L1Aura Loire/Lori Landay
Artist Statement

THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY, or FROM THE GLOOM METEOR
The pieces in this installation, made for the sixth birthday celebration of Second Life in response to the theme, The Future of Virtual Worlds, evolved out of my experience building at the installation site. The "meteor" sims are all dark, barren, unlike the bright sunshine that characterizes so much of SL, and the gloom really got to me. I preferred building on my own land, in the sunshine, surrounded by the trees, water, and flowers I have come to love. I guess I experienced virtual seasonal affective disorder, because I found being at the meteor oppressive and disheartening.

I incorporated this into my narrative, into what virtual experiences the poor, stuck meteor people might choose, and pondered this as I built each of the sculptures that represent their virtual worlds, which are immersive experiences in what they do not have, shaped by a nostalgia for what they cannot possibly remember because it was never theirs, but which is very much theirs through the virtual simulations.

You can fly between the sculptures, or click your way from poseball to poseball by camming around. Experiment with mouselook and different points of view.

Peony Envy
This sculpty uses an image from an online bulb and plant catalog, Dutch Gardens, what I call "flower porn." The poseball contains a yoga pose from the Massachusetts General Hospital/Mind-Body Institute Study on teaching people the Relaxation Response in Second Life. It was by participating in that study that I first connected with nature in the virtual world, and made my first friendships.

Desert Place
This piece was really the turning point of the build for me, when some combination of the meteor gloom and unforeseen emotional upheaval reminded me of the Robert Frost poem, "Desert Places." It makes use of an experiment I've been playing with: using friends' rez dates for the numbers in particle scripts to make different colors and effects.

Burst
The tex for this one is a photograph taken by NASA of the sun: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/sun_skylab.gif and the sound is a recording of the solar wind made by Voyager 1 and available at: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/voyager-sound.html. Thanks for that sound, Sage Duncan! The solar flare particle burst is based on Misprint Thursday's rez date, and she did in fact illuminate my process with her help, in equal parts of practical, creative, and humorous.

WaterView
Standing at the apex of the build, this clickable offers a vantage point from which to view the installation as well as the surrounding builds. The texture on the outside is a photograph of the Boston Public Garden, verdant and watery, but is transparent from within. The poseball contains another yoga pose from the Mind/Body class.

Memory as Misappropriation
The title of this piece is historian George Lipsitz's phrase for how people take television shows and other texts from the past and substitute them for memories and nostalgia because they give us a convenient past that we like. This sums up the relationship to the past that the meteor people have forged visually and experientially through their use of the images and other fragments from the ancient disc, not really memories, but then they become them, virtual immersive experiences they have that are so different from their meteor lives, but are interwoven seamlessly in them, in their dreams, in the very fabric of the their minds' eyes, down to the cushions of the chairs on which they recline.

ARTIST STATEMENT - VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY IN 2009 - PICTURES -