It wasn't a gift

[2011-10-09 11:26:59]
Kev Sweetwater: Thank you for this gift, Treasure
Treasure Box: My pleasure.
Treasure Box: It was more a personal tradition.
Kev Sweetwater: =)
Kev Sweetwater: maybe we can burn some other stuff more often
Treasure Box: lol
Treasure Box: I said "tradition".... Not "psychosis"....  ;)
Kev Sweetwater: hahaha

It wasn't a gift.

A gift comes from an overflowing cup.  My cup is empty.  When you give up something that you need, it is a sacrifice.  So, it wasn't a gift.  It was a sacrifice.

But it was not a sacrifice for the event or for the principles of the event or for anyone at all.  It was a sacrifice to That Which Is.  It was my rite of worship.

2011 Burn2 Temple, built by Damanios Thetan

When Kell contacted me this year about burning the Temple again, I was already swamped.  I told her it would take at least a week out of my schedule.  It took three solid weeks.

In those three weeks, I wrestled with design decisions, cussed at bugs, berated myself for making a commitment I could not afford, and cried in anguish for falling short of my own expectations.

When I scripted the burn for the first time in 2007, it took me four or five very long days to script and to test.  The day before the event was to start, we were left without Man or Temple, so I was scripting as the event was going on.  And I had to burn both The Man and the Temple.

It's not that simple anymore.  In the quest for a more realistic burn, I've tried to innovate and create some new technique or new way to do some part of it.

I raised the bar for myself every year.

In 2008, Damanios added glass to the Temple design, so I experimented with breaking glass.  The broken shards were particles.

It was the year my grandmother passed away and I was triggering the burn from a little Internet cafe in a small rural town in the Philippines.  The trigger wasn't coordinated by script.  Poid Mahovlich had to help me trigger each piece.

In 2009, I coordinated the trigger by "cocking" the scripts to listen for a code, switched to prim glass shards, added sparklers for the "bones" inside the temple at the start of the burn, and introduced the megaprim fire, which was a disobedience of the explicit rule that megaprims not be used in the event that year.  But there was no way I could achieve the same effect with 10x10x10 prims.  The flexy prim was a simple and elegant way of simulating the movement of fire.  And with glow and transparency, the dark silhouettes of the objects inside created a dramatic effect.  I overheard someone in the audience say that it was the best use of megaprims he had seen yet.  Somehow, that comment justified my transgression.

But the burn had now become much more complex.

It was also the year I became disillusioned about the whole event.  I was reprimanded because I blogged about my disagreement with their plans to desecrate the Temple and turn it into another party venue.  That reprimand made me feel like a hired hand who should shut up and just do as we were told.  Except we weren't really "hired" because we weren't paid.  Neither did we volunteer on our own; we were asked to do it.  I could have left; instead, I chose to stay because I had made a commitment.  But the work became emotionally painful.

After the burn, Damanios said, "I was worried your heart wasn't in it, but you proved me wrong."  It wasn't that my heart wasn't in it.  It was that my heart was broken.

I didn't think I could handle another burn.

When Kell asked me this year, I was torn.  I really couldn't afford to do it, but it felt as though a long-lost lover was asking to be taken back.  Damanios already agreed, and I had told Poid in the past that I'd burn any Temple Dama builds, so I chose to say yes.

This year's coordinators are much nicer; the issue this year was time and personal resources.  I had to give up a timeshare week that I had scheduled months ago.  I had to postpone projects that I am already behind on.  And because it was on such short notice, I didn't have time to think about the design or to experiment.

There had been significant improvements in the Linden Scripting Language to make scripts more efficient, so I knew that I had to rewrite all the scripts at the very least.  But there had to be something innovative somehow.

So this year, the censer played an important role in the burn itself.  I started with the idea of paper boats and I changed my mind.  It was serene, but standing water doesn't make sense in a desert.  I was playing with llTargetOmega on child prims when the objects in their orbits reminded me of planets, and that, in turn, reminded me of an old collectible Christmas ornament that I created for the International Spaceflight Museum in 2007.  Touching the ornament would change the sphere into the sun or moon or any of the planets.  And that's where the Lotus Suns idea came from, except I used the texture map of Venus instead.

