Saturday, September 25th, a new art installation at DixMix Gallery was opened on the skyplatform “Womb”: “Somewhere” by Theda Tammas and Iono Allen.
The Womb is a seperate platform in the skies above the gallery. The teleport is right next to where you land.
Once you’re on the platform you should adjust your viewer settings: graphics to ultra (or to the best your system can handle), enabled advanced lighting, shared environment (top menu “world” -> “environment”) and allow media to be played automatically.
The installation extends over 3 levels. “Somewhere” uses a lot of the different creative possibilities of virtual worlds. On the first level, where you arrive, is a big screen quite at the end of the platform. The floor is white, something between snow and sand, the sky is grey, cloudy and dark. The screen shows a film that seems to be made in this environment. A woman with a magnificent head of blue hair is dancing, she almost hoovers over the ground. And step by step other women, twins of her show up. When they are five, all dancing sychron, they disappear into the horizon before the video restarts.
Impressions of “Somewhere” by Theda Tammas and Iono Allen (1)
On the left side of the platform is a stair. It leads your to the 2nd level of the installation. The ground has some gaps through which you can see the 1st level below of you and in the sky you see the 3rd level frough even larger gaps. On the 2nd floor are several objects. The woman of the video now appears as animated dancing figure. She dances in or around the objects, she sits in a red net like being caught by it. She dances under huge gates and she watches herself dancing in other videos shown on 2 screens. The combination of light effects with the ground and skies, the videos, the 3D art ojects, the animated and static figures build a unique and permanent changing art installation. You can animate yourself to dance by clicking objects that look like bar stools on the first glance. And then let your mind wander …
Impressions of “Somewhere” by Theda Tammas and Iono Allen (2)
Getting on the 3rd level wasn’t that easy as I found no stairs. I tried walking through gates and all of a sudden got to the 3rd level. This level was obviously used for the opening event. Again you find different objects with the woman either dancing of being kept like a prisoner. Once free they dance, seek nearness to each other and follow a lead. They break out of their own prisons and limitations.
Impressions of “Somewhere” by Theda Tammas and Iono Allen (3)
Theda Tammas is in SL for more than 14 years. She has had already some exhibtions of her work. I couldn’t find out a lot more about her. If I interpreted it right, then she’s from Brasil (I might be wrong though). Theda has an own website where you can see a lot of her former installations.
Iono Allen is also more than 14 years in SL and not only from his profile I conclude that his main passion is making films, so called machimas. He has an own vimeo channel where I found a video about “Somewhere”.
Thank you Dixmix for providing and curating the DixMix Gallery, thank you Megan for building it and for contributing to it. Many thanks of course also to Theda Tammas and Iono Allen for creating “Somewhere“. Another great installation of the two. It is not the first collaborative artwork of Theda and Iono. Theda made the figures, the art objects and the setup of the installation, Iono made the video clips. Once again I enjoyed my visit.
Landmark to DixMix Gallery
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Madori%20Bay/46/213/22
Theda Tammas website
https://bytheda.weebly.com/
Iono Allen’s vimeo channel
http://vimeo.com/user2558273
Diomita Maurer’s Blog 