Marion in Wonderland

Moving

2007-12-07T16:32:00.000Z

This blog is moving - to Wordpress. I have copied all my posts over to their new home, and will make some changes to the layout over the next few weeks.

My previous blog posts will stay here, but any future posts will be on the new site.

If you are reading this through a feed, please take a moment to re-direct the feed to the new address.

Thanks!

Tagged!

2007-12-04T20:11:00.000Z

I've been tagged by Caterin! Tag suggests school playgrounds, and little girls running round screaming, chanting rhymes like:

what's the time? five to nine
hang your knickers on the line
now its nearly half past ten
time to take them off again

Not that I'd associate Cat with such behaviour, of course.

Anyway, the rules of this tag game -

(1) Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
(2) People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
(3) At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
(4) Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So here's my eight ......

My favourite SL motto, which I saw on somebody's profile - "we're all here because we're not all there"

Speaking of playgrounds - Iko_Iko (the Dixie Cups version) is always playing somewhere in my head

Actually I entered SL mainly to show my FL photos, but it hasn't quite worked out like that

Like many others, I owe an awful lot to Natalia, for her friendship, encouragement and invaluable advice when I first landed in SL.

My SL gallery is in the wonderful and prestigious Cetus District, built and run by the excellent Xander Ruttan and Tricia Aferdita. Xander doesn't have a blog, but you can always get down there and tell him how good it is.

I do have an alt, but she never tells me anything.

Anything by Laura Nyro

None of your business

So, who to tag next? I seem to be running out of people, they've all been tagged already. There's Otenth, although goodness knows what the good people of Caledon would make of these goings-on. And, as the rules don't exclude non-SL blogs, Stephanie, who posts beautiful pictures, and knows far more about philosophy than I ever will.

Synchronicity

2007-12-03T20:50:00.000Z

In my last post I included a quotation from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Looking him up on Wikipedia (what would I do without it?), I came across The Book of Disquiet, a series of lyrical and melancholy observations from the perspective of one of Pessoa's alternate selves, Bernardo Soares – an obscure, philosophically inclined office clerk in 1920’s Lisbon – which was compiled from Pessoa’s papers after his death. The book is discussed on The Blog of Disquiet, in commentaries on individual passages in the book, contributed by several writers, which is now on my daily feed list. I have a theory, based only on my own experience, that the random acquisition of books, based on pure chance, or certainly nothing more than oblique hints, is often very fruitful. So at lunchtime last Friday (incidentally, the anniversary of Pessoa’s death) I went down the road to Dillon’s bookshop (the original one in Gower Street which is actually now part of the Waterstone’s chain, but will always be Dillon’s to me) and picked up a copy of The Book of Disquiet, which I have been reading ever since. I bought the translation by Margaret Jull Costa, whose name I recognised from her translations of other Portuguese and Spanish writers, but there is another translation by Richard Zenith, in which the text appears to be differently organised. Maybe I shall have to get both.

Anyway, on the train into London this morning, I read a beautiful passage on the age-old philosophical problem of recognising the existence of souls other than one’s own. The narrator (Soares) reflects on the death of a passing acquaintance, the tobacconist’s assistant:

I suppose no-one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on.
..............
On certain days, at certain times, with an awareness wafted to me on some unknown breeze, revealed to me by the opening of some secret door, I am suddenly conscious that the grocer on the corner is a spiritual being, that his assistant at the door, bending down over a sack of potatoes, truly is a soul capable of suffering.

Yesterday, when they told me that the assistant in the tobacconist's had committed suicide, I couldn't believe it. Poor lad, so he existed too!

The train was delayed, and when I reached Liverpool Street Underground station the platform was closed through overcrowding. As it was a bright sunny morning, I decided to walk through the City to Moorgate, to catch the Northern Line from there. The street was thick with crowds of commuters emerging from the station, and it was a while before I reached the entrance. At the moment when I got to the stairs down into the tube station, a woman leaning on crutches was slowly and painfully making her way up the steps towards me. I paused to wait for her (I didn’t really have much choice). At the top she stopped for breath, and smiled.

