Build: Odyssey Exhibit A

Ok, this is a little complicated. :-)

Back when I first showed up on SL, I did a search for 'art' and found two kinds of places: The first was the kind of art gallery where you go to see 'flat art' that people have uploaded into SL. The second was the kind of gallery where the concept of 'gallery' is a little antiquated, and where the art is SL art. That is, art that can really only exist in SL, in any practical sense.

Luckily, one of the first SL art places I found was a sim called Odyssey, looked over by an avatar called Sugar Seville. The sim was (and still is) owned by a company called Dynamis, and set up as a place to nurture SL art. It's one of the oldest art galleries, and thus art-oriented groups on SL. So there's a tremendous sense of history and community around this place.

Recently the sim leadership has had a re-shuffle. And, coinciding with that, an exhibit by Selavy Oh, which always means chaos. So much chaos that when the dust had cleared, the original gallery, called Exhibit A, was half-gone. It looked a bit like this:





Anyway, back when I first showed up on Odyssey, Sugar very patiently gave me the sort of help you give a newbie, and hit me with some landmarks for good art and design places in SL. One of those places was DEsign Island (which is no more at this time). DEsign Island was an architectural experiment by Helfe Inhen, where he'd let people build places within a sort of space-age superstructure called Ville Spatiale. So I went and spent some time there, because Helfe was kind enough to give me build rights, which I didn't utilize nearly enough.

That was all a year ago. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, and Helfe sends an IM: Would I rebuild Exhibit A?

Of course I would. :-)

So I rebuilt it, mostly from memory, tweaking things here and there, yielding the same basic place, but hopefully reflecting well on me. :-)

The place is very large. The floor is 80x40, and the roof structure is ~55x100. The concrete, wood floor, and roof textures were supplied to me by Helfe. I tweaked the floor a bunch to make it repeating (the earlier build was all 10x10 tiles, with the floor texture stretched in various ways). The whole thing was built over about a week, in very short bursts (I was traveling).

I was thinking: There's a lot of concrete wall here. And what happens to concrete walls? Graffiti. Plus there are graffiti'd walls in a nearby build. So I added a spray can which allows any user to put graffiti on the outside wall. Coding this was the single most time-consuming aspect.

I'm very much glad to have been able to make this full-circle return, and rebuild one of the first places I came to in SL. Especially one that is so rich with community and where so many great SL artists have exhibited.

Web: Odyssey on ning

SLURL: Odyssey Exhibit A, Odyssey sim landing point

And photos: