We had a blast tip-toeing through the virtual tulips today as we Collabricated along with Mother Nature. Lots of floral themes, a few trees, some mushrooms, and one giant sammich eatin’ ant. :)

Working with everyone today really gave me a creative boost, inspired we to work on some new fantasy based flowers and plants for my FloraPrims store. It also reminded me how excited I was when I discovered Fallingwater’s flowers in my early days of SL explorations. There are so many graceful, natural, delicate curves hidden in those seemingly simple prims. Thanks to Sindy, teeg, aaron, Corcosman, Dragger, Razitra, Ina, Maximillien, and everyone else who joined us today.

Our next session is tomorrow (sept 7th) at 5pm slt time. Come on down and join us!

The weekend is approaching quickly - wow what a quick week - and I am scheduling another Collabricate session. Come on by this Saturday the 6th at 11am SL time for another experiment in interactive, collaborative building. This week’s theme is: Mother Nature.

I think we might try a new structured experiment this time in addition to the freeform doodling. I’ve been thinking of ways that we might remove some of the ‘taboo’ of working on other people’s objects by injecting a few rules into a build. For instance we might try working on a piece where everyone gets a turn to add or change something. A bit like the Exquisite Cadaver game used by surrealist and Dada artists.

Remember that all skill levels are welcome, you can even come by to spectate if ya like. See ya there. :)

Here’s a great collection of SL videos compiled by the New Media Consortium using the VodPod wesbite. Over 170 tutorials, artist interviews,  bits of machinima, and examples of using Second Life as a platform for RL business and education. Just a quick browse and your sure to find something interesting that you have not seen before. Like maybe, this one:

Airplane Tracking in Second Life

Love this NPiRL article and interview with Seifert Surface and Art Laxness - two of my SL heroes. :)

“Art Laxness: I enjoy maths but not to the level Seif does. (He) is a mathematician who does art; I’m an artist who does math. I see math as more of a means to an end… which results in Seif explaining stuff to me so I get what is going on while I need to. Then I promptly forget it all.”

An interesting fact from the interview - that Sculpty Noob avatar that we were playing with at yesterday’s Collabricate session is actually a stolen version of Art’s work. :( I didn’t realize this or I would not have used it. Guess this is one of the worst aspects of content theft in SL - just not knowing that something is stolen.

We had another fun Collabricate session yesterday, continuing with the Circles them. Several folks from Saturday’s session came back for some more digital doodling. I can tell that as we continue with these experiments that it will become easier to work together. Still feels a little odd to make changes to something that another person is working on.  :)

I will definitely make this a weekly event. I think we will stick with the weekends, but I might also experiment with some other days and times. So hard to schedule something in SL that works for everyone who is interested. Stay tuned for more details.

Everything that we created in the first two sessions is still rezzed on the sim. Drop in and have a look it ya like. I’ll be collecting our favorite pieces as we go and then we’ll have a show to display all our spiffiest doodles. :)