SL Video: "Tripping through Skyscrapers in Second Life"

(Click here if the video fails to play)

By Erik Mondrain in May 21, "Skyscrapers is a Second Life art installation by Gem Preiz, an artist most known for his intricate fractal images. Here, he created an immersive, scaled-down cityscape—inspired, as he writes, by his 'fascination for [these] modern cathedrals which are, like those of the past, the synthesis of all the techniques of their time, dedicated to the collective aspirations of their builders.' For more about the installation, and about the idea of 'scale' in a virtual world, please see the excellent write-ups by Inara Pey (https://modemworld.me/2020/04/22/gems...) and Ricco Saenz (https://secondsighting.wordpress.com/...). 

"I highly recommend visiting the installation 'in person' as well, by the way, since there's much more to see there than I had time to show in this video. Also, a quick note on technique: Although there are a number of elevated mass transit tunnels crisscrossing the city, there are no trains, just the flying vehicles at the landing point; I filmed by setting my camera position and angle appropriately, then going "backwards" through the tunnels with my SpaceNav after turning off (or rather, zeroing out) all the other axes in the flycam's configuration. And the color shifts and the hallucinatory, back-and-forth swaying are, of course, a result of editing, not something this or any other city does naturally... so far as I'm aware. ^ - ^ 

"Music is by SLOOM, specifically the track 'Skyscrapers' from his Mix Tape #1 album. (And yes, though it still had to fit the kind of sound I wanted, I did seek out a track with the same name as Gem's installation on purpose.) It can be found at the Free Music Archive (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sl...) and is used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License version 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...). More of SLOOM's music can be heard on Bandcamp: https://sloomsmixtapes.bandcamp.com/ "

Located in Akimori: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Akimori/128/128/2981