Seeing is Believing - Part 3

2007-11-27T10:04:00.000Z

I have been thinking more about the exhibitions I visited the other day, at the Photographer's Gallery. The introduction to Antoine d'Agata's show included a quotation from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:

what we see is not made up of what we are seeing but rather from what we are

which is quite possibly true, but a strange thought nonetheless. Looking at pictures like these, the idea that we are looking at ourselves, or rather images that we can only interpret through our own experience, is disturbing. It's also relevant to Fred Ressler's interpretation of his shadow pictures, in the Seeing is Believing exhibition. After commenting on this work in my first post on this subject, it was a pleasant surprise to get a response from the photographer himself.

I know very little about Pessoa - I first encountered his work in a dreamlike album by Bévinda of songs based on his poems. According to sources quoted in Wikipedia, he wrote under a large number of heteronyms (72!) , each possessing

distinct temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles

This statue sits outside one of the cafés he frequented (although not one I visited when I was in Lisbon, otherwise I would have a better picture to show you).

Seeing is Believing - Part 2

2007-11-23T13:04:00.000Z

The Photographers' Gallery is oddly laid out, with separate entrances to its two gallery spaces, and there are usually two exhibitions opening at the same time. So after looking at the Seeing is Believing show I described in my previous post, I went round to the café to look at Insomnia, an installation by the French photographer Antoine d'Agata. I'm not sure the café area is the ideal location; although a warning of "sexually explicit" images is displayed, it's something of an understatement. The wall is covered with a montage of several hundred framed pictures, mostly in a grainy, dark black and white, of night scenes, sex acts, desolate streets, and (incongruously?) a dead roe deer. Interestingly, in the video interview showing in the entrance, d'Agata is standing in front of the wall, with the deer image centre screen. The overall effect is haunting and disturbing, and sometimes threatening. Even the very ordinary apartment building below is mysterious - in the light of the many images surrounding it, I couldn't help wondering what is going on behind these blank darkened windows.

Many of d'Agata's pictures can be seen in his Magnum portfolio.

pictures © Antoine d'Agata/ Magnum Photos. No infringement intended.

Seeing is Believing - Part 1

2007-11-23T10:13:00.000Z

This is the title of a current show at the Photographers' Gallery in London, which I visited yesterday. I was more interested in the contemporary work in this exhibition than in the worthy archive of "psychic investigation" pictures, which wasn't really very well presented. It was interesting to compare the amateurish fakery of these pictures (ghostly shapes and floating tables) with the conscious manipulation of photographic technique to create "paranormal" effects in the modern pictures.

I particularly liked the work of Fred Ressler, who takes pictures of shadows falling on the walls of his house that show ghostly blurred faces, like this one, which apparently has an uncanny resemblance to a friend of the artist. I don't quite go along with his views on these images:

I see these images as projections from my unconscious corroborated by having them projected to me. I started seeing these photos as something beyond what any artist could do. The way the background complimented [sic] the foreground to form a unity with a group mind..... These beings are not under control as in art. They are not bound to function as in nature.

Really? Another one, called "Dylan", I and another visitor both thought could actually be an image of the great Bob, so perhaps there's something to it. Anyway, the pictures are very impressive. If the artist's ideas give him a rationale for making excellent images, who am I to argue?

Metamorphosis

2007-11-19T19:52:00.000Z

My friend Bacon Rolls has a show at the SL Museum of Contemporary Art, which is well worth seeing. Here is the introduction I wrote for the show.

The challenge of creating SL art from RL originals is not simply a matter of uploading images to hang in virtual galleries. The uploaded pictures filling so many SL galleries are in truth no more than copies – they are not the real thing. Bacon Rolls has created a bridge between “real” and “virtual” art, with bold, large-scale works which are both original to SL and explicitly based on the forms of his RL work, by translating his RL paintings into SL sculptures, and back again. This exhibition demonstrates the stages of this translation process in a series of images and sculptures that display consistency and variety.

Bacon’s RL paintings of land- and seascapes form both the inspiration and the raw material for his SL work. He translates the textures of his RL paintings into SL sculpties, abstracting their qualities of form and colour, and providing their surface appearance. Greens and blues predominate, evoking the colours of the original paintings. Bacon combines the pictures with their SL sculptie counterparts to create strikingly beautiful images that break out of the flat space that confined them in RL – echoing the work of RL artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg in exploring the relationship between two and three dimensions. This being Second Life, they can also defy gravity.

