Sunday, January 15, 2017

Virtual Art Project Causes Crash by Inventory Overload



Some of us use quite a few attachments for fancy outfits. And at parties we'll engage in the consumption of scripted food to make it look more like a real life event. But how many of us thought about doing what Mijn Seoung (Martina Menegon), a performance artist in real life and Second Life, recently attempted. She tried attaching everything she had in her inventory to her avatar.



As one can see in this video, early on in the process her avatar was looking less than comfortable. As things went on, she ended up with thousands of objects and eventually "overloading the system" that finally caused her to crash. Unfortunately, she finds that her stunt has rendered her unable to get on.

I was a Second Life resident for almost 10 years, and the only reason I am using the past tense is because I somehow destroyed my poor virtual me for an art project: I wanted to record the result of me attaching everything I owned in Second Life to my avatar (thousands of different hair styles and colors, clothes, shoes, animations, furniture, houses, etc.). I somehow overloaded the system and my avatar started changing, then transformed into a white cloud, and then the software crashed. Since then, whenever I try to open Second Life, the app crashes. I tried some solutions I found online but nothing worked. I will try to contact the Linden Lab soon, because I have to admit, I miss being in Second Life.

For the full story, read Hamlet Au's article on this noteworthy test of Second Life's tolerances as part of artistic expression. To my knowledge, sorry to say Mijin is still unable to log on and could use some advice on what to do. No doubt she's tried calling the Lab for help, though as Hamlet put it, "Not sure if Linden Lab tech support has a 'Performance art' category in its tracking system."

Bixyl Shuftan

No comments:

Post a Comment