We went to look at ‘Silence’, by Magda Schmidtzau, in a very beautiful space, at the La Maison D’aneli gallery, today…

… these works are gorgeous. Given the eclecticism of style, and based on our recent, year-long submersion in Mj, we surmise that some, if not all, aspects of these images were created using an AI art program…

… of course, that in no way detracts from the work… given our infatuation with the potential of the medium, that makes us appreciate them even more, because, if they have been done using AI, they are very good…

… we could be wrong, but when you have lived AI-generated art, and it’s wondrous potential for genuine, original work, for a whole year, as we just have, you recognise a certain feel. I tried contacting Magda (in the process discovering I’d bought one of her works, seven years ago), to ask her, but she was offline… I look forward to finding out if I am correct (no, I didn’t jump from third person, to first… when I say ‘we’, I mean the human, Flutter, and I)…

… however they are created, we were very taken by them, and loved this space, somewhere we don’t remember ever having come to, before…

… the works are very reasonably priced, for what we consider to be top-level SL art…

… and we had to stop ourselves from buying more than the two we did (:

As you know, our (the human, and I) passion is art-as-design (love of art for it’s visual impact), and not art-with-a-capital-A, art as an explanation of the cosmos, so we don’t really bother with the art-speak explanations when we look at art. For a great art-speak explanation, though, go here… this is an excellent publication I recently discovered (this article is, in fact, how I learned of this exhibition) that is dedicated to all things wonderful in SL (:

It’s a long time since I visited ‘Innsmouth‘, and it’s the first time, for Flutter…

… I’d forgotten how beautiful it is…

… the place has a definite ‘Silent Hill’ vibe…

… everything is shrouded in thick fog…

… creating wonderful, faded perspective, and muted colours, wherever you look…

… we strolled around for hours… Flutter was a bit nervous because Innsmouth has a bad history, but one of the advantages of being a 4000 year old ‘Demon’ is that there’s not much that scares me (:

My darling lepidoptera and I decided it was time to go and see ‘Skye Neist Point‘, again…

… believe it, or not, this is a shop display!…

… you can buy everything you see, here…

… Skye makes some of the best landscaping materials in SL…

… and this gorgeous place is testimony to what you could create with those materials…

… the scale of some of this stuff is brobdingnagian…

… and you are free to wander around and take pictures. There is so much potential, here, for fantasy photography…

… we might blog the castle, next post, although we have already done so, but it was a while ago, now… we’ve also already used this whole sim for posts (:

Over the past 5 days, Flutter and I have been spending hours standing in the same place in ‘DownTown‘…

… that’s because the lag/rez-time, here, is even worse than it is in New Babbage… here, we literally have to wait for an hour to get a fully-rezzed scene, and sometimes, even that isn’t enough time…

… we’re becoming quite adept at the zen art of standing still whilst reality coalesces out of the chaos…

… it’s actually very rewarding, these type of incredibly detailed builds are usually worth the wait to discover, something I seldom have the time to do, or, we just never really enjoyed this kind of shooting, but, now we are older, we are slightly more relaxed?…

… anyway, DownTown is a very well made ‘role-play’ sim, a grungey, post-something concrete jungle of quite despair/decay…

… with plenty of potential…

… for dramatic imagery (:

Flutters and I have recently spent some time re-discovering ‘The City-State of New Babbage‘…

… we don’t come here, much, and certainly have not been here for a long time… we usually find the lag and the rez time, here, to be soul-crushingly depressing…

… but this time, over two visits, we found those things to be as good as they’ve ever been, though, on the second visit, we still had to wait, literally, 20-30 minutes for a scene to fully rez…

… New Babbage is a huge, extremely consistent build, with a Victoriana/Steampunk theme…

… there’s a lot to see, here…

… with wonderfully photogenic architecture and structures…

… like Bay City, it’s one of those ‘old’ SL communities where you get the sense that a lot of people care for the place, and possibly live here…

… but you seldom see another being, here.