April 9 -- Second Life

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The UM brown-bag group went to see an art exhibition.

People built renditions of RL art in SL.

Here are two versions of Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles.

We could walk right in..........







Esher. I walked up some steps, but then.....



flew up to see the higher parts.





This one was animated. The crank turned, the white triangle things rotated. I didn't notice if the birds went up and down....









This was one of my favorites. It doesn't show well here, unfortunately. The sprinklers were animated; they looked much more like actual sprinklers "in person" than they do in this image.





I suppose one just gets used to the things one can do in SL that one cannot do in RL, if one spends enough time there, but I am still amused at being able to ...



... sit on the art.





Oldenburg.





This one's for you, Dad.







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February 5 -- second life

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On the 5th, the UM Second Life brown bag group went to Australia for an exhibit of portraits which was commissioned by the Australian National Portrait Gallery.

As I remember the details, there are exhibits in real life, as well as in Second Life....

There were five different artists.

As we were trying to get a taste of all of it, we didn't do any of it for very long, and I have to confess that I don't know ... what their point was ... in depth.....

I believe this one was about the choices people make as to how they look in Second Life. I find this to be an interesting topic. I often think "Since you can look however you'd like to look, why did you make *that* choice?"

Here are three of the UM group, watching a video. The experienced Second-Lifers in the group were impressed that the video was also making marks on the floor.





A different artist's work. I don't know what the point was.

I like all the luminous cubes.





Isn't it excellent that we can fly up and look around from inside the middle of it?





A look at most of our tour group, in yet another artist's area. The wings belong to a person who is mostly person-shaped, but with a cat's head.......

This installation seemed to me to do the best job of integrating real life and second life, and of using different sorts of information.

You could enter a name, and it would go out on the web and run a search engine to see what it could find about the name. Then it would make those floating shapes, one for each reference to that name. The shapes had the name attached, and also made music. Any person there could delete any shape they wanted to delete.....

Our tour organizer had told us that the names we looked up would be in the shapes, so we didn't use our own names. Lots of "Adam Smith" and so on.........

Lots of layers of abstract/concrete, SecondLife/RealLife going on here, as well as interesting things to look at and to hear.......





And again, from up inside part of the work.



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January 29 -- Second Life

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I visited Second Life on January 29 for the first time in months. Can you see the snow falling, over on the left?





The UM SL brownbag group went to something that was called The Bronx Manhattan.

It was the grittiest place I've been.

It's a mark of my shallow nature that I don't want gritty icky stuff in my fiction.

My view is that there is (WAY) more than a gracious plenty of gritty icky stuff in reality, and I don't need to take in any more of it in my spare time.

Someone clearly spent a lot of time/energy/money building this space. There were lots of people there, not just the UM group, including a couple of people one of our group accurately described later as trolls............

To me it is odd that people would choose to spend time in a place like this. I hung around out of politeness to the organizer of the expedition, but if I'd been by myself, I would have left after about two minutes..........

I'll spare you the trolls and the dead bodies................





One could, in an academic sort of way, admire the amount of work that was done.....





There were some interesting things to look at.





The long tan pipe-y thing is the arm attached to the hand in the prev.





We found what looked like a shopping area, where, oddly, all the signage was in German............

I decided to get some altitude, to see what I could see...........





I wonder why the texture never showed up on her arm.....

When you first get to a new place, it can take quite a while for it to load on your computer. It is often the case that things begin as gray shapes, and then the color and texture that clothes the shape shows up later. This looks like the Lady never quite finished loading.............





After a bit more looking around we went back to Wolverine Island, and debriefed.

It was felt by some that there was value in taking a group of students to experience a slum in a safe way.

I don't know if I have too much imagination or what, but sheesh. Doesn't everyone watch tv? Movies? Haven't we seen the dead bodies and the trash and the grafitti and, yes, even the trolls?

I don't choose to watch icky stuff on tv, and I don't choose to read about it, and I don't choose to go to see it in Second Life, either.

Not sure what visiting a slum is teaching me that I don't already know...........


Remembering many (MANY) conversations of yore about Art, and about whether icky stuff is more properly the subject of Art than pleasant or beautiful stuff........

It's clear that there are people who find some kind of value in voluntarily exposing themselves to ickiness, but I don't get it.

Spending time/money/energy to make people go "eeuwwhhh" -- I don't get it. I mean, I can imagine that people want to do that to others, but why do people want to expose themselves to it? If everyone felt the way I do, there'd be no market for it and fewer people would do it................

Baffles me.

In any case, all of us were relieved to get to Wolverine and breathe some nice clean Michigan air!

(Interesting that all of us felt dirty after virtually! being in that icky place......)