Bacon carries the process of translation further, downloading snapshot images of his Second Life creations, modifying them and then loading them back into Second Life for display as two-dimensional pictures which are clearly related to the RL landscapes they are derived from and yet have their own identity as abstract representations of the SL landscape.

More Walking

2007-11-07T08:56:00.000Z

This week I am out of the office, on a training course in the Holborn area, a good opportunity to see more of London. Incidentally it's close to the former offices (in Doughty Street) of Creative Camera magazine, where long ago I met its owner, Colin Osman, who was my first photographic mentor.

Here are a couple of pictures I took.

A shop window in Clerkenwell Road

Autumn trees in Gray's Inn gardens

Cetus Gallery Website

2007-10-19T19:48:00.000Z

Cetus Gallery District now has its own website with details of all the galleries and events, thanks to Tricia Aferdita's hard work. Things are developing at the gallery district, with a new cafe hosting live music events, and a Halloween party planned for next weekend.

Dead Flowers

2007-10-17T15:20:00.000Z

It's become a standing joke in my family that I am only interested in dead or dying flowers, but it seems I'm in good company. This is from a current exhibition at the James Hyman Gallery in London.

At the heart of the exhibition is Anya Gallaccio's Red on Green . This spectacularly vibrant work consists of 10,000 fragrant English tea roses on a bed of their stalks placed in a rectangle on the gallery floor. Inspired by the garden of love at the Chateau Villandry in France, Gallaccio explores the symbolism of plants and colours. Initially filling the gallery with perfume and colour, as the red roses die and change from red to black, this extraordinary, romantic gesture is transformed into a contemporary vanitas: an elegy to love.
The picture above is from the gallery website and was, I guess, taken when the exhibition opened. When I visited a couple of weeks later, I took a picture (yes, I did ask first). Thanks to Blogger, I couldn't upload it at first, but here it is -

Although the flowers were rather faded, their aroma was still very strong and, as the gallery assistant commented, not entirely pleasant. Unfortunately, I won't get back to see the final decay of the flowers, as the exhibition closes next week.

Disappearing Pictures

2007-10-12T09:50:00.000Z

My friend Goffredo de Cuir invited me to see his gallery, which is under development in kitsch fashion (his word, I'm not being rude, honestly). He has incorporated something I hadn't seen before, a fascinating technique for mounting pictures. You put your picture texture onto a standard prim surface, then put a glass texture onto the back and side surfaces. The result is an object on which the picture is visible from the front, but which is completely transparent when viewed from behind - the picture disappears and reappears as you walk round it! Goffredo kindly gave me a copy of the glass texture, and I couldn't wait to try this with one of my own pictures - I added a rotation script, so the picture comes and goes as it spins round. If I knew how, I would make a video demonstrating this, but it would be pretty boring to watch.

There must be a way I can use this in an exhibition.

The only explanation I can find for this phenomenon is that SL is fundamentally two-dimensional. Well, there's a thought.

Still Here

2007-10-10T09:56:00.000Z

I know, I know, it's a month since the last post, and since Caterin (who can be really bossy) mentions it, I'd better update this blog. I have been messing about with the layout, and put some stuff in, then took it out again because it made such a mess. The worst was some code from Amazon that picks up on words in the blog text and provides links to books, CDs and other stuff they sell. Some of the links were ok, like the lovely Minnie Ripperton, but others were ridiculous - a reference to Second Life was linked to a book about life in World War II ! Sort of logical, I suppose, if you just look at the words, but it's the sort of fundamental error that proves how stupid technology can be, particularly when it tries to be clever. So that came out pretty quickly.

I do use Amazon code for the album pictures on the right, and that works fine, although it gets a bit difficult when I buy records that even Amazon doesn't stock.

Being in central London, I am so lucky (not, perhaps, financially) to be near wonderful shops like Stern's - last week I picked up a gorgeous compilation of 1970's jazz from Ethiopia - and Sounds of the Universe, possibly the best record shop ever.

Also, I tried Twitter, and put a feed of my twitterings into the blog, but to be honest it got boring, so I took it out again.

Anyway, I have got things to write about, and will do just as soon as I get round to it, so hopefully you won't have to read yet another apologetic post.

Watch this space!

Walking

2007-09-11T09:39:00.000Z

"Walking" is a superb track from the classic Miles Davis album Winter in Europe 1967, which I recently downloaded.

