Reel Expression

The Deco Sims
I am building two sims in the style of Art Deco. Lalique for me and Cappiello for Ceres Prototype. Cappiello is a bit more time sensitive as she’ll be getting rid of her previous site and my main store is already on a corner of Lalique. Her store is nearly completed so watch out for her grand opening :)

For those of you have already been to Lalique Square, you know my odd obsession with Art Deco. Both sims are named after deco artisits, Leonetto Cappiello (posters) and René Lalique (glass). There is just something about the conjuntion of Constructionism, Cubism, Modernism, Bauhaus, Art Nouveau, and Futurism which comprises Art Deco.

Alle says I have a thing with vintage stuffs. I dunno. There just is something about the roaring 20’s. Speakeasies, burlesque, jazz, vaudeville, the lost generation, women’s sufferage, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, sound in films, and of course the major pioneers in film editing (Kuleshov,Eisenstein, Vertov, ect) .

omg Luthy deleted her build
Yes. Building Ceres’s large and rather complicated store(s) made me a better builder. I dunno if it was needing practice, playing with prims or what. But I got better. Also, everything that I had built was based upon the size of my store with no expansion space. Saddly it was even smaller then my current one. I have been planning for ages to widen the types of things that I do. I spent a couple of days staring at my space trying to figure out what to do, when I just linked all the surrounding stores, took them into inventory, and deleted everything. Its a bit of a mess atm but I think starting with a clean slate now is better than after everyone moving over.

Animation stuff
Sorry its been so quiet on this front. Been busy with the build. Creating a custom AO for Elika. Creating a few new things that won’t be talked about until later. But not to worry, a new animation set is due out next week. That is if all goes well.

Vanguard
Ok. The NDA has been lifted. I can finally talk about it. I regularly play what I like to call kill kill kill MMOs. SL is actually an oddity for me and something my gamer friends tease me about constantly. My good friend Eems and I meet up at 8pm GMT every night and run around the world of Vanguard. It’s pretty much your typical eq/wow/ect stuff. But there are some added things that make it a little bit better. For one thing, crafted items are worth the trouble. And leveling up your crafting doesnt cost materials. You can also build boats. Then there are the mounts which are a bit easier to buy and some do fly. Woot. That was the one cool thing about DnL. Then player houses/shops. The pvp is a bit... tacked on like EQ and WoW. But saddly there isn’t anything else coming out that looks remotly worthwhile.

My insomnia has insomnia.
It seems to be an endless cycle that has gotton way worse. Just to let you know, it’s 6am my time and I haven’t slept yet. But then again I didn’t wake up until after 8pm. Usually I like to keep to a schedule when I’m not on a job. Wake up around noon, animating/building by 2, meet up with Eems at 8, back to SL for a couple of hours, then in bed no latter then 4am. Granted sometimes I go out instead of playing VG, sometimes I spend time with my husband, and others I stay in SL and work.

See, my best work usually starts around 1 or 2am. I like working when its dark outside and the flat is quiet. I have a notepad with me and I’ll draw it out. The funny thing is, I can’t draw. My husband has seen them and has no idea how I can get from them to the build or pose. The pose will always be a stick figure with some funny explination to myself. Maybe one day I’ll scan it in.

Now, the current problem started because Eems had been offline for like 2 weeks. I’d just keep playing with prims for hours and then the alarm would go off and I’d make my husband tea. Then the time I would actually fall asleep would get later and later until yesterdays 11am. Though I do partially blame that on finishing a book (The Black Dahilia) and starting a new one (Empire).

So.. I guess I’ll leave you with one final image of the cafe and call it a night.

Cheers.
Luth

0100101110101101.org recently published a list of Second Life’s 13 most beautiful avatars and the press release circulated throughout the blogosphere. Curious, I went to look at the list, and what I found disappointed me; not only were the selected avatars not among the best I had seen, but worse, they were hardly better than average.

