I visited the ‘Natural History Museum of Vienna‘, this morning. It’s many years since I was here last, but it’s not changed much. I don’t think the Bryn Oh exhibition was here, then, she wasn’t very famous when I was here last, though, I could be wrong, and it may have been here; that’s how long ago I visited here, though, so long ago it’s all a bit vague*. This is a very old-SL-style build, three dimensional aspects represented by two dimensional images applied to the faces of prims. This looks delightfully dated, now, but has, for me, the same appeal as remembering what sound sounded like from a valve radio (yes, my human remembers that)…

… it’s worth a visit here, just for the hallucinogenic optics of the place. Several of the rooms aren’t actually ‘rooms’ with 3D objects and real (SL-real) dimensions, they are actually photographs that you step into. This is a wonderfully, though odd, trippy experience…

… you step from a prim faceted reality, into a very weird, slightly disorienting visual illusion. I have no idea how these rooms are actually constructed, just that it’s pointless trying to adjust your ‘hover height’ to cope with the sudden experience of hovering above everything. As you move into a room, your mind kind of compensates for the disparity of the visuals, and it all begins to feel right…

… the rooms themselves are a delight. Being photos of real museum rooms, they feel incredibly like every such room my human has ever been in, right down to their gorgeously fusty datedness. The human has found that every museum environment it has ever experienced was stunningly modernised… 25 years earlier!…

… the dinosaurs are out in the actually constructed rooms. These beasties are obvious labours of painstaking craftsmanship. This Diplodocus is 157 prims! All the skeletons have similar prim counts, which is probably why most of the building itself is just textures on flat prims…

… there are some lovely wall displays…

… to inspire wonder and thought…

… but I have to confess to becoming fixated on the more hallucinogenic aspects of the place. At times I felt like I was Alice, and this was Wonderland, which, I guess, is a fine way to feel in a museum…

… climbing to the roof was like emerging into the set for ‘Inception‘…

… Inception meets Alice in Wonderland. When photography is your passion in SL, you soon notice that SL has very strange visual dynamics, very similar to video game visual dynamics… perspective is very plastic in SL. On the roof of the Natural History Museum of Vienna, the rules of perspective crash into the rules of reality, including backward inscriptions on the building face…

… I loved it!…

… careful cropping can get interesting results…

… less careful cropping gets even more interesting results (:

*Annie Brightstar kindly informed me that Bryn Oh’s installation was there, 11 years ago. Just as well I know not to trust my defective memory (:

I visited Where Our Journey Begins, this morning. This is a very conventional, scenic sim, no fantasy trees, here. When they are well done, I love these kinds of sims as much as I love the whimsical ones…

… which isn’t to say there isn’t the odd touch of whimsy, here, too…

… this is a lovely place to explore, plenty of delightful little scenes to discover…

… hidden vistas to find…

… being an island, it has many delightful coastal spots…

… where you can relax and breath in the sea air, listening to the wheeling seabirds, and talking to the more friendly ones.

I visited Lightning Bolt, today. I was straight away struck by the attention to small detail, here…

… then, by how much very charming cuteness there is here. Not cloying, kittens on cupcakes, cuteness (who doesn’t like kittens on cupcakes!?), but wonderful, whimsical cuteness…

… like these guys. There’s so much sweet stuff here, the colours, the little compositions of critters and scenery…

… there’s cats and dogs and dragons and reindeer and orcas. However, the thing I found most captivating was a little house full of food and puppies (and some ferrets)… it actually has so much food in it, it made me think about an interview I once read with Evelyn Waugh, where he was asked why he spent so much time describing food in ‘Brideshead Revisited’, and he said it was because he was poor, and always hungry, when he wrote it. I hope the creator of this sim isn’t going hungry…

… I didn’t check (which isn’t like me), but I’m guessing this little house is a rare gacha, it has that feel. It made me really smile, it’s so homey and welcoming. I spent as long in this house as I did in the rest of the sim…

… it was so comfortable, and relaxing…

… so obviously made and decorated with love…

… I especially enjoyed spending time with these lovely ladies. I have my own set of these cuties, and they are some of my most-loved gacha… they always make me smile…

… Lightning Bolt is a really sweet place, with lots of wonderful, small details. I haven’t been so smitten with a sim for a long time (:

Last night I visited the Haus Museum of Art. Downstairs is mostly traditional masters, which are nice, but I don’t really go to SL galleries to see traditional masters…

… what I love in SL is contemporary, SL art. There was a bit of this on the ground floor, as well as some SL fashion…

… upstairs was all contemporary art and culture, covering a wide range of genre…

… if I have to see RL art in SL, then this is the type of art I love to see…

… though, as an avi whose human has a graphic design degree, and had copyright law drummed relentlessly into them, I still react to the dubious legalities of seeing images, especially unsigned ones, by heavy hitters like James Jean and Nagabe, displayed in these galleries…

… though that doesn’t stop me enjoying seeing such stunning work. I love what this gallery seems to be attempting, to present a very wide snapshot of art, across many genre…

… and the presentation is beautiful and engaging. There’s even a wonderful homage to the ‘Portal’ games…

… complete with interactive gun turret, plaintively asking ‘Is anyone there?’ as it tries to kill you.

