Scripted plants

Tethered Plants
Originally uploaded by Snowy Hoobinoo

After playing with some kinetic scripts and plants/flowers there was an idea that I had sketched (more doodled) a while back of flower heads being tethered to a rooted base.
I had the idea after coming across a couple into bondage, the mistress was leading her slave around by the collar with a chain link that appeared to sag in the middle and had physics. After looking all over for a tether script I went back to the source and went on the hunt for a bondage tether script, and guess what?! There's a whole group dedicated to bringing open source bdsm equipment to the SL masses (just search for opensource bdsm), anyway one collar and it's script later and a few hours messing with it I managed to come up with the above. I really wanted to sort out a nice hover script for the flower heads, I tried the swarm scripts but they all sort of clumped together, the ones in the video are controlled using an RC helicopter script!

The point of all this is that I wanted to create a serious of kinetic and interactive plants/tree's and flowers that provide a base that can be built and layered up to produce some really stunning nature pieces in SL, at some point i'll box all these up and make them available, hopefully someone might pick them up and really run with it..

Kinetic Tree's

Fluid Tree
Originally uploaded by Snowy Hoobinoo

While looking into the organics and movements of squid I was playing around with a few prims and scripts to try and replicate these movements in SL. The original idea was to use these across a plane to create the idea of a moving mass along the land but once I got it all moving it just looked so out of place that I had to use them in other structures.

So I decided to form them together into this tree structure, i've been wanting to produce kinetic trees and plants for a fair while but couldn't find the movement I wanted. This is almost exactly what I wanted, the concept of a tree that's constantly writhing, always reforming itself.It's a little script heavy at the moment (about 30 odd!) and needs refining, i'd really like to get the tree to randomly rez itself. 

While I was looking at the finished tree I decided to have a play at filming too, I was suprised at how easy it was! using xfire and windows movie maker I was able to knock up a quick vid of the tree in minutes.

Window to the Avatar soul, a zero prim SL art display.

The above image is of my Avatars eyes in SL, it's a cliched reference but I needed it to make my point......the past few weeks i've been looking through people's profiles and exploring the Ascii art within, most of it is the usual hearts or neko ears but it got me thinking about what I wanted to communicate through my profile. How to show/tell someone who I am through a few lines of general text.

Squint closely at the above and you'll see the ascii text, click through to my profile and the story begins to unfold....

I ended up hand typing an ascii tree to fill the about me and continued up through the the photo with the beginnings of the tree's branches......

Carry on through to my interests a few lines of a poem appear (why not Haiku's for interests!:)) and hint at the meaning to the piece......

In my 1st life is the branch holding the hidden sapling that glows it's light through the profile and out through the eyes of my av, below is the edge of the tree placing the small home into shadow but looked over by the sapling above.

The story carries on, parts are tucked away throughout SL and come out into prims when they need be.....;)  It could all do with a polish but I wanted to experiment pushing out through the boundaries of communication in SL and what it could do. 

The hidden lives of furniture

When I was younger I would often lay on my back looking up at the furniture in our house and imagine walkways, ladders and the homes of whoever or whatever lived there, etching out their existence on the unused and unseen surfaces. Then one day I tacked along on a trip to the dump and came across the huge pyramid of abandoned furniture there, I stood looking through the legs of chairs, bedside cabinets and into the darkness that was the heart of the pile, looking for the hidden city that must be tucked away inside.......

Anyway, for a long time in SL i've been looking at the relationship that the home, house and furniture have upon the avatars that own or use them. Many houses in SL are exact copies of their RL counterparts along with the living spaces and furniture used to fill them, as avatars we are expected to navigate these spaces and interact with the object within in much the same way that we physically do in RL.

This has been playing on my mind for a long time, almost since my rez day as to how, in a world with near limitless possibilites we are still expected to live and work in a set template of structures, why do homes have roofs when there's no rain, no privacy and everyone can fly for example?

Perhaps a thinktank could be brought together to produce an architectural housing structure that would fit and specs and needs of avatars in a virtual world with SL's abilities.

In the meantime I have been working on this piece based on old sketches and ideas of how we may live in a world with no rules or cares, how would we adapt to fill these spaces when physics and shape can be morphed into any form? Perhaps at night when you go to bed the kites begin flying from under your tables....

Meat Landscape

A while ago someone gave me some art magazines they were throwing out to flick through, among the articles were a few pages on the artist Paul Emsley and his amazing water colour paintings of Rhino's, in the interview they described how he approached these paintings as landscapes. 

White rhino by Paul Emsley

This got me to thinking as to how I might be able to transfer this technique in reverse towards creating a work in SL, by taking photo's of parts of my body and using these as textures for a landscape scene.

Build based on fingers and knuckles

The result is a very alien almost obscene look to all the plants and parts of the scene, while I kept all the usual repetition/symetrics and based each part of the build loosely on a RL concept (such as fingers)  the textures add a new layer that helps change the viewers perception.

Overall i've tried to link myself to my work in a macabre way which is what i've been looking at doing for a long time.

This was origionally meant as a temporary experiment and so has no permanent place to really expand upon the theme, though for the time being you can find it under the Brooklyn is watching sim here for a short time.