This blog started out as a way to share the stuff I created in Second Life. Second Life is an online virtual social environment where what you can make and be is limited only by your imagination. One of the things that took place in Second Life was a virtual Burning Man like event called Burning Life. Through Eye Ree, my Second Life avatar, I created some of the art shown in this blog for Burning Life events.

But Eye Ree was not my only Second Life avatar. There was also Tina Yugen and Anima Ahn. Role playing them taught me some interesting things about myself. With them I explored my gender and sexual identity, social roles, fashion, interior design and other things. I spent most of my time in Second Life as Tina.

My virtual experiences in Second Life increased my awareness of some long ignored aspects of myself and reawakened the artist in me. Eye Ree, Tina and Anima were the Second Life group “Completely Different”. Three different aspects to my personality represented virtually.

The experiences also rekindled my interested in Burning Man. For years I had been interested in going mostly for the alternative lifestyle aspects of it. But Burning Life changed how I saw Burning Man, just as Second Life in general changed how I saw myself.

I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2010. I missed 2011 but, if things work out, I will return in 2012.

I’ve decided to adopt Eye Ree as my playa name and use this blog to talk about my Burning Man experiences.

“What do you want out of Burning Man?”

A friend recently asked me that question. What’s the appeal? Why do I go? I don’t have a simple answer.

What I really want to do is create the same sorts of big, lighted, interactive art I made for Burning Life  for Burning Man. But that isn’t really the answer to the question. The question would be why?

A big part of the appeal of Burning Man for me is the special challenge of the event. Burning Man is, first and foremost, a social event and I don’t do social well. I’m not wired like most people. To get the most out of Burning Man, I have to step out of my comfort zone and engage with people.

There is also the challenge of the physical. The my skills and experience are with the digital. I know how to get things done with a computer, but designing, building, and installing a large work of art on the playa is currently beyond my ability. And the social thing makes it hard for me to find people willing to help.

And finally there is also the simple thrill of participating in an event as unique to the human experience as Burning Man. The transcendence of the mundane. The catharsis of reality. Or something like that.

“I want to want something.”

This was the wish I wrote on some art left out on the playa in 2010 for that purpose.

I got my wish. I want to be a part of Burning Man year after year.

But I’m still not sure I know how to answer his question.

I did an installation for Burning Life again this year, 2009. The theme, borrowed from Burning Man, was Evolution.

What I built was a “Tree of Life” that you could ride from base to tip along a random path. If you intersect an “Environmental Factor” (the colorful spherical things) on the journey you are ejected. If you make it to the bubble your road stays with your name over it. The tree starts off empty and over the course of the event it filled out with the glowing bubbles of the survivors.

How long before Linden Lab really starts to worry about that statement?

Anyway, I’ve moved to the self (ok, RL self) hosted EyeRee region on osgrid.org.

Stop by and get a free copy of the Irie Beholder. Look around. I’ve re-created Irie Life, Knowledge and Mind Share.

Whole place is still very much a work in progress.

For almost an year I have been thinking about various builds for Burning Life 2008. The theme, borrowed from Burning Man 2008, is “The American Dream”. I kept focusing in on one aspect of this: given all the diversity of American culture, what is that makes us all Americans?

I had lots of ideas, all of which were too vague to be built, or too complex for Second Life to support, or just silly. When I claimed my plot for this year’s festival, I still didn’t know what I was going to build.

So, I went looking through my inventory for anything to make my bare rectangle of playa unique and I came across a “thought balloon” attachment I had made a few months ago.

After a few days of tinkering I ended up with this:

That’s some 60 randomly colored heads each with a thought balloon. The pictures shown in a thought balloon is picked randomly every few seconds from a set of some 20 or so pictures. I selected those pictures because they represent things I tend to think about and, I believe, are things that most of us think about.

If a visitor touches a head, it changes color. If a visitor touches a thought balloon, the picture shown in that thought balloon is briefly flashed on all the nearby thought balloons.

I also finished up the attachment and have been giving copies away to visitors. It is also listed on SL Exchange. The attachment comes with over 200 pictures and can easily be customized to display any picture. Since I made the entire thing full permission and put it under a Creative Commons license, anyone can customize it in any way they want.

Well, Anshe Chung Studios decided to recycle the Unreal Woods sim I was on. They gave me other land and some bonus tier. But I got very little notice and wasn’t too happy with the land that was available. 

In the end I took three different plots of commercial land because I thought I could turn them over pretty quick. So far two have sold. The last is here. I doubt that they would recycle a commercial sim. Maybe.

For now, I guess I’m living on my Burning Life plot. GavinLeigh Wake happened to catch a picture of me as I was claiming this plot. See his great blog post for details on how to claim your own plot for Burning Life.

I’m not sure where I’m going after that. An OpenSim grid has some appeal, but would Eye Ree be Eye Ree anywhere else?

For a while I had land in Fillip at the northern most point on the original mainland continent. On it I built a very large scale sculpture as a tribute to emergent complexity. It also had a vendor for my Irie Beholder and a gallery for my Vivid Purple series of digital artworks.

[gallery]