This blog is moving away from an exclusively SL setting, as I become increasingly aware that life is not so easily divided between First and Second, and that Wonderland can be found in many places (mostly inside my head).

For three days last week, the London underground system was disrupted by a strike, causing chaos and fury among commuters (at least according to the press). I decided to avoid all that, and set out to walk the three miles or so from my office to the mainline train station. A friend does this walk every day, in both directions, but I only managed three homeward walks. The weather was glorious, with warm September sun lighting up the streets, and evening shadows lengthening eastwards in front of me as I walked. My route went through a succession of familiar places, past favourite streets, squares and buildings, making it more of a treat than a chore. Here are some of the places I walked:

Gordon Square

Herbrand Street

Queen Square (the Italian Hospital)

The Italian church, Clerkenwell Road

A 17th century charity school, Hatton Garden

Hatton Garden, Hatton Wall, Bleeding Heart Yard and Saffron Hill. Cowcross Street and Smithfield

Little Britain and St. Paul's Cathedral

Postman's Park, Staining Lane, Love Lane and London Wall, ending at Finsbury Circus:

The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart

2007-09-10T10:25:00.000Z

Since joining Second Life, I have come across several quotations and passages in books I am reading in my first life (although SL seriously eats into my reading time!), which strike me as relevant to my experience and feelings about life in this strange alternative world.
The title of this blog entry is a quotation from the 19th. century French poet Charles Baudelaire - I haven't yet been able to track down the particular work. It sums up a lot of my feelings about Second Life, and I guess the modern world in general. It is also the title of a recent book by the French poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud, a collection of poems about Paris.

UPDATE 10/09/2007 - Today I accidentally found a correct version of the Baudelaire reference in this article about poetry and cities:

Baudelaire captured this essential transience in a famous line from his poem “The Swan”: “La forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d’un mortel” [The form of a city / changes faster, alas, than the heart of a mortal]. And Jacques Roubaud picked it up with a slight variation (“La forme d’une ville change plus vite, helas, que le coeur des humains”) as the title for a book of 150 poems on Paris published in 2000.
Poetry City by Cole Swensen

The first quote starts at the top, with a brief exchange from Shakespeare's The Tempest - in the original Folio text. Pretentious? Moi??

Caliban reassures newcomers to Prospero's island, while they are more interested in the freebies:

Caliban:
Be not affeard, the Isle is full of noyses,
Sounds, and sweet aires, that giue delight and hurt not:
Sometimes a thousand twangling Instruments
Will hum about mine eares; and sometime voices,
That if I then had wak'd after long sleepe,
Will make me sleepe againe, and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and shew riches
Ready to drop vpon me, that when I wak'd
I cri'de to dreame againe.

Stephano:
This will proue a braue kingdome to me,
Where I shall haue my Musicke for nothing.

Next, from V. by Thomas Pynchon: Rachel Owlglass contemplates reflections in the New York waiting room of the plastic surgeon Shale Schoenmaker who is about to "correct" the Jewish nose of her friend Esther Harvitz (an operation which Rachel will reluctantly pay for):

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light, and be only, till death stopped the heart’s ticking (metronome’s music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp’s dance under the century’s own chandeliers. . . . .

From The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami: May Kasahara delivers some home truths to Toru Okada, who is seeking enlightenment at the bottom of a dried-up well:

"Hey, I'm still a kid, you know. . . . . But from what you just told me, I think you had the wrong idea from the very beginning. You know what I mean, Mr Wind-up Bird? What you were just talking about . . . . it's kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like, 'OK, now I'm gonna make a whole new world' or 'OK, now I'm gonna make a whole new self.' That's what I think. You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi'. You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else. Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-up Bird. You're a grown-up, aren't you? How come you don't get it? That's a big problem, if you ask me. And that’s what you’re being punished for – by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I remained silent, staring at the darkness that enveloped my feet. I didn’t know what to say.
“OK, Mr Wind-up Bird,” she said softly. “You go ahead and think. Think. Think.”
The cover snapped into place, and the well opening was blocked once again.

