Prime Radiant & Theatre of War

Prime Radiant at Visualizing Theorem, UTSA

After some people said they missed the announcement of the opening of Kelly Yap's DayGlo show and my Big Winter installation, I thought I'd show off two of my recent pieces and give a bit of info on them:


Prime Radiant - Second Life & InWorldz

PR began as a piece for the 'Visualizing Theorem' show being curated by Misprint Thursday at the University of Texas at San Antonio [UTSA] Roadrunner spaces [opening April 2].

The show is interesting in that Misprint has arranged to have 15 musicians, working on collaborative internet sessions of music inspired by the sciences [site URL: Theorem] to have Second Life artists create pieces to compliment or work with the musical selections.

Misprint is working on the press release(s) for the show; it will feature some RL/SL interactive performances as well as the artwork/music collaborations. Stay tuned.

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Phases is the title of the music I was interested in working with in "Prime Radiant (Phases)" and I decided that rather than use music as I usually do, I would try to work with the phasings of light and color theory to compliment the music. I did put a few sounds into the piece because the stream on the parcel is not looping; it only plays through once. When viewing the Radiant, you should listen to the local stream at least once.

CMYK is a subtractive color model used in printing using cyan, magenta, yellow and black [K] inks against a white background. RGB is an additive color model using red, green and blue colored light and is newer than the CMYK model, made for display on electronic devices and surfaces.

The beauty of light on a computer screen is one of the things that drew me to them and I like to play with it; Radiant is an extension of the playing around with the values of chroma and luminance I was doing with the piece I had up at Split Screen and UWA in December, Chroma. It was difficult to get the right shades of cyan, magenta and yellow for the circles, and of course it is only perfect on my computer screen, with my color mask, calibration and etc.

I tried to compose Prime Radiant with the four Windlight time presets [ 4 movements or stages, echoing the musical composition]. I was also very happy to switch for a beach parcel, as the Radiant performs best against a sky background and in the wash of prim waves and surf.

The glow and transparency of the different elements help to highlight movement in the waves and clouds, making the piece bridge sea to sky at Sunrise and Sunset; at Midday the central emitter will be washed in and out of view by the compound glows playing with the reflecting ripples of the surf and the luminosity of the Linden sky cover.

At Midnight, Radiant displays a color wheel, mixing shades of light using both models (although actually it is a visual trick; of course everything on the screen is in an rgb format) and producing a light show; a custom particle in the center emitter that makes it look wreathed in milky smoke. There are "spectral dolphins" in the surf which circle the Radiant, created by submerged particles and the distortion and ripple of the water's surface.

It's really quite fun with the music, like a personal Laserium :D

In InWorldz, I was able to scale the prims up so it is truly awesome in scale; standing under it you are surrounded by movement and color. I will also be composing my own ambient/tone poem score for it there.

Theatre of War at The Zinn, Four Bridges

Theatre of War

An installation done for The Zinn, a new area in the Four Bridges sims that Trill Zapatero has been working feverishly on. The opening for that area is also TBA (soon).


The Theatre has a 'soundtrack' of a David Bowie song, "Life on Mars?" from Hunky Dory. A link is provided to call up a You Tube page of the song in case you have no iTunes or mp3 handy, similar to the device I used in 'Big Winter'.


The Theatre is populated by ghosts, visual and audible. The 'fog of war' blows this way and that. Quotes from glorious war movies evoke laughter, applause and cheers from the inhabiting phantoms.

The screen behind the figures is an animated texture of many images of war and flickers very quickly, causing the glow around the central figures to jump and jiggle. At Midnight the figures can be seen clearly, especially the all-but-invisible dead child.


Trill did a great theatre marquee for the entrance. Be sure to get a Ticket before entering.

SLurl: Theatre of War at The Zinn, Four Bridges

Both pieces have Flickr albums, which you can get to from the link in the sidebar here.