UT San Antonio ArtSpace
ProjectImagine@UTSA team member Cogito Ultsch greeting at the event.
The University of Texas San Antonio celebrated the opening of a virtual art gallery on October 9 as part of the Imagine Peace festival – an annual, worldwide event in SL and RL in honor of John Lennon. The sim itself is a new addition to the metaverse purchased with nearly 50 other sims as part of a UT System Initiative. The Imagine team at UTSA had only three weeks to create an art gallery on a blank sheet of a sim.
Luckily, the UTSA team is no stranger to SL’s art community! Previous to the UT System’s mass land purchase, Dr. Carmen Fies, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching, founded UTSA’s Tejano Tech sim. Her work here placed an emphasis on STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) that is reflected through the sim’s art galleries. “Art and STEM do mutually constitute each other,” Fies explains. “It all is really just different expressions of the same. All we know (and even don’t know) is one…and there are different sparkles to it.”
UTSA signed on for the festival last minute. Fies and three of the Tejano artists (Sapphoria Shilova, Gary Kohime, and Cogito Ultsch) comprised the Imagine Team that brought it all together. Kohime organized the featured artists and managed impressive contributions from some big names in SL art. Featured artists Bryn Oh, Sasun Steinbeck, and Spiral Walcher are interviewed below about their involvement with the art community.
A hidden element of Bryn Oh's "Willow".
Bryn Oh
Self-proclaimed hermit Bryn Oh was persuaded to leave her home at Immersiva, contributing Willow for the big event. She confesses that her excuse for interaction was driven by curiosity about Yoko Ono’s avatar, “I never did see…but I heard she looked like herself. I kind of hoped she would be something very creative.” Bryn Oh is the pixelated concept of a real life oil painter using SL as a medium for ideas that mistranslate onto canvas. After her first week on SL, she says, “I realized that this was the medium I had been looking for. A medium where I could create a painting that you could enter and explore rather than passively look at.” (Hint: Keep the explorative aspect in mind when you visit her work!)
Cogito Ultsch showing her favorite piece - Sasun's Morphing Sculpture.
Sasun Steinbeck
A must see at the new gallery is Sasun’s Morphing Sculpture. Sasun Steinbeck began working on the sculpture in 2005. The menu-driven sculpture provides infinite options thanks to four years of intensive scripting that began with simple “prim torture” sample scripts that twist prims. The sculpture truly displays the exactitude Second Life is capable of, and all with regular tubes and toruses. As the sculpture developed she sought other artists for feedback and became inspired to create the Art Galleries of Second Life list. She is excited to see the evolution of the “artist” on SL and notes that, “there’s a real blur between ‘scripter, ‘artist’, ‘designer’, and ‘builder’. The penultimate SL artist is some combo of these things.“
inside Spiral Walcher's forest
Spiral Walcher
Spiral Walcher shares two versions of a sort of digitalized forest with the new UTSA gallery – one a spring version with butterflies, and an autumn version. “Cool” is the word – and several fun snapshots a must! After spending a couple of months in SL, Walcher casually decided, “I wanted to see what this whole ‘building’ thing was about. As it turned out, it all came pretty naturally to me.“ Walcher hopes to someday transfer this newfound talent into RL and create light sculptures, but in the meantime appreciates the frugality and creative leverage SL has to offer.
Story and images by Teresa Shoffner
Tags: art, collaboration, galleries, UTSA