How were they “average”? Both as avatars and photos. The avatars themselves were all beautiful in the usual SL ways: nice skins mapped onto nice shapes. That just about all of the photos were closeups or even extreme closeups didn’t help: so much of what makes an avatar a statement is her full appearance, including posture, clothing, hair, and accessories. It is very hard for most SL avatars to stand out when all you have is a face.

The best of the lot were the pictures of Aimee Weber, which showed her in a bit of a pose, giving some sense of her in-world personality. But Aimee Weber is Second Life’s Jennifer Aniston: her avatar is beautiful and distinctive, but how many covers of People, Us, and In Touch does she really need to be on? Picking Aimee is just too easy.

It is, of course, very easy to criticize something as subjective as a top-10 beauty list. I want to do something more useful than that. I want to explore the criteria of beauty the collection suggests. First a compliment: Kudos for not showcasing only white females (which would be all too easy in SL): both genders and different races were included. But there were no furries or non-human avatars, no fashion-extreme vamps. The notion of “beauty” was Benetton shop-window multiculturalism beauty: race is a fashion we put on–Look at me! I’m the African Jennifer Aniston!

But the most important questions remain unasked: What is the soul of beauty in Second Life? Does Second Life have its own standard of beauty? The people behind the beautiful avatars exhibit at least superficially address these issues:

The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, “artificial” light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world.

Such a description applies to every MMOG I have ever seen and most video games in general since the NES. It isn’t Second Life’s aesthetics at all; it’s video games. So we are still left to ask what Second Life’s aesthetic is.

They continue:

Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds, and questions the impact such technologies have on art and society.

While this still doesn’t get at anything in Second Life in particular–it seems to apply equally to text-based worlds like LamdaMOO–at least it brings up an interesting question (albeit one that has been asked in media studies circles for over a decade): How do simulated worlds “allow the creation of alternate identities”? More interesting (but not asked here) is how these alternate identities reflexively shape (or nihilistically pull the rug out from under) our “real” identities? And anyway (this is my question), how do a dozen or so extreme closeups of Second Life pixel-faces help us get at these issues?

They continue:

Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars’ icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and “traditional” art forms, and between art and life itself.

Heavy rhetoric, but what does it mean? The analogy to portraiture is interesting, but what is the significance of portraiture in a world where our virtual faces are botoxxed into immobility by a technologically enforced lack of facial expression? Second Life avatars are profoundly expressive, but it is a misplaced real-life assumption that the expressiveness is centered in the face. This is a major flaw in the exhibit. (Another flaw is hosting it in a perfect reconstruction of the actual RL museum exhibit. Note to the organizers: in RL museums, we don’t look with virtual 3D cameras floating 20 feet behind our heads, and your SL exhibit is in fact frustratingly incompatible with the everyday experience of being an avatar.)

I would argue that our true SL expressiveness comes not through the face but instead through (a) the disposition of the body as a whole–including race and gender, pose, fashion, accessories; (b) the backstories we provide ourselves in our profiles; and above all, (c) the words we say as we interact with our friends and the world through chat boxes and IM windows.

If I, in my way, embody some part of this “Second Life aesthetic,” look for it in my words and look at my whole body (in where and what it is doing); look not at my face (which can tell you only the most rudimentary things: that I am Asian). And then forget about me: look for it in the words and bodies of those avatars not possible or practical in RL: the furries, mermaids, winged vampires, aliens. Their aesthetic goes far beyond their 3D-mesh cheekbones and pretty-texture eyes. What do these avatars tell us about how people live in Second Life, about where people find (and create) beauty in virtual reality?

As it stands, the exhibit “Second Life’s 13 Most Beautiful Avatars” seems like a publicity stunt. Superficial notions of Second Life beauty can be passed off as “hip” for a now-credulous press, currently enamored with all those “cutting edge” people who are “driving” Web 2.0.

Even if they are, in fact, strangers here themselves.