Messages in the Lotus Suns inside the Temple.

If you didn't witness the actual burn, this is what happened....

When the burn was triggered, the messages were shouted out in public chat, which is the tradition.  In the past, each pod burns by itself after the messages it holds are shouted out.  This year, the lotus sun pods were pulled into the center sun which grew slightly with each pod crash.  At the same time, the lava-like fluid in the censer bowl started rising at the center towards the sun.  By the time the last pod crashed, the tip of the rising fluid had already reached the center sun.

The rest of the fluid was then "slurped" into the sun, which grew even faster and finally burst, as flames shot out towards the four outer structures of the Temple.  A few moments later, the outer structures burst into flames and the glass broke into pieces.  And the fire started.

In the past, I had always wished I could add a "story" about how the fire starts, instead of chalking it up to spontaneous combustion.  This year, I finally did.

I used megaprim fires again, and even though we could edit megaprims now, I decided to let the fire prims fade in, instead of growing in size.  That was an aesthetic decision.  This year, I also added fire licks, which took me a while to experiment with, and I'm still not entirely happy with it.

Start of burn, soon after the whoosh.

I had to cut some corners, so to speak, with the main burn, because I was short on time and because I was keeping the whole burn efficient.  Even on the day of the burn, I was tweaking settings and rewriting code.

[2011-10-09 12:03:44]
Treasure Box: I wish I had more time.
Kev Sweetwater: well you got a year till 2012 is needed  =)
Treasure Box: lmao
Treasure Box: Only if Dama is building.
Treasure Box: And he already said he wouldn't again.  :)
Kev Sweetwater: eh we'll see
Treasure Box: lmao

[2011-10-09 12:10:10]
Damanios Thetan: He's asking me for next year too... and told him i don't do it unless Treasure can burn it ;)
Treasure Box: omg
Treasure Box: That's practically a commitment!
Damanios Thetan: no... not really

*sigh*

If Dama and I keep pointing at each other as the condition for agreeing to doing it again next year, we're in trouble.  Thankfully, Dama won't commit because of his schedule.

It isn't so easy for me.  The burning of the Temple has acquired a spiritual significance.  To be asked to do it feels like a higher calling.  I cannot say no.  Even if it requires me to make a sacrifice.  Even if it consumes me.  All I can do is require conditions to be met.


I have a whole year to think up conditions to be met....  :D

Burning again

Kell Babenco: Greetings. I am contacting you on behalf of Damanios Thetan. Damanios is once again building the Temple for Burn2. You were the brilliant scriptor in the past for the Temple and message leaving device. Would you be able to help out one more time? I look forward to your reply. Kindest regards.

Now, how can you turn down someone who calls you "brilliant"?!? ;)

Actually, I had told Poid Mahovlich once that I would burn anything Damanios builds. I've burned every Burning Life Temple that Dama had built. And there's no point in breaking the tradition now.

I thought that Kell meant for next year.... I was wrong. She meant for next month.

Burn2 starts on Oct 1. The Temple burn is scheduled around Oct 9, my RL birthday. I have reservations for a trip that week. And I have a lot of projects that I'm already juggling this month, including finishing the book, creating two more stereoscopy tutorials, doing my taxes, job-hunting, and lots of other little commitments.

But, this is significant to me. Burning the Temple is a spiritual rite. It is deeply meaningful in ways I cannot articulate. And being the one to burn it, I feel like a priestess. How can I turn down that honor?

Before anybody gets any ideas, I only committed to burn Temples that Dama builds. And he said this is the last time he's building a Temple for Burning Life / Burn2.

So there.

Posterity in SL

I have seen a few art contests where the organizers take a Copy/Transfer texture of an artist's work and do with it as they please. Some artists don't think twice about it. Most of the time, artists assume that the texture would only be used for the competition and nothing else.

But contest organizers usually have sales in mind. They want to sell the pictures and make a commission out of it. And that's fine. In fact, the artist might even be happy about it.

Now, even in that situation, the problem comes in attribution of the work if the contest organizer applies that texture on a prim. What happens is that the prim would show the contest organizer as the creator of the object and, if the object is simply something that displays a texture, the entire work becomes attributed to the creator of the prim, which, in this case, is the contest organizer.

