window shopper

I do a lot of window-shopping, in SL that is. I do it for real too and it’s for similar reason in both cases, I’m poor, both in SL and RL, plus I’m also fascinated with the whole art of the shop window; and it is art. It’s something that’s usually overlooked, taken for granted or not even seen at all.

I think they influence us more than we think, even if you think you haven’t paid any attention to it, I reckon, at the very least,  you’ve probably registered it at some subliminal level. It’s the first thing people see on approaching a shop or wherever it is, not just the name of the shop but how the outside looks, is dressed, and the window-display is all part of that.

I can’t say I know what makes a well-dressed window, what elements make it work, but I know when I see one if it’s good or not, or if someone’s made an effort, been creative, clever, imaginative, and also who they’re appealing too. I especially enjoy Christmas time for this. Some go to amazing lengths to make a window that draws you in, even if it’s not a shop you usually or ever go into, their display can still be a feast for the eyes.

It’s something I find the online world just hasn’t got to grips with and can’t quite do anyway in the same way. Most homepages, which is like the shop window equivalent, are so often dull, bland, or over-crowded, messy, with way too much going on, or confusing or simply useless. In SL, window-displays are not as common as you might think, not many people seem to bother with them. Sure, they have signs and such, but actual window displays, something to initially grab your attention, are lacking. I’ve found a few on my travels and I know there are more but one has to rely mostly on chance to find them.

By extension, I also know window-shopping can simply be browsing instore without actually buying anything, but the term itself has come from the window-display, almost a digest or summary of what that store is all about.

I’ve posted a few photos here of window displays taken during my window-shopping travels, and I’ll be doing more for future blog posts. Rather dimly of me though, I forgot to label what shops these actually were, so in future I’ll try and remember to do so. It’s important to capture the moment as some displays change regularly, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.

 

© Anan Eebus

"lingua abstractica" art exhibition

{This exhibition is now over, thanks for taking an interest}

Welcome to another art exhibition of mine I've been lucky enough to be offered an opportunity to display at the Sisi Biedermann Gallery & Gardens in Second life. 

Through this collection I'm attempting to extract the fundamentals from what is often overlooked in an increasingly distracted and distracting world, to rediscover the tangible through simply being in a space without being bombarded by all the peripheral noise. 

I hope this collection of my paintings can make you think or maybe even take you away for a short time from the craziness of the world and of overthinking and help find a still place inside yourself. Through these images I'm offering one way in which to navigate the madness of pandemics, lockdowns and divisiveness.

 

 

 

‘broken songs’ art exhibition

{This exhibition is now over, thanks for taking an interest}

 
Good news!
I have a new collection of artwork on show at Yr Helyg gallery in Second Life (SL).

I’ve always drawn and sketched and doodled, and a few years ago I took up being a life model for local art classes and recently with lockdown and all I decided to brush up on my own canvas skills, so, with the help of an online art course as the pandemic restrictions at the time made it impossible for face-to-face classes to even run it became one of my personal lockdown challenges, to get some formal training in it.

I’ve been doing more abstract art for years and photography, for which I’ve also had some SL exhibitions, and some design work inside and outside of SL but now I thought there was time to get some more proper training in actual painting and this collections is some of the results. They are watercolour on canvas and I’ve entitled the collection “broken songs”, a theme loosely-influenced by how music evokes memories and transports us back to important or special places and times in your lives.

I hope you might find time to visit the gallery and enjoy your time there. You can visit them at the slurl, http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Vinefields%20Paradise/92/96/22
where you’ll also find artwork from other artists in this brand new creatives gallery.

Anan~x

xmascellany #19

Just the one photo today to wish you all a
 **Happy and Peaceful Christmas**
especially after the year we've had, it's been real and real weird. My hunt for the lost snowflakes continues but I am getting warmer and warmer and warmer . . . . . . . . 

 love and hugs to you all {xxx}
 

can’t see the prims for the mesh

One could choose to be prim and proper, or one could choose to be a complete mesh…

In two world and in two minds it’s sometimes hard to reconcile one within the other or one without. While some have chose the latter to go mesh in toto, clothes, skin and shape and who knows probably mind, though what a mesh-mind is like is something far to tangled to contemplate, while others retain the old school tie, so to speak, 100 % prim, and also quite possibly in mind too. Then there are those who mix-and-match, pick-and-choose, bits of this and bits of that and try and make them fit which is tricky as mesh and prims are rarely made to meet each other’s eye. So, a little tinkering and cheating is required to make an almost seamless join.

Primmers may choose to keep their skin and shape while choosing mostly mesh clothes, sometimes making a bit of a mesh-mash but with careful stitching can usually be made to seem organic and natural. Meanwhile meshers don’t have this dilemma and just go all-in mesh-mad even with their heads. Now there’s a tricky thing, a mesh body with a prim, or what I’d call normal, head but as long as you tone your skin just right it’s not insurmountable. Especially that still mesh heads come with few variations and you can end up looking like a hundred or a thousand others: a world of doppelgangers!

Of course some mesh clothes and bits and bobs are made to fit prim bodies and just as well as even mesh bodies are slippery things and finding the right mesh clothes to even vaguely fit is a humongously uninviting challenge.

