Upon searching for an event to attend in Second Life in the near future, I have decided that I want to attend "Burning Life". From what I can gather, Burning Life is an annual event that started in 2003 and is inspired by first-life art. Though learning and experiencing art is interesting to me, this is not the particular fact that drew me to this event. I came across what I found most interesting on the video that appears on burninglife.secondlife.com on the "What is Burning Life" page. Upon watching the video, I realized what the event is. It is a coming together of many many avatars to start from scratch and build a city....on FIRE! Having the mathematical and sequential mind that I do, my first question was how? How can hundreds of avatars all build a city on a first try, especially since the avatars have not necessarily met and worked with each other before.
The entire idea seems too chaotic to me. I feel like it would just be a lot of avatars building a bunch of random objects which in the end would just look like chaos. To me a city is very structured and organized. After pondering on this for a few minutes I then I remembered that the event is inspired by art, which may not necessarily follow the rules of an ideal city.
The more angles of thought I take on the idea the more interested I become. I must admit that as of now I am quite skeptical that hundreds of avatars who are strangers to one another can come together without any rehearsal and build a fantastic city on fire. At the same time, I know that deep down within all chaos there is organization. I am just curious to see if the organization can get the better of the chaos.
One last detail that caught my interest is the irony of the entire situation. Basically, many avatars are going to try their hardest to build a nice looking city which they will in turn set on fire. It seems kind of counterproductive to me. This is like deciding that the colosseum would be more artistically appealing if it was on fire after just having finished construction.
But then again, Second Life does not follow any other rules of the first life, so why start now with the construction of a city?
Luckily for the builders, except for the Lindens who make the common infrastructure, each BL builder gets a temporary plot on which he or she may build. This means that only a few builders collaborate on each structure.
ReplyDeleteI've been invited to build next year. I think I may.
The result becomes a planned chaos of wildly different structures sensibly aligned on a grid. No two are alike, but then, neither are any two paintings or sculptures.