Interview: Alizarin Goldflake

It is such a great pleasure to interview for this blog Alizarin Goldflake. Riding on the back on two of Ali’s sea horses and taking photos, we met at Nordan Art where Ali is currently showing her beautiful work Deep Dark Depths until January 23, 2012 (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nordan%20om%20Jorden/138/50/2502). Below please find our interview.

Flora Nordenskiold: What signifies your work the most to me is fantasy and I feel immediately drawn in. Some of your work is large, usually immersive art sculptures, which engage the viewer to interact and listen. Please tell us about your Second Life work, what inspires you and how did it all start?

Alizarin Goldflake: I discovered within a few minutes of creating a Second Life account that I could fly – and zoomed right off Help Island into the virtual night. Within days I stumbled upon The Shelter, a wonderful group for newbies, and one of the mentors showed me how to rez a prim and put a texture on it. I imported a digital drawing (www.marthavista.com), and voila! my virtual art career commenced. I started looking for a gallery and found Juanita Deharo, a well-known Australian artist in Real Life, who gave me my first show and became one of my very closest Second Life friends. I have no idea why I chose to use Second Life that way – I could have danced, I could have sailed, I could have socialized, shopped, meditated, gotten pregnant, raised chickens – but art is what I ended up doing.

In the beginning I took classes on everything from texturing to prim twisting (nod to Miso) to scripting. In the early days the most influential teacher by far was Rezago Kokorin, founder along with Sunn Thunders of the original Virtual Artists Alliance, who taught a large number of budding virtual artists, including comet, Misprint, and Oberon, how to modify scripts in his weekly classes. Anime Smooth became my obsession. I put transparent drawings on nested spheres and spent hours mesmerized by the interacting textures. Then Rezago introduced particles, and my digital drawings began to drift out of the spheres and off on the Second Life wind.

It was a short imaginative leap to go from art to be entered with your camera to art to be entered with your avatar, and so I began making environments, abstract at first but then my digital landscapes found their way onto the insides of cylinders. This was the beginning of the fantasy quality of my work that you mention. My Real Life digital drawings try to capture the essence of a feeling evoked by a moment and a place, and when they come into virtual reality they move away from the literal into the essence itself. I employ every tool I can think of to intensify a certain kind of feeling in other avatars, using sight, sound, and touch (in the sense of animations). (I would love to incorporate smell, but VR isn’t there – yet.) My most recent tool is Blender, under the inspired guidance of my good friend soror Nishi.

You also mentioned scale, Flora, which is a feature of virtual art that I find captivating. My work would be HUGE in real life, and I love it that I can create pieces here where the sheer scale becomes a tool toward the effect I want to exert. There has always been something magic about imagining oneself small in a big, big world, from Swift’s Lilliputians to the fairy houses in Cathedral Forest on Monhegan Island.

Flora Nordenskiold: I know you are also active in InWorldz. What are your thoughts on creativity and the creative process, both in Second Life and in InWorldz?

Alizarin Goldflake: InWorldz and Second Life provide the same basic creative tools, but InWorldz is intentionally more creator-friendly. I think the founders have benefitted from Second Life’s pioneering efforts (which were of necessity a bit undefined as to goal) and are building a second-generation world with a focus on creating an environment that caters to content creators.

As a creator, here are the features that make it my preferred building environment: free uploads, scaleable megas up to 256 m, hollowing down to 99 instead of 95, sizing down to .001 instead of .010, and generous prim allowances at low prices (35,000 K prims for $75 USD/month). It also provides – for now, though I don’t expect it to last – peace & quiet compared to the hustle-bustle of Second Life with all its group notices, IMs, inventory offers, etc. And it doesn’t hurt that most of my close friends are in InWorldz frequently, too. Drawbacks are the wonkiness of some scripts and sits and the lack of physics, but this doesn’t majorly impact what I do. My intention is to build in InWorldz (saving time and money) and to contribute that art scene as it grows and then to import the work into Second Life, where the audience for virtual art is much, much bigger – the plan for now, anyway.

Flora Nordenskiold: You have been in Second Life since 2006, going on six years now. What are your thoughts on the art community in Second Life and how have things changed since you first came here?

Alizarin Goldflake: In the beginning virtual art was sheer wonder, adventure, discovery, learning, and companionship in all that, and the same, I think, was true for many others. Now it has become more of a rat race, more like being a real life artist. For my liking, the SL art scene now has way too much attention going to competitions v. exhibitions – virtual art is such a new medium with so much still to explore that saying one piece is better than another is a bit like pinning butterflies. And also there is too much attention on full sim builds and big sloppy effects at the expense of the smaller, quieter masterpiece. One rat race is quite enough, thank you.

Flora Nordenskiold: Second Life in some ways becomes and extension or perhaps a reflection of Real Life. On a more personal note, in terms of your creativity, how does your Real Life influence your Second Life and vice versa?

Alizarin Goldflake: Total meld. I make things in RL for SL that then make it back into RL shows – Jim Dine juried my goldfish and tetra drawings from the virtual “Acquarella” into The Boston Printmakers Biennial at the Danforth Museum this year, for example. And I discovered process art in SL that now shows up in RL as my digital collages, a totally new art form for this landscape photorealist.

Flora Nordenskiold: The Second Life art community is diverse and vibrant, the creative possibilities appear limitless. Who are some of the creators that inspire you here?

Alizarin Goldflake: Inspire? Hmm, that is too kind a word. After the moment of open-mouthed appreciation crests, my mind immediately sets about to discover how a particular effect was achieved. Once I have an idea, I squirrel it away in my bag of tricks for future use. So instead, here is a list of Second Life artists from whom I have “borrowed” (in alphabetical order, not by degree of preference or friendship!):

AM Radio
Artistide Despres
Cherry Manga
Chrome Underwood
comet Morigi
Eliza Wierwright
FreeWee Ling
Fuschia Nightfire
Gleman Jun
Glyph Graves
Igor Ballyhoo
Josina Burgess
Juanita Deharo
Miso Susanowa
nessuno Myoo
Robin Moore
Scottius Polke
Shellina Winkler
Simotron Aquila
Sledge Roffo
Solkide Auer
soror Nishi
Tuna Oddfellow

I am sure I have accidently left off some major people, but that is my best shot for now.

Now I would like to turn the tables if I may, Flora, and suggest that you answer the above interviews questions yourself in a future blog post. I would love to know your reasons for being a virtual gallerist, something you do so very beautifully, about the occupational joys and drawbacks, and what your thoughts are about the virtual art scene.

Flora Nordenskiold: Thank you, Ali! And that’s not a bad idea at all; at some future date, I will interview myself for this blog.

Alizarin Goldflake: Thank YOU, Flora. It has been a wonderful respite to take some time out to think over where I have been and why and where I might go. Perfect way to ring in the New Year!