The Ant Farm Sessions

It’s been nine months  since Medici University ended, June 30th, 2015.

The LEA grants for the last half of 2015 included Art Farm Co op in which some of the avatars that were at MU participated. The group for both was VB Friends. As someone told me a few weeks ago, it is VB Friends, not VB Art or VB Creativity.

I felt it was important to document my time at MU in this blog and there were a few readers who would check in occasionally.  I also kept an under-the-radar blog for my own memories during Art Farm Co op. I mentioned it to a few people a couple of times.

I picked up an unknown reader for the blog, someone in the US, and am relieved they never shared their identity.

It’s been three months since Art Farm Co-op ended and I’m now sharing the link to the blog I kept about it.

The Ant Farm Sessions

Finale

The Drinking and Drawing final reception was yesterday evening. I took lots of photos and uploaded quite a few to Flickr. These are the rest of them.I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who showed up for it. It’s great when we support each other and also a sense of closure is needed.We didn’t talk much about the drawings and that’s fine. It wasn’t a critique.We decided to march around campus and go to the river. RMarie handed out torches that people could fire breath with.We ended up underwater in the slough for a while.

 

There were a lot of available prims since people have been taking studios down. Neeva temporarily used all but eleven to make a tumbling tower which we watched from underwater.

 

After a while there was little conversation. It was very late. But we stood around on the hill, reluctant to leave. Everything needs to be gone from LEA 23 by midnight SLT.

But many of us have been transformed by this and it won’t be the end really.

 

 

 

Final Weekend

On the final Sunday afternoon stroll around MU. This is a large copy of my thank you photo sitting on my studio plot. Many studios look the same as they ever were; others have been downsized very recently to minimalist displays of the latest works.Nearby in Vashti is art from the Emotion in Art classes.

Laserskater’s studio is gone and this was remaining.

RMarie Beedit’s studio.Muse Beck’s studio.Elle Thorkveld’s

 

 

 

Made Me Smile

I’d given four of my glitch photos to Seraphim Placebo, curator of the Placebo Gallery and was pleasantly surprised to see them in her private collection exhibit. Sometimes it’s these little things.

 

Oh Give Those Useless Eaters Some Cake

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for months. The photos were taken on the photoshoot that Van Caerndow did when he was preparing to do the portrait he painted of me.

I thought of these photos when I felt angry and disgusted and wanted to write a sarcastic post. There were many such occasions to do so, not necessarily about MU but about attitudes in the world of SL blogging and such. Snobs, elitists and those who are dismissive of the creativity and rights of others, I dislike them in real life and also in virtual worlds.

I would have done it in story form and written an exaggerated diatribe along the lines of the ridiculous, narcissistic, exclusive attitudes that I read about. But I’m not angry this weekend. I’m very much engaged with a new project and have no reason to poke around and stir up old pain and wounds. But I’ve sure enjoyed writing imaginary stories in my head over the last few months to go with this title and these pictures.  I saw something online the other day–a quote–something like how in a world that profits off our insecurity and self-doubt, it’s an act of rebellion to accept ourselves as we are and choose to grow as we see fit.

I Knew This Day Would Arrive

Earlier today I learned that my favorite virtual destination for almost four years is closing  this day. I don’t feel sad; I have great memories and lots of photos of this place. It’s one of the places I liked to make sure that new SL friends got to see. I also don’t really feel sad that MU is shutting down. I have good memories of it and it’s transformed me in some ways. Now it’s up to me to carry on and make the changes in my creativity that it’s inspired me to.I wouldn’t have gone to Roche today because I have a lot to do in real life and I knew there would be others there but I’d deleted the video clips I’d made of it when I first started learning machinima a little while ago. They came nowhere close to doing it justice. Even though I knew this day would arrive I thought I’d have a little more time to improve my skills and do a better job of capturing the beauty of Roche.

I went back and filmed around people as best I could. There’s a lot of footage and it will take quite a bit of editing but I’m so glad I made time to do this.

I uploaded my Newton Out of Context slideshow video. The avatar Newton is very photogenic and also quite interesting so I included some (out of context) quotes along with his images overlayed with destination and art images. Most of the art is mine; there are some drawings by Trilby Minotaur and RMarie Beedit too. I had the inspiration to do this and worked on it all of one Friday night about two weeks ago. 

 

 

 

Lucia at Zombie MU

 

I was going to write a third and final episode to my Lucia/Zombie story but MU and it’s website is sort of a ghost town by now and like many others I’ve pretty much moved on. I want to show the pictures I took with the Lab’s mesh zombie avatars on campus. I had fun with this photo shoot. The picture above was taken in front of my studio at Vashti 4. This was taken at the Writers’ Lounge.This was taken at the MU Gallery.This was taken at the Drinking and Drawing (and also Life Drawing) Gallery where I never was able to get my drawings up. The art on the left is by Trilby Minotaur and on the right is my RMarie Beedit.Here the zombie guy is looking at the painting Van Caerndow did of me on the kiosk.Here the girl zombie explores RMarie Beedit’s studio.In Eupa’s studio.In Veyot’s studio. In Michael Green’s studio. In the story I was going to write something about a zombie with a cloud of blue hair. I barely know Michael Green and don’t know if he has a sense of humor or takes himself very seriously and would have been offended. There are some MU learners who are quite tetchy.