Certainly, the artist initially gets recognition because a placard with their name is displayed alongside the work during the exhibition. But after the work is sold, there is usually no record of the artist's name with the work. Long after the piece has been sold, would the purchaser even remember the artist's name? And inside SL, most people know to look at the creator of the object. So, people would normally assume that the creator of the object is also the artist. And, again in this case, that's wrong. So, nobody would know that the texture creator (the artist) is in fact *not* the object creator (the contest organizer). The contest organizer gets a reputation for being a great artist because of work that other people did.

Not all artists in SL are equal. Some have been in SL for a long time. Some are new to SL and were pulled in by the promise of exposure and sales inside SL. There may even be a few who don't even come into SL; they sell their work through agents, usually museum owners.

It's not even a matter of trust because a creator is required to give Copy/Transfer permissions to someone who would sell their product for them. It's not even fraud, because the artist willingly gives those permissions. It's a matter of preserving the integrity of the information about the art, specifically the attribution to the right person.

Every newbie knows how to slap a texture on a prim. There is no reason why contest organizers have to do this for artists. Every newbie knows how to set permissions on a prim. Since the artists are trusting the contest organizer with Copy/Transfer permissions, they can give modify permissions on the object too, so the object can be resized.

A warning, however: Even if you apply your textures on your own prims, don't let that give you a sense of security.

There are three ways to apply textures on a surface:
(1) By using the Edit tools to select the texture from your inventory and applying it to the prim.
(2) By dragging the texture(s) from your inventory to the prim's inventory (i.e.: the Contents tab of the Edit tool) and using a script to apply it to the surface(s).
(3) By using a script with the asset ID of the texture.

#1 is the most common way of applying textures. #2 is commonly used in objects that switch textures, like slideshow devices, but makes it easy to grab the textures from a modifiable object and apply them elsewhere depending on the texture permissions. #3 *can* be used a) legitimately, to protect your own textures by not putting them inside the object, or b) illegitimately, to apply "stolen" textures on the surfaces. For database performance, SL is designed so that the same texture with the same asset ID is saved only once in the database. And obtaining the asset ID of a texture is too easy inside SL.

Artist beware.

Virtualizing Visual Art

I have to apologize about the long absence. There are several reasons for that. The first reason being art. And that brings me to one of the items in my list of topics to talk about.

What pulled my attention from mid-August to early October is a virtualization of a real-life artist event -- Burning Man (www.burningman.org) irl was translated into Burning Life (www.burninglife.com) in SL. Artists coming together to create art for art's sake. A lot has been written about the two events, so I will not delve into that. I had never been to the real-life Burning Man, and I may never. The SL Burning Life was enough experience to last me a lifetime, and I'll leave it at that.

There are two classifications of art in Second Life:
* art created inside SL, including SL photography, and
* art created in the real world, which are mostly photographs and 2-D images imported into SL.

Gallery owners differentiate between the two and seem to have a preference for RL art and RL artists. To be honest, I think that's a snobbish attitude. It's akin to preferring a crappy oil painting to a breathtaking photograph, just because the painter took more time on the work or spent more money on materials.

Any week-old newbie knows how to import a texture, slap it on a prim, and resize that prim. Where's the creativity in that? Why not just upload the texture on a photo website, like Flickr, where it could get viewed by more eyeballs? Or submit it to a stock photo company and get paid much more than US$1 or US$2 for it?

I'm not saying that all RL art in SL are crappy. After all, I own a gallery, where I sell my own RL photographs, and I'm not about to admit my work is crappy. ;)

But, to a lot of artists, Second Life has become a new medium. And, if all you do is slap a texture on a prim, then you're not really taking advantage of the unique possibilities that a 3-D world affords you.

My first exposure to SL art is in the Second Louvre, where I discovered an array of amazing sculptures, made with a few types of prims. After having learned how to build and script pretty much anything, and after seeing countless other art by other artists, I'm still amazed how Starax Statosky can evoke emotion with a sculpture using only those few types of prims. Now that is creative genius.