So, for a destination blogger, it is currently impossible not to know about Skrunda-2, as everyone seems to be blogging about it, so I thought I’d better go and check it out, too…

… it’s an abandoned, over-grown town, where nature is reclaiming what man has cast aside…

… something I really liked about this build is that it feels like contemporary abandonment, it feels like a real abandoned town, not a post-apocalyptic build, you don’t expect to see any zombies here, just wild animals…

… there is a lot of wonderful wall art, here…

… which adds to the contemporary feel of the place…

… plus equally wonderful sculptural art, in hidden places…

… I spent a good couple of hours here, it’s a very engaging build, with far too many photogenic opportunities for one post.

I visited Nostalgia Falls, today. One of the first things you see at the landing point is a huge, steaming locomotive, seemingly trapped in place by massive spider webs… just past that, at the dock, is a fairly hefty fishing boat, also stuck in place by large webs… I told myself I really didn’t want to run into those spiders…

… heading away from the dock, things become far less gloomy…

… in fact, they become stunningly autumnal…

… really pretty…

… with the prettiest planet in our system suspiciously close to Earth, in the sky…

… there are gorgeous little scenes, wherever you look…

… there’s a lot crammed into this little sim, I just got hooked on the autumnal gorgeousness, but there’s a little village, tombs, a carousel, a bombed out building…

… and a big old house full of ghoulish critters. In front of that house is a graveyard, and the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic playground, complete with bleeding zombie girl. Plenty to keep your camera snapping, and all very nicely blended together.

I spent the morning installing a new exhibition at Placebo Gallery. The exhibition is called ‘Imaginary Landscapes’, and consists of my eight latest works, where I have further explored one of my favourite themes, landscapes created from textures…

… although there are actual RL landscape elements incorporated in my textures, most are not landscape elements, in themselves, rather, they are photographs of concrete, sand, plants, clouds, rust, timber… all blended and mixed and reblended, till I weave them into these wonderful, rich, fantasy landscapes…

… they are landscapes from my mind, distant shores of the imagination, where you might find the ruins of civilisations vanished millennia ago…

… places where there are three suns and five moons…

… where there may be life, but not as Jim would know it…

… places you could spend the rest of your years exploring, not quite sure how you arrived there, in the first place. Something about looking at some pictures in a gallery?

Today I visited The Land of Thor, specifically to look at an exhibition in the Midgard Gallery, that Inara Pey had recently blogged about…

… the images in this exhibition are some of the freshest, truely delightful works I have seen in SL for a long time…

… really sweet whimsy…

… wonderfully engaging imagery that manages to totally avoid the cliched feel of a lot of this type of work I see in SL…

… I really loved all the rabbi-centric (my own word (: ) images in this exhibition…

… upstairs was an equally fresh set of work based on J G Ballard’s, then, ground-breaking novel ‘Crash’…

… if you’ve ever read the book, you’ll see the connection. However, having found ‘Crash’ to be Ballard’s least engaging novel, I find these works to be a much less grim depiction of the theme… if you didn’t know they were a homage to the eroticisation of auto-accident injuries, you’d find them quite joyous.

I visited ValiumSL, yesterday…

… the whole place made me expect to run into an armed mob wearing trump clan markings…

… but they must have all been off building a wall, somewhere…

… leaving the town deserted, except for tourists…

… who may, or may not, come to visit the gallery, here.

I visited the Vordun Museum and Gallery, last evening. I haven’t been here since their ‘Floating World’ exhibition, some time last year, or possibly even the year before. The Vordun is a very elegant gallery, very much like an RL ‘High Art’ gallery. The only thing I don’t like about it is the fact they force a HUD on you, as you enter… there’s no request, it’s just forced on you, and I find this gross lack of etiquette to be strangely at odds with the otherwise very sophisticated environment. I find it so invasive and irritating that I instantly remove it and anything it may have had to offer me, so, in that respect, it’s totally counterproductive of them to force it on me in the first place. Ok, I just needed to say that…

… the gallery is beautifully designed, the spaces are mostly quite intimate, and wonderfully visual…

… by which I mean the spaces themselves are visual, not just the art works that are in them…

… the works are displayed on various, perfectly coloured walls, with excellent lighting…

… the works are all old masters. You can buy many of them in the gallery shop, so I’m assuming they are all in the ‘Creative Commons’, otherwise selling them would be copyright infringement… I’ve seen plenty of that, as far as selling ‘Art’ goes, in SL, but would assume a gallery as obviously dedicated to a ‘High Art’ aesthetic as the Vordun, wouldn’t be selling work it shouldn’t be selling…

… the art works themselves are gorgeous reproductions, with deep, rich colours…

… there is a wide variety of mediums, from oils, to woodblock and etching…

… and even paired themes, like above, where there is a display of works depicting people playing instruments, alongside a beautiful display of classical and Renaissance instruments.