I love the Cezanne-like painting with the cell phone in it. And finally, inside my studio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Week

Sunday I attended the MUGA Machinima opening. I couldn’t figure out how to use the screens properly and watched the videos online. Most of them I’ve seen. I’d intended to submit the one I did of Newton but had run out of space to upload to Vimeo for the week. Instead I uploaded a slide show of Venexia I photographed just before it closed and didn’t mention it.I’d linked six drawings to a panel for the Drinking and Drawing show because I simply can’t deal with placing anything individually on the MU grid. Then it turned out to be four or five drawings so I edited it. I set the panel to the side. Later Trilby moved some things around so I could put my panel up on the wall. After struggling to open a package of Paleo Wraps in real life I didn’t feel like messing with this anymore and I’m really tired of explaining this to people.My landlady wants me to use the Shotgun House in Eaton as a gallery but that will be a while. The doors don’t close on their own so I know that people wander in all the time.

I posted the Tai Chi Mastery certificate I made for Elle on MU Talk and the MU Documentary Flickr group. For me, Elle is the best example of an ideal MU participant.

I saw Bryn Oh at SL12B. I was checking out the role play info for Asphyxiation Point. They have fabulous rain at their exhibit and it makes little splashes on the ground. But Danger! Role play in virtual reality has been a huge disappointment for me.I almost landed on Fushcia Nightfire when I teleported in to her SL12B exhibit. And I took down my studio along with the stuff I had at the tai chi dojo. Now except for the drawings at the Drinking and Drawing wall, all my stuff is cleaned up.

 

 

 

This Week

This will be a long and random post. Above is the photo I took of Art Oluja at City Inside Out. That is her written piece she’s looking at. I gradually got the idea of doing a machinima about it after first wondering if any of the story board writings would work.

I didn’t save the first one properly and then deleted a bunch of the components to keep my new laptop organized so I can find stuff. I can’t figure out how to make folders in this one. And then I had to redo most of my work.

Now that MU is winding down, my landlady has been patiently waiting for me to have more time to assist with property maintenance. She wants to see if the pod boat owner would like to use this place in Montara as a stop. So we tried out several different docks before settling on this one. It had to be positioned right so Governor Linden would stop sending it back to my Lost and Found folder.Then there is the 512 snowlands property where I have my small build platform. Land has been sold next door and the new neighbors have put up ugly ban lines. So Kate doesn’t want to hang out in the yard anymore and got a bigger house for us to be indoors. It is a Shotgun house by Culprit. And it is a Louisiana type house, not for snowlands but it does have a fireplace. And this is SL. We can have any kind of house anywhere. She thinks it would make a nice gallery. And that wouldn’t use up so many prims since I use the build platform too. I put a rug in, and my plant stand with hibiscus. I made it smaller than the giant one at my studio. I actually looked up the care of hibiscus online. They can grow indoors with warmth and it’s recommended to be in a south or western window so I placed it in this west window near the fire place.I went to the visiting artist talk at MU but after eating carbs I had to go crash after an hour. My drawing for class this week which was to be something musical. This is my drawing and I’m sticking with it.Newton stopped by my studio on Friday night so I snapped pics of him in front of the white backdrop to make some double exposure pictures. I liked them so well that I was inspired to make a machinima of still photos and out of context quotes by him. I used a lot of my drawings as the second photo as well as places I’ve photographed around SL.Like this. This is so much fun!

I’ve cancelled the rest of the tai chi classes for the semester. I gave Elle her certificate of mastery and will post it to MU Talk later on. And I still have my collection of zombie artists at MU photos. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them yet.

Soon this blog will be shut down. I will likely start another one in a few months to document my creativity.

I’m so glad I wrote all this. Even if I never look at it again.

Double Exposure Stills

The above photo was taken at City Inside Out and Lost City. I blended both photos in Picmonkey, using one of them as an added texture. I watched a tutorial about it, which I’m not sure is available to users of the free version. It’s fairly simple to figure out; I just hadn’t ever thought of it.

Picmonkey is one of the few subscriptions I have of all the tools on the internet. (I’ve also purchased Fraps.) Contact me inworld if you have questions.

I’m simply not willing to use my mental bandwidth on things like Photoshop at this time and I’m not a snob about which applications I use.  Like playing with glitch art last week, I gave myself a crash course in this double exposure technique.  I used different settings than in the tutorial which may be more suited for real life photos.

Trilby Minotaur is one of the avatars in my new machinima. I photographed them in front of a white panel. So much of what I do is on the fly; I photographed snow on the ground in Eaton, on Sansara, for the texture.

I snapped still shots on location at LEA 20.

It takes, patience, luck, tweaking and a good eye for what you like.

I’m in the very beginning stages of learning machinima and this is something I can do now to help  bring my vision to manifestation in my art.