Anyway.

A couple of weeks ago they went to Casablanca.

So I went there. Nice and clean and empty (of trolls, or anyone else but moi).

Lots and lots of cool tiles...............











Now this makes sense to me. Someone spent time and energy and money making this, so people can see it and go "ahhhhhhhhh."



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SL -- Genome Island

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I arrived on Genome Island standing in the water by this map.

Gene pool?





There is a very big model of a cell.





The external membrane is transparent; we are inside, and can see out as well as seeing the parts of the cell.





I believe there is more active teaching going on here than anywhere else I've been.

This sign is near the giant cell. The yellow cube floats and rotates, and when you click on it (or one of its fellows), it gives you instructions for how to do something in SL. I learned how to zoom my camera out much farther than I had been able to using other tools I know about.

Excellent.





The SL hints are great, but as you would guess the real teaching focus is on genetics.

Here we see two of a group of student project boards.

Interesting how coat color can come with various and sundry other issues.....







Back to the teaching. How could we have Genome Island without Mendel's peas?





The teaching here is much more interactive than I have seen in some other places. You click on things, and get (visible) data about what happens next in whatever sequence of events you are studying.





An excellent large animated art piece. All of this was swirling around and changing color.........











Can you see that the sign says "Human Genome"? The chromosomes were labeled, but the labels did not photograph. Our friends X and Y are on the right. Poor old Y is not only ... short ... but looks rather ... simple.............





I hadn't been thinking of myself as uninformed on this topic, but I was struck by how little I know as I explored this island.................





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SL -- coping with shopping glitches

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The UM SL brownbag on April 10 was about things that can go wrong when you are shopping in SL, and how to work on making it right.

It was informative.

As I still have not bought anything, it was all theoretical for me.

And not so interesting from a photographic perspective as visiting a planetarium.....

One of our regulars had a fish circling her head, today.

(She told us she'd seen a falcon from her RL office, which is not too far from the very tall off-campus apt. building I lived in for years. I wonder if falcons nest there, now. Wouldn't it be cool to see falcons? I thought it would have been cool and timely if she could have had a falcon circling her SL head......)

We are seated on the lowest level of the library on Wolverine Island. You can see stairs going up, on the right.





Playing with the camera, looking for something to shoot.

These sorts of shots are interesting to me -- maybe because I can't take them in RL....

Tables in SL can be very smart (and friendly). Some of them always have at least one empty chair. When a person sits down, another chair is added.





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SL -- JPL, NASA

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The UM Friday SL brownbag group went to JPL/NASA's island on April 3.





There is a planetarium inside this model of the sun.

We arrived in SL on the platform just outside the planetarium entrance.





You can use the map beside the platform to tell the planetarium where you live. It will mark your location on its model of Earth, so you can tell which part of the sky is overhead for you.





This is what the inside looks like. There is a model of the earth, and there is a transparent floor. You can see me, pretty much in the center of the pic, standing on the transparent floor.

The "person" in orange is a "planetarium guide."

You could ask questions like "where is Mars?" and the planetarium would show you.





Here you can see more of the other UM people in the planetarium.

It was kinda weird looking at the earth from this polar perspective. Greenland unmistakeable, but then figuring out everything else wasn't trivial, I found, looking down from on top.





Here is what happened when I asked the planetarium "where is Orion?"

You can see the brown skinny triangular thing pointing at Ann Arbor on the globe.





After a bit, we left the plantarium and explored. Underneath the plantarium are models of the planets in our solar system.

It's interesting to compare the "journalistic" pics I take of the group, and then the pics I take when I go back alone, later, and have more leeway to get just what I want in the pic...........









Did you know Jupiter has 62 moons? I was thinking 12 or 15..... Bet those sort of numbers are the "Galilean moons" -- visible using the equipment Galileo had......





JPL in RL is in the desert.

My buddy Leslie lives in Tucson, and recently had an unfortunate encounter of the cactus kind.

Hope you are feeling less like a pin cushion today, Leslie!





A new telescope is going up. The James Webb Space Telescope's mirror is much bigger than Hubble's, but it will only do infra-red light (Hubble does IR, visible, and UV.)





There is a lot of info about Martian landings. Martian dust devils are much larger and more powerful than those here on Earth.

You can "ride" inside a Martian dust devil...........







Looks like fun, no?

No. But not nearly as distressing to the balance system as it would be in RL!



A side note that JPL/NASA is *packed* with stuff. Like RL, it can be darn hard to find a nice clear plain background for my intended subject!



Leaving JPL/NASA for a neighboring island, we happen across a nice waterfall.

At the top. See the eagle, gliding by?





And from the bottom.



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