texture artists, machinima artists, sound artists, performance and so on. Anyway, when I was looking for artists to help with the five islands for the World Expo I wanted a top scripter on one island and asked Glyph who created a beautiful installation with some great scripting.
By clicking the center tree you will set off the scripting element which involves disassembling the figures on the mountains who then meet within the center of the sim to cycle in a form of dance. Check the machinima below to see what i mean.
Its interesting though that second life art has evolved for me in different ways such as having "favorites" in categories. Generally in first life people have a favorite painter, they don't generally distinguish between painters who specialize in texture or colourists or ones who work in highly complex composition. It all comes down to a general favorite painter for most. In second life I have way more categories within art. I might have a favorite overall artist, but I also have favorite overall builds which might not be from the same artist. Some have years of continuously great building installations where others have one magnificent build. I could talk about favorite sound artists like Adam Nash/Ramona or Dizzy Banjo, favorite texture artists such as AM Radio or Scottius Polke, installation artists like four Yip or AuraKyoo Insoo. Particle artists like ColeMarie Soleil or Jopsy Pendragon. And most of those fit into more than one category. I could branch out to great flickr artists who manipulate second life such as Ash or Alpha Auer, and of course the scripters whom i mentioned above. I should do that next post. Show some great flickr artists. I am sure I don't know all of them so if you have any suggestions let me know either here or in world.
Actually, I see there is a group in Flickr called Steamprincess which is made up of pictures taken of my builds. I think I will showcase some of my favorites from that group in the upcoming weeks too, because I think its awsome people take pictures of my work. So if you have any pictures put them there. The group was created by Therese Carfagno. Here is the flickr info for it.. http://www.flickr.com/groups/brynoh/
Comments
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I’m not sure the term scripter is really meaningful. I certainly don’t think of myself as a scripter. For starters I make and use my own my own textures for 90-95% percent of my work and of course I make my own sculpts with their unique properties. In addition almost everything you see is hand built prim by prim. I do use LSL freely though to create the effects I want in my art (as you do). In fact programming of one sort or another is what we both do equally to create art in SL. Scripting/Coding of one form or another is the native tool of second life art.
Let me explain what I mean here. First of all I start with the premise that all art in second life is scripting (though all scripting isn’t art in the same way just because someone is using paint it doesn’t mean they create art).
When using the build tools to rez an prim you are using a script (a program composed of code that somebody wrote) to create its characteristics on the server ... you then manipulate the prim in a series of different ways using code to change the variables that describe that object.
When you use the build tools you are in effect scripting using a high level visual coding language. Putting few numbers into the object tab /texture tab (or using the scroll bars) is the same thing as putting those same numbers into a llSetPrimitiveParams() statement.
What using LSL in addition to the normal build tools does is that it give you finer control over the end result as well as giving you access to things that are not available in the build tools that LL has supplied.
To use a painting analogy an artist might choose to use a trowel to apply paint or a fine camel hair brush .. or a leaky bucket suspended on a string or a combination of all the above but they are rarely defined by the technique(s) they use to create art.. I mean when was the last time you heard someone called a troweler or Jackson Pollock referred to as a leaky bucketeer.
Of course the upshot of all this is that it means you are one of my favourite scripters in SL ;).
I understand what you mean Glyph and I suppose in a way once we turn on our computer everything we see is a script in some form or other. I am saying that what I like most about your work is the way you use LSL beyond what LL offers us. I like, say, AM Radio for his colour and composition. I love four Yip for her fun lighthearted work, Scottius for his textures etc.
Its my personal preference I am talking about. The painting analogy you used is the same idea that I was making. I think you misread my post. I am explaining how in my first life I don't distinguish between painters of different techniques when I pick favorites. It would be easy to do so, but its just not something we tend to do. For me in Second Life art I have, for some reason, placed my favorite artists into sub categories. I have overall favorites like I do with first life painters, however with SL I have become more specific in my own mind. It was merely something I found interesting about the way I view art in SL.
Hi Bryn,
I just came across this a month after you wrote it - which I guess shows you how diligently I keep up on my blog reading ;-).
Thank you for bringing up my name and I would certainly love to hear you talk about my output. In fact, nothing would thrill me more… However, I do not think that I would qualify as a virtual photographer at all. The reason that I am getting nit picky here is that virtual photography is actually something which I have lately been giving a lot of thought to. I think that a whole new genre of creative activity is emerging on sites like Flickr and YouTube. I have no idea if the “serious” art world out there is paying much mind to any of this as of now but it would seem to me that sooner or later they will have to come out of their trance state and start doing so. In fact, I could go out on a limb and add that for me virtual photography/machinima is possibly the most impactful artistic “genre” which is emerging out of virtual worlds – to which can be appended a whole gamut social scientific theory, ranging from networks to anthropology to economics to legal issues as well.
What differentiates the whole genre is that in it novel art work is created from pre-existent art work. In fact, if anything, the artwork itself depends upon other artwork to come about. So it creates its own evolutionary system of creativity. As an example, a person comes to Immersiva and uses the content which you have put there as the original builder - often to the extent where an entirely new work which may no longer even have anything to do with the actual point of trajectory itself emerges. I constantly see this with the photographs in which SL Residents have utilized my alpha.tribe avatars to create completely novel images of their own. I am usually so stunned by what I see, that I have now begun to hold exhibitions at a gallery dedicated to photographers who use alpha.tribe avatars for their own creative ends.
What I do on my Flickr however is the documentation of my own building activity. At least the bulk of what is in there… Two notable exceptions would be MosMax Hax, whose work I have photographed a lot as well, and then a bunch of photographs which I took while I was standing in for Bettina on the NPIRL blog 2 winters ago. So, I was just documenting things for the posts which I was writing. And then there are of course souvenir photos or indeed some early SL days “fashion shots” (where I did in fact indulge in virtual photography myself ;-). But all of that accounted for, I basically stick to photographing my own builds and very little else.
Oh and, I have also used my own builds as props for photographs which I have taken, like the Tales of Ruysch – which would probably the ones that made you think of me in the first place. What would differentiate those from virtual photography (as I perceive it at least) is that I photograph my own builds populated by avatars which I make from scratch. Thus ultimately, everything you see there is made by me… So, I guess at the end of the day, I would be a builder and an avatar creator who is thrilled to put her output at the disposal of virtual photographic artists and who sometimes uses her own work to create her own stand-alone images as well.