Now, to mesh hair, which is debatable at best insofar as does it really work as well as prim hair? The jury’s out probably and no one likes their hair to be dissed. But, mesh hair works best when short and only certain long or medium styles look halfway decent with so many looking ill-fitting, clumsy, clunky and clompy, if any hair can be either of those things It does have a habit of looking like it’s been glued down with tons of hairspray, being that it doesn’t actually move. This is partly solved when mesh is mixed with some prim to give it some flexi, and a flyaway touch when moving, perhaps a more natural look and probably feel, after all we all feel, even in Second Life.

The biggest problem for mesh is we all have different computers with different computing power and mesh, as opposed to prims, needs lots, and I mean lots! Otherwise you wind up surrounded by two-dimensional coloured human shapes or even more disturbing, distorted clothing gone awry sometimes absolutely massive unable to resolve in your screen because basically they are over-scripted, and you’re under-powered. So SL can seem even more alien than it usually is with a plethora of mishapes (or meshapes) because mesh needs more than most of us SL’ers have.

This problem doesn’t happen with prims and the now largely left behind sculpties never really sat too comfortably being they weren’t actually the shape they appeared and were in-disguised, invisible massive blocks that you either kept bumping into or walking through which made you think you had some superpower, and made a mockery of walls, making them pretty much superfluous along with everything else that was supposed to be a solid object. It could look good but interacting with it was impossible. Prims are undoubtedly the most screen and computer-friendly, the sculpt too in that sense but not very interactive-friendly, with mesh being proper memory-gobblers, slow to resolve and can sometimes go hugely mental, hence, not so screen and computer-friendly. Unless you’re an evil genius with the most powerful computer in the world stealing everyone else’s computing power! Mwahahahahahahaha!

Of course, if you’re not into SL you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about and think I’m just making it all up or talking on tongues. So, just take my word for it: there’s mesh, there’s prims, and sometimes there’s sculpties and they all go together like a blind-date gone wrong, when all the two parties can’t wait to do is politely make ones excuses and leave.

ps…. prims are ‘primitives’, visual 3D object with predefined parameter used as the building blocks in SL to make basically everything lok and interact the way they do.

pps…. can’t be bothered to define anything else LOL.

© Anan Eebus 2019

self-fulfilling- a second life of photos

            I’ve been organizing what I hadn’t realized is an enormous archive of photos I’ve taken in Second Life, and am still adding too weekly and sometimes even daily.  It’s insane to discover they number in the thousands. Yes, thousands.  I was also shocked when I checked. 
            Luckily I have image software in which I can view and catalogue them by date or title, size, however pretty much I need too.  I am renaming them more accurately than they have been when I saved them automatically at the time, and they go back to 2009 which is the earliest photo I have though I remember taking a couple though not many before in the few months before that but I don’t seem to have those anymore, in my archive or inworld, more’s the pity as I remember distinctly taking a picture of my avatar on the second or third day in SL when I first realized I could take photos.  How basic and raw I must have looked then hardly knowing a thing about how to interact or live inworld. 
            It’s been kind of a mixed experience, which by the way I’m still doing, a little each day as it’s so vast there’s no way I could do it all at once, evoking memories and emotions of all kinds, some good, some not so good, some ugly, some maybe I’d wish to forget but then again maybe I shouldn’t as they all happened to me and are part of me however they felt at the time so there’s a place for them too. 
            I also knew I’d been through a lot, and as a consequence I think learned a lot too and hopefully gained a whole lot more perspective in SL in how to live there in conjunction with RL, real life, the real world, and basically not let it get to me in the ways it has in the past when I really should’ve perhaps just shrugged more off than I did than carry it like it was more important than what it really was. I continue to live and learn but only going back through all these photographs do I realise how much and how intense it got at time. 
            The happy times are many, but there are also sad ones too, especially when I’ve lost people to them leaving SL usually which incidentally I’ve never done and have been here since I first ever joined in February 2008.  Yes, all that time ago, though for the first maybe three months hardly spent any time here but then come the summer I started probably what I’d call my SL journey proper. 
            Most of my photos unsurprisingly have me as the prime subject, but they regularly include others I’ve known and the things we did, including portrait shots not just of myself like I say but also friends for their profiles or whatever reason they’d commissioned me to take them for, being I am a professional photographer and artist in SL too.  I do though have a record of me, as in my avatar, throughout my time here and all the physical changes I went through and something really obvious is I’ve always had blue hair, and still do, and I remember having  decided on that for some reason within my first week inworld.  I’ve accumulated many hairstyles over the years but the colour remained the same in various hues of blue. I also noticed that I haven’t actually changed that much, just updated to looking less of a newbie to something a little more individual. 
            I’ve included just the one photo here from the thousands, which as hard to choose, but this one evoked a moment in 2010 when I really felt things were collapsing around me, a very intensely emotional time and I was writing a resignation letter, not just from my vampire clan inworld but maybe even from SL.  Clearly I didn’t, though I did write the letter and think I still might have it somewhere, which has to be my next task to try some time to catalogue all my SL writings such as those for clan including vampire stuff, for my gallery also and who knows what else may be lurking there still. 
            There’s of course the other reason why sorting through all these photos takes time, seeing them arouses these very emotions, losses, fears, sadnesses and also good times, funny times, loving times too, of which there have been and still are many, and it’s a lot to feel and take in all those years at any one time. So, it’s best I spread it out over however long it takes. 
           Anyway, just thought I’d share this with you all, or anyone who even reads my blog, it’s fascinating particularly so as SL is real and it isn’t, such a strange state of being.

© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder