self portrait

the self portrait was created in response to a call by oberon onmura for the show the real me at his man-a-hatta gallery (see this blog post for info). it had exactly the size of the bounding box, the physical presence, of my avatar, rotated in synchrony with the avatar, floated slightly above ground when the avatar was flying, and changed its transparency when the avatar was off-line. in a sense, it is a realistic portrait of the avatar, since the only effect on virtual physics is created by the bounding box. the bounding box, in turn, could be viewed as the representation of the avatar, and the avatar is a representation of the user.

spiral

spiral, presented at BiW, was intended as horizontal work, covering and structuring the whole plane of the exhibition area, in contrast to the many artworks that used height as preferred dimension. see two blog posts at BiW, one by shirley marquez, the other one by amy freelunch. a later version of the spiral was shown at the ARENA event curated by roxelo babenco.

physics primitives

the physics engine in second life provides a valuable instrument for creating work, and i have used it from early on in my work. the example above, cubic hail shown at BiW, was, after cube descending, one of my next works working with temporary prims, physics, and continuous creation of objects. here, ichibot nishi added some color and additional dynamics.

decomposing

several works using so-called invisiprims, a visual effect first considered to be a bug, but soon used by many developers in sl. invisiprims cause the avatar body, the water surface, or other textures using the alpha channel to become invisible and have several other interesting visual effects.

the picture above was taken in my contribution for angelgate's radiance exhibition in 2008 curated by bau ur.

see several blog posts, for example about spatial decomposition by amy freelunch, and loose your head by jay van buren.

cube descending

my first work shown at a permanent exhibition in the virtual world of second life, an homage to marcel duchamp's famous painting nude descending a staircase. cube descending translates a method for depicting time, the use of consecutive snapshots first used in photography, e.g., by étienne-jules marey or eadweard muybridge, to the three-dimensional domain, using the illusionistic nature of a virtual environment. the specific technique used here, slowly fading 3D-snapshots of the falling cube, also relates to the one used in comic-book illustrations of dynamic scenes.

soft structures

during the following months, i created a couple of versions of the soft structure, all based on the same principle, exploiting the virtual wind and the virtual cloud density. some of them were shown at BiW. the soft structure was also shown at the 5th birthday event of second life (sl5b) as soft double structure, and, in an interactive version, at dc spensley's show kiss the sky (see this report about the show).

leaving traces

leaving traces, another work shown at BiW and discussed in the first podcast, had several layers of meaning. it used the scripting from the black cube to circumvent BiW's auto-return, and instead of just one week, it remained there for many weeks. it was scripted to become transparent over time, so that it would become an invisible trace after about two or three weeks. the texture was a scan of one sheet of a series of works on paper, which i did some years ago: ants first walked through a dish of black ink and then onto a white sheet of paper, leaving their footprints as traces. leaving traces was also a comment to all the self-declared artists leaving their work at the green lawn of BiW. random traces, which sometimes seemed to make sense.

constructing identity

a figurative work as an attempt to construct an identity for selavy. we continuously reshape our biographical memory, and pictures from family albums serve as some kind of fixed points, burning themselves into memory. as other memories, they need not be real to become part of what we call our identity. this unfinished work was only posted on flickr. later, i used the first image of the series for a cooperation with ichibot nishi, and reused it again in my installation systems of reference at arthole gallery.

architectural intervention II

brooklyn is watching (BiW) became a very important site for showcasing my work. architectural intervention II was the first work that i showed during the first week, jay discovered it right away, and mentioned it on the blog. for this intervention, i created a copy of the original stage (left yellow ridge) and placed it as a mirror image.