Finally, a melancholy poem, also from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, from Mr Honda, Toru Okada's onetime fortune teller ("Nomonhan" refers to the battle in which Mr Honda was wounded):

Dying is the only way
For you to float free
Nomonhan

Sweet Delight

2007-09-07T15:16:00.001Z

The reasons for my life are in a million faces
Like aching promises I feel them in my bones
Slipping through my fingers to dance upon the road
The reasons for my life are more than I can hold
But oh, the sweet delight to sing with all my might
To spark the inner light of wonder burning bright
You’re not alone
You’re not alone

The reasons for my life are buried in deep places
Words once could awaken them
These seeds that I have sown
Ringing through the madness to crash against the cold
The reasons for my life cannot be bought or sold

The reasons for my life are filling all my spaces
Like rushing waters flow, they carry me along
Twisting through my memory to pull free from the load
The reasons for my life are more than I was told

Reasons - Minnie Riperton

A Second Life Artwork

2007-08-31T10:34:00.000Z

The pictures I show in Second Life are just copies of my first life photos - although I'm pleased with the way they look, they're not the real thing. When I printed some up and framed them properly, the difference became clear - which is why I intend, when I get the time, to start making real prints available, via my own website. The Second Life version is always second best.

With artworks created in Second Life, it's a different story, as the objects created can only be seen in-world, and have to be judged in that context. Partly for that reason I haven't looked at them very much (since I know next to nothing about scripting and building), and haven't been greatly impressed with what I have seen - with one or two exceptions, such as Bacon Rolls' floating sculptures.

So when Velazquez Bonetto came to my gallery show, and offered to do my Second Life portrait, as he had already produced portraits of several avatars, I wasn't sure what to expect. The result is stunning, and these pictures don't do it justice.

The whole portrait rotates slowly, showing my avatar in different animations and colours, so it has to be seen in-world to be appreciated. Velazquez has it on show alongside his other creations at Diabolus Gallery - well worth a look. I also have a copy at my Cetus District gallery. Although certain people (mentioning no names) thought it a bit "egotistical" to be showing my own portrait, I just love it.

A Belated Update

2007-08-31T09:58:00.000Z

Here we are at the end of August, and only my second post of the month - I don't know where the time has gone. Although I've been on holidays in first life, and offline for a week or so, I have been doing things in Second Life.

My new exhibition, all flower pictures, is up at Cetus District. After messing around with the layout, I cut back on the garden effects. Siana Orca took me to an excellent place for buying plants and garden stuff, but in the end I didn't use it, as time was running out. Overall I think it looks pretty good, and visitors to my opening seemed to like it.

A few weeks ago, Becky Rawley offered me a space in her sim at Stockton Springs, where I have set up a second, smaller gallery. I'm still putting pictures up, and it should be done in a week or so. The Cetus District gallery will remain my main space for exhibitions, because it's a lovely place to be (although expensive!), but hopefully Stockton Springs will be a good place to keep some of my better photos on long-term display, and maybe even sell them.

Marion im Märchenland

2007-08-03T13:24:00.000Z

In idle moments, I look at my blog stats (such as they are) and follow through the links to see how people get to my blog. You'd be surprised at the number of people looking for quotes from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - is it a school text somewhere? Pictures of Miss Piggy are also popular, and the Wet Kitty is searched suprisingly often, since it's been called something else for months now.

Today I found this link, which appears to be an automatic translation of this blog into German (with the title Marion im Märchenland). Not knowing any German, I asked my friend Jil to look at it, and she thought it was a terrible translation - " a mess" in her words!

I'm not sure what I think about this. On the one hand, it's good to know that people with no knowledge of English can look at this blog, and hopefully understand some of it. But, and I think this is more important, what is the point if it is so badly translated? I flatter myself that I write with some style, and the thought that my writing can be so badly mangled by Google's super translation software makes me very uncomfortable. If anybody knows of any way to block the translations, I'd really like to know about it.

PS After first posting this, I suddenly realised I could get a French translation, by opening the French Google, and I found Marion au pays des merveilles. Quelle horreur!

Sky Blue

2007-07-31T12:31:00.000Z

An exciting day for me in RL yesterday, as I received my long-awaited copy of Sky Blue, the latest album from the Maria Schneider Orchestra. If you enjoy big-band jazz (well, I do), you should hear this - in my opinion Maria Schneider is composing and performing some of the most exciting and beautiful music around. Her CDs are available from her own website , which also has free downloads, and the ArtistShare label

Dreaming

2007-07-26T15:13:00.000Z

Dreaming is, among many other things, a wonderful, nostalgic and emotional song by John Lee Hooker, on his brilliant album The Healer, which is running through my head as I write.

