Smarthistory: The Blog

Max Newbold and Sez Zabelin, smARThistory correspondents in Second Life, recently visited Alizarin Goldflake in her studio there:

Teleport from here.

To see the images larger, click on them.

Alizarin showed us her work and spoke to us about her process. She is exceptionally thoughtful and meticulous in her approach to making her dense poetic environments–and her art in turn inspires thoughtfulness. She told us that she tries “to get everything just right…if something is wrong it spoils the magic.” She spoke of working out aspects of her art, “tracing over my stuff alot. I think about [it] while i am walking the dog. I think about it most of the time.”

Alizarin Goldflake, Come Go With Me

Goldflake’s work has that same sense of fantasy, of stylized trees and natural forms, of symmetry, of reflections, and solitary contemplativeness that we know from the work of illustrators like Kay Nielsen and Maxfield Parrish, and the quietly profound, empty landscapes of American Luminist artists like Martin Johnson Heade.

Kay Nielsen’s “And then she lay on a little green patch in the midst of the gloomy thick wood” from East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Glodflake titles some of her work “Immersive Art.” And of course, art in Second Life is known for being interactive, immersive and kinetic. In an earlier post, we talked about how in Second Life, art often literally transports you, lifts you in the air, spins you around, drops you, moves your “body” for you — so that you become part of the work. And just as important, there is a particular (narcissistic?) pleasure in watching yourself within the art. A friend once told me that so much of Second Life was like being a kid again, and perhaps this explains the pleasure I so often feel in Second Life — taking part in this type of immersive, kinetic art (I couldn’t say “looking at the art” because it’s not that at all really, it’s like being carried away, taken on a surprising journey, perhaps it has something of the magic of being on a Merry-Go-Round as a child).

One of our favorites is Come Go with Me, which looks, from the outside like a giant round aquarium. When you enter, you are immersed in a watery green space of moving plants and dappled light. You can sit peacefully on the surface of the water.

Alizarin Goldflake, Come Go With Me

Maxfield Parrish, The Reservoir at Villa Falconieri

Max standing inside Riverbend

In this one, Riverbend, we walk into a circular space and a vast, symmetrical, landscape completely surrounds us and moves slowly by, reminiscent of the German Romantic painter Friedrich, who often painted image of figures with their back to the viewer so we are watching others watch — not dissimilar from art in Second Life.

And, since we are in Second Life, art can do things that are not-possible-in-real-life (NPIRL). We can, for example, walk into, or fall into, what seems like water and stay there without worrying about breathing. We can keep our avatars still as the work’s patterns move around us, and we can move our cameras to watch ourselves watching.

There is Immersive Art: Flutter — a floating globe that we can sit inside of. White particles (literally called particles in Second Life – scripts that look like moving forms, like smoke or rain or snow, or fire) explode from where we sit and transparent butterflies come forward from a blue background and move and fade away.

And in Immersive Art: Phosphoressence (below), our avatars fall into a giant tank of virtual water, and we sit, and forms that simultaneously suggest stars, galaxies and clouds outlined in bluish green all against black and azure backgrounds move past slowly, while sounds of thunder echo in the distance.

A relatively new work, Night Light (below), has two layers. In the layer below, we enter a cylinder of water with floating plants and a white fish who swims by.

In the layer above, one’s avatar lies on the surface of the water, like a virtual Ophelia. The symmetry, the colors of the evening, are all stunning. We can’t wait to see what else Alizarin does — and we look forward to exploring art in SL in upcoming posts.