Innovations in SL (in no particular order) 1 - Ramonia

My good friend Aleister Kronos asked in his blog the other day for suggestions as to the top 5 innovations in SL.

He came up with his top 5, & I came up with a few more. I've decided to write a series of blog articles on the various innovations. The challenge to fulfil is "Show me somewhere that represents the most innovative use of Second Life."

So, my first entry, and one which is always fun to visit, is Adam Ramon's sculpture park at Ramonia. I have already reviewed some of Adam's work in my previous blog entry... Art Installations

Adam has worked with Mashup Islander to produce an amazing number of sculptures.... or perhaps the correct word should be "installations" within SL. Each of the works involves an interaction space, and a set of sounds - be they musical notes, or spoken word. Interacting with the sculpture causes it to make new and interesting sounds.

Now some of these works could have been created in RL, but they would have been horrendously expensive, and actually quite dfficult to realise. Within SL, it is quite straightforward to script something that will drop balls when touched.... have the balls bounce off chimes on the sculpture, then have the balls disappear as they touch the ground. Falling balls can be achieved in RL, but not ones which disapear soon after use. Here's a picture I took of one of Adam's works on display in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in the Neufreistadt sim.




Another of Adam abd Mashup's works is the piece Cantata Park 1..... There is a good article about the artists at www.justvirtual.com from which I have pinched this description....

Cantata Park 1 by Metamatic is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant’s movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time. The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life’s construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar. Cantata Park was produced in December 2006 Copyright 2006, Metamatic Collective

I had a rather excellent evening a while ago, visiting the sculpture park on Marni (Ramonia) with some friends. We were all able to fly through the work, triggering all sorts of interesting sounts....again, an act which would not be possible in RL.

So there's my first example of innovation in SL.... a set of sculptures that react to the user; that could possibly be realised in RL, but which are far more accessible, interesting an FUN for beng created in SL.