It’s been so long since my last entry in this blog that people have been asking, and I’ve been wondering, if I am continuing to maintain it, and to keep my readers (both of them) entertained with my doings in Wonderland. The thing is that things have been going on, in both Second and First Life. In First Life I have stopped seeing my therapist (hurrah!) and become busy at work for the first time in about nine months, which is good since nothing is more depressing than enforced boredom, but it does make it harder to keep up with all the other things, like taking pictures, enjoying Second Life and writing about it. This week I had two 12-hour days in the office to meet a deadline, so I am now late in preparing for my next show at Cetus Galleries, which I had planned for this weekend.

The show isn’t quite right yet. Caterin came over yesterday and provided some helpful advice with her customary tact – it’s far too crowded, the water effect is overdone – which I will have to think about and make further changes over the next week. I’m very keen to get it right. So I will have to re-schedule the opening, for Sunday 5th August. I was hoping to get the excellent Kyle Beltran to play live, and he seemed happy to oblige, but it may not be possible to arrange a time convenient for both of us, since we’re 8 hours apart in RL time. Maybe we’ll do it another time.

The therapy thing. It was very useful, but now it’s not. It took a lot of talking sessions to make me realise I was acting the victim for most of my life, now I have to stop doing it, and the therapy itself was part of that, so it had to go. And, as Tweedledum (or Tweedledee) said, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." For another thing, he (my ex-therapist) is a very nice man, but he does wear socks with his sandals.

In Second Life…………..Second Life is like dreaming, except when it’s not. Caterin and I had a conversation about this a while ago, and she introduced me to the concept of “lucid dreaming”. The topic came up again last night when I was dancing with my friend Pablo, and I’ve been thinking some more about it. Dreams are just thoughts; they are no different from our waking thoughts, they are less inhibited, that’s all. This of course means that we can and often do dream things that our conscious mind would stop if it had the chance. When I go into Second Life, my conscious mind is partly on hold, less able to apply the brakes on what I think and do. Of course, I do purely practical stuff, like hanging pictures or paying rent. But a lot of the time, I’m in a dream landscape, seeing unreal things and interacting with people who are no more real than me, and who, for all I know, may not be there at all. If you go with the flow in Second Life, and allow things to happen, thoughts and desires come to the surface, and dreams take shape. Sometimes the dreams are delightful and entertaining (as it was dancing with Pablo). At other times they are dark and threatening, and expose the murky currents beneath.

More random thoughts to follow on this subject….

The Maze at the End of the World

2007-06-14T21:07:00.000Z

My friend Josina Burgess (aka Jose den Burger) took me to see an installation by her RL husband Jan van der Woning, who is a photographer specialising in panoramic pictures. He travels for Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, producing stunning and disturbing panoramas which depict the effects of climate change at the extreme ends of the earth, in Alaska and the Antarctic.

The pictures are arranged as a maze, so you have to walk into and through them (following the exit signs) from one scene of global devastation to the next, and you quickly get lost - the effect is both bewildering and alarming. These are the "drunk forests", where the melting permafrost causes the trees to fall down.

Of course you can always get out of there (by TP), unlike the real world.

Everyone should see this. The displays are all in Dutch (I think an English version is planned), but the pictures speak for themselves.

Alight for the Royal Institute of the Blind

2007-06-13T20:53:00.000Z

This is what the train announcer says as we pull into King's Cross tube station. I hear it every day, and I have yet to tire of it. I'm not sure what it means, which possibly makes it a good place to start this post.

I have been intending to write about gender and Second Life for some time. I made some references to it in my first couple of posts, but have mostly been silent on the subject. I wanted to write about the Transgender Resource Center, but soon realised that my own situation was so different from most of the regular visitors there that I couldn't do justice to the magnificent work being done by Jani Myriam and her volunteer helpers.

There are lots of transgendered Second Life residents, and I have been finding more of their blogs every day. Some of my favourites include Miss K, Cala, and Siobhan Curran (Kisa Naumova in SL). Reading their posts, and talking to Second Life friends, I decided I had nothing to hide, and should make my own position clear (well, less murky). I am male in first life (that is, most of the time) and female in Second Life. That's it. When I first joined (only six months ago - gosh!), it was primarily to show my photographs. But as soon as I realised I could select the gender of my avatar, I didn't hesitate, and here I am, as Marion. Being Marion undoubtedly enables me to express parts of my personality which don't get out much in first life, and I'm happy that way. I've never had a male avatar (but if you ever come across a Marlon Rickenbacker, say hello - he might be my twin brother). I really don't want to be associated with the games where people pretend to be the opposite gender for their own amusement (particularly as a dear friend was cruelly hurt by one such), and I will always give an honest answer when asked the G question.

This is the Transgender Pride Flag, and I'm proud to display it.

By the way, some idle googling in the office today turned up a real-life Marion Rickenbacker - a white male [!] who lived in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, and died in 1954, aged 48.

Gallery Opening and Talk

2007-05-24T22:00:00.000Z

OK, this post is the text of my talk in the Cetus Gallery District Community Center, which I gave, with illustrations, on Sunday 20th May.

I first acquired a camera when I was 17 – it was a revelation to me that I could make my own images, when I had thought I was incapable of any sort of artistic achievement.

I don’t come from an artistic family; the only exception that I know of was my grandfather, who had a studio in London before the first World War, making woodcuts and ornamental marquetry. This is a technique for cutting wood veneers of different colours into shapes and laying them onto a surface to create a design or picture.

I owe my interest in photography as a serious art form to Colin Osman, who was the owner and editor of Creative Camera magazine in the UK through the 1960’s and 70’s. I got to know him through doing some translations of work on Russian photographers, and he encouraged me to look at a wide range of pictures, giving me a real appreciation of the scope and potential of photographic art.

Learning about photography I was most impressed by the great documentary photographers of the 20th century – Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and many others, as well as photojournalists and war photographers such as Don McCullin or Philip Jones Griffiths. Growing up at the time of the Vietnam war, it was their images which brought home its sheer horror and pointlessness. In photographic terms it was not only their subject matter, but also their strong sense of composition and effective use of light that gave their images such power.

In terms of my own photography I find most satisfaction in images of the natural world. I think I draw most influences from landscape painters – I am a great fan of Turner – and American “fine art” photographers of the early 20th century – Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston among others. Since looking more closely at flower photography, I have been drawn to painters of floral subjects, from 17th century Dutch masters to Georgia O’Keeffe.

I take a fairly simplistic view of photographic technique. I think it’s important to compose my pictures as much as possible through the lens, and to avoid cropping. Obviously there are many occasions when cropping is necessary, but for the sort of “set-piece” pictures I enjoy taking, there shouldn’t be any reason for it.

I use both film and digital cameras, and view all my pictures on a computer. I try to use photo editing sparingly, for example to adjust contrast or brightness. Maybe I will learn to do more complex things with Photoshop in the future, but right now I don’t see the need. The original image is what matters most to me.

The first photos I showed in Second Life were a selection of macro close-ups of flowers, like this one, which I called "Faded Flowers". I deliberately chose flowers which were past their prime and losing their perfect shape, and I got as close as I could with a macro lens (a few centimetres) to emphasise shapes, colours and textures inside the flower, rather than the overall structure. The changing colours and shapes were to me more beautiful and interesting than the conventional images of flowers in their prime. In this peony, for example, the dying flower has a wider and richer range of reds and purples than the rather bland red of the original flower.
The next picture is the same flower 2-3 days later, when the purple has almost turned to black.
The ideas behind these pictures are not new. In a way they are my personal take on the “vanitas” paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries, designed to remind viewers that death waits for us all. This is a common theme, still used by modern artists. For example, a time-lapse video by Sam Taylor-Wood in London’s Tate Modern portrays the collapse and decomposition of a bowl of fruit.

I really enjoyed the taking of these pictures, getting my camera into awkward places, and peering into the intimate depths of flowers. This quotation from the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch expresses some of what I feel: “The excitement of this experience is that in taking a photograph the eye must adjust to a relatively small organism, like a flower; the eye must see, as it were, through the eyes of an insect, and see the world as they do”.

Imagine flying into this. Pink Floyd:

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

What I also like, and is important to me about these images is that people react to them in different ways. My pictures are not intended as objective records of anything, but rather as subjective images to be interpreted by you, the viewer.

It’s fundamental to our psychology that we are constantly ascribing meaning to the world around us, both consciously and unconsciously. That meaning is largely determined by our own individual backgrounds, personal histories and states of mind, not by any intrinsic quality in whatever we are looking at. A flower has its place in the world, but its “meaning” is entirely created by human perception.

When I look at an artwork, my conscious effort to give it meaning is shaped by a host of unconscious assumptions and feelings, which I project onto the image in front of me. So for me the important thing about my pictures is the relationship you the viewers have with it, and the meanings you give it. My picture is, hopefully, an act of communication, through which people can share ideas and emotions. It’s not a statement which I want you to understand; it’s more like a gesture which opens the door to dialogue.

Here's an example of what I mean:
This picture is on show in the Bing & Binder gallery, directly above mine. I called it “sad satin folds” since that was the comment from a friend when I posted it on Flickr. It makes me think of gypsy dancers – personally I find it quite romantic, even sentimental.

However, others have interpreted it differently – as sensual, or erotic, or even, according to one visitor to my gallery, as sexually explicit (I can’t see it myself ☺).

So you could either say that this picture is unsuccessful because it doesn’t convey a clear message, or that the various interpretations give it layers of ambiguous meaning, which develop as people comment on it. I’ll leave that for you to judge.

One of the things I like about showing pictures in Second Life is that I can play around with the scale, and make pictures appear to be much larger than would be feasible in RL. So these close-ups are many times the size of the actual flowers. Seeing them in Second Life has encouraged me to print them bigger, up to 10” x 8” (25 x 20cm). I am starting to take digital pictures in RAW format, which will allow for much larger prints.
The pictures currently on show in my gallery – which I hope you’ll visit after my talk – are not flower close-ups, but landscapes and street scenes. This one isn’t on show at the moment, but I wanted to show it here, as an example of my approach. I am really more interested in creating an atmosphere – a sort of “internal landscape” – than in accurate portrayal of a specific place, but I think this picture does a bit of both.

The location of a picture can be very important. Several of the pictures currently on show in my gallery (including this one) are from Dungeness, a bleak expanse of shingle on the south coast of England, which is home to a nature reserve, a small colony of artists, and a nuclear power station. I hope I have captured some of the atmosphere.

In this picture, which is also on show upstairs, the actual location is less important – it could be the coast of almost anywhere in the world.
This picture isn’t in the current show, although I have had it displayed in the gallery for a while. It’s a lot darker than the scene I photographed, and the image is further removed from the original location. I called this “No traveller returns”, as the quotation came into my head when I looked at it, and I think it fits.

…….. the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourne
No Traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.

Or, as Muddy Waters (I think) put it – “I’m sick of living, and I’m scared of dying”
Finally, this tree is from the countryside near my home. I love it, it’s my guardian angel. I used the sepia toning, not for an “antique” effect, but to emphasise the shapes created by the different shades of brown – rather like my grandfather’s marquetry pictures.

Vote for Cetus!

2007-05-15T10:54:00.000Z

Cetus Gallery District has been chosen as one of SL's 50 best places by the publishers of The Corsa Guide to Getting a (Second) Life.

Starting Wednesday 16th May, you'll find a voting kiosk on Ruttan Lane across from the new Community Center (just below my gallery). Voters will determine which of the nominated 50 will be honored as SL's Top Ten Places, to be singled out in the guide.

With so many cool places, we're honored to have been selected for the top 50!

Once More, With Feeling

2007-05-11T12:00:00.000Z

Again, I've been neglecting this blog, being so busy in first life - also, as the weather improves, getting out more and taking new photos. When I do get online, all my second life time is taken up with the gallery. The Cetus District is expanding fast, and galleries are opening all the time, with new openings and community events, which are increasingly well-attended. There's a fantastic range of interesting artworks on display. If you join the Cetus District Gallery Association (search Groups under "Cetus"), they'll send information and notices of group events.

I am installing a new set of pictures, and planning a new opening for Sunday 20th May. As part of the Association's events programme, I shall give an online presentation and talk about my photographs at 1pm SL time in the community centre, followed by the opening party in my gallery, complete with miraculously re-filling drinks, chocolates and other goodies. After the trauma of my first opening, I'm very apprehensive and nervous in case I crash again - here's hoping! I shall be badgering everyone on my friends list to come along. If I haven't met you in-world, I hope you can make it too.