Tag: Artists

Bryn Oh Opens a New Artistic World in Sansar: “I See Our Movement As the Immersivists”

Canadian artist Bryn Oh (whose work in Second Life I have written about before) is opening a new art installation in Sansar on Friday, December 6th, 2019, on which she has been working over the past year, thanks to some financial assistance from the Ontario Arts Council.

Titled simply Hand, Bryn Oh describes the artwork as follows in a recent post to her blog:

Hand is the story of a girl named Flutter who carries something precious in a suitcase.  You follow her story in the same world that my others characters inhabit, and some of these you will recognize furthering their story and place within the world I have been working on for over a decade. 

Bryn created Hand to be best experienced in a VR headset, and she has some insightful observations on the use of virtual reality as an art form:

I believe that the virtual reality medium is a new art form which, in my case, focuses on immersion.  Throughout art history many artists have striven to immerse the viewer in their sculpture, painting or even cinema. They want you become lost in their artwork whether it be compositional methods such as the eyepath leading the viewer around a painting, to cinema where they turn off the lights, turn the sound up high with a screen large enough to reduce the peripheral vision distractions to a degree where the immersion is strongest. They overwhelm or control your senses, then tell you a story which, if well written, will take the viewer away from the world for a while.  We had the Cubists, Impressionists, Surrealists, Modernists and I see our movement as the Immersivists. 

Having been very impressed by Bryn’s art to date in both Second Life and Sansar, I look forward to experiencing her latest creation!

If you want to visit Hand, here is the Sansar Atlas entry for the world.

Cryptovoxels’ Burgeoning Art Scene

Were you aware that the blockchain-based virtual world Cryptovoxels has a flourishing art scene?

Commissioned Crypto Art Gallery by Alotta Money
(from a tweet by Conlan Rios)

More and more often, I see announcements about art galleries and installations in Cryptovoxels, both regular art and blockchain art (the production of which is described at length in this article). Good sources of information about openings and events are the official Cryptovoxels Twitter and Discord channels.

The PROOFofARTWORK Gallery by Hans Benzin in Cryptovoxels
(https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=E@261W,72N)

If you are looking for galleries to explore, I can suggest no better place to start than Listed: Blockchain Art Galleries on Cryptovoxels.com, a directory of approximately forty galleries to visit. Or you can take the new Cryptovoxels Art Tour (CAT), which has an official guide book to approximately 30 art galleries. You can hop directly into each gallery from the guide book!

Limited-Edition Art Gallery by Jonathan the Designer (from the Listed list above)

Art Plunge: Step Inside Famous Works of Art in Virtual Reality

I just love VR apps about fine art and artists! Art Plunge is a short but satisfying program for the Oculus Go, Gear VR, and Google Daydream, which is now also available for the Oculus Rift VR headset.

Art Plunge allows you to actually step into three-dimensional versions of five famous paintings in the history of Western art:

You can’t move around while you are inside the painting, but you can tilt your head from side to side, look around you, etc. In the Mona Lisa, Mona’s gaze follows you are you move your head from side to side, a subtle but realistic touch! It almost feels as if Mona is patiently waiting for you to speak to her. Very effective.

The app is only CAD$2.29, so what have you got to lose? Give it a try! I loved it, and I only wish I could step into more paintings. Perhaps the developers will issue an expansion pack sometime in the future. I would definitely pay more to be able to step into some more famous paintings!

Occupy White Walls Now Allows You to Submit Artist Suggestions

Occupy White Walls (OWW for short) just keeps getting better and better. OWW allows you to create your own gallery and curate an art collection, pulling from a catalogue of thousands of artworks, from the ancient to the modern. People are doing insanely creative things with the platform (see the pictures here and here).

Occupy White Walls is working to expand the catalogue of art from which users can select items to display in their galleries. I am on their mailing list, and in a recent email they announced:

In June we added 461 public domain artworks and many artworks from contemporary artists too!

And, in response to user requests, you can now submit artist suggestions to OWW for them to consider adding to the game. They do caution:

While we love all art, sometimes it is not possible to have them in game, an example of this would be artists who died less than 70 years ago and are not in the public domain in their country of origin. Images need to me 2MB or larger in file size.

Here’s the form. You can submit as many different artists as you wish. I intend to use it to suggest some of my favourite Renaissance artists to OWW!

You can download Occupy White Walls for free from Steam.