‘If this was real life, those gulls would rise as I approached them’, I thought to myself with a feeling of disappointment, as I walked across the sands. At that moment, I’m surrounded by gulls. I’m surprised and delighted. No art or modelling process can capture everything; it’s about capturing the most important things. And […]
This week there was a story on Motherboard entitled ‘Avatar IRL’, by Cecilia D’Anastasio, about a transwoman, Veronica Sidwell. Following her experiences in Second Life, Veronica decided to transition in real life. Below the article lies the tagline: ‘Goodbye, Meatbags is a series on Motherboard about the waning relevance of the human physical form’. Why […]
The Rituals of Relationships, and the Ordinariness of being Online In this post, I’m looking at a couple of quotes that made me think about how relationships online and offline compare. The first is by the writer, Daniel Blythe: The problem for the contemporary writer is that virtual life is not set aside from the […]
Book of the Week a couple of weeks ago on Radio 4 was from Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, and Friday’s edition drew from the chapter on children. It told about Deb Wilenski’s experiences with children who were given the chance to freely explore the natural world. It struck me that the two predominant features that […]
This post has an addendum responding to comments by Bryn Oh on her blog made during June. In response I staged an art intervention on Lobby Cam, which seemed appropriate in the circumstances. Bryn Oh opened her new exhibition on Immersiva today, Lobby Cam. I remember her once talking about how Second Life art was […]
I’m looking at ‘Sacrifice’ by Osferatus Haven, at Morpheus. It’s a set piece diorama; flickering flames, but otherwise it’s a static installation. A couple of blood-lusty creatures face each other while desperate hands reach up from the ground and corpses lie round and about. By coincidence, I’d come across a journal article1 a little earlier […]
‘All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. . . ‘What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. . . . ‘And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken […]
Earlier this month, the garden designer, Dan Pearson, was the guest on Desert Island Discs 1 on Radio 4. Early on he spoke about what he thought of gardens: I think they are a place of escape, and a place of immersion. They are somewhere where you can be yourself, completely. I think they provide you […]
In my last post, I talked about Nothing Endures But Change, Whiskey Monday’s experiment with constantly changing sets on LEA10 in Second Life. Here’s my latest piece from there, which is linked to my Flickr stream. Whiskey also has a Flickr account. Additional note, September 2015: An adapted version of this image was put into […]
