LEA 15: The Timewalkers

The Timewalkers is another widely moving sim experience, and I highly recommend it before this LEA Round ends. At the landing point it doesn't look like much - a neon stead and the edges of some glowing clocks - but ramp up your draw distance, set your windlight to the sim default, sit down either alone or with friends, and watch the world through mouselook (recommended unless you're taking pictures, so want more control) and enjoy the view. Created by Solide Auer and Lorys Lane, The Timewalkers is less interactive and more overwhelming - a blinding succession of first concrete and then increasingly abstract moving shapes against and as bold, geometric shapes. As the allusion to time indicates, you start and end in a clock - complete with giant Roman numbers and turning gears - but the time in between is spent ghosting down a simplified bucky-ball tube and then through a series of layers of spinning colors and shapes in more simplified circles and squares, which have been rendered ornate by the mixing of colors and the spinning of their forms. Halfway through there is a metronome - much larger than any avatar - another, different way of measuring time, and it's accompanied by improbably colored clef symbols.

If, like me, you get vertigo partway through as you're hurtling and lurching through space, I recommend focusing on a fixed spot for a while and trying to get some perspective. The exhibit itself is so huge that it defies easy capture in either image or words, and I'd imagine each person who came would find something different. I, actually, found a noob who tried to friend me, walked into a wall, and then went Away. I can only presume that she didn't know about IMs or typing at all, as she didn't respond to anything I said to her. I have no idea how or why she tried to friend me on the black floor of an art project; like many noobs, her name was a random collection of letters and numbers, and her face was mesh. There are times I wish I could step outside of our separateness and know what people see from the outside. Each avatar in Second Life has it's own story, just like each car which drives past me has it's own history and sequence of events which caused us to cross paths as we did, when we did, and in the manner that we did. In the echoing blackness under time, my newest noob looked vulnerable as she slumped over in the dark - seemingly as lost as we all are in the beginning.

( More pictures here. )

Credits: 

Location: LEA 15: The Timewalkers
Light Settings: Sim Default
Water Settings: Sim Default

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping, only