I think I’ve said elsewhere that, for all my years spent inhabiting and actually conducting psychological research in Second Life (SL), I had never built anything there. Astonishing then, that the need to do this came not from science but from art in the simple task of mounting paintings and putting them somewhere for viewing, preferably the right way up. Veyot (in-world name) introduced me to the cube (a ‘prim’ or ‘primitive’ building basic) and nudged me in the right direction. YouTube provided the visual instructions. That was May 2024.

July 2024. Since then, I have purchased land in-world, built a gallery, and populated it with my paintings. It was a painful process with so many mistakes to make, so many shortcuts builders know and the rest of us don’t, and so many tools I just had no idea existed, but the triumph when it all came together was more than worth the frustration of losing things through walls, spending ridiculous amounts of time getting a painting to sit flush to a surface, and finding that, were there actual weather in SL, the place would be flooded. Still, it isn’t going to collapse on anyone and there’s no insurance required. This is a video of the completed building:

But because I forgot to record the actual process, there’s no actual evidence that I built it at all and I’m very much into evidence so I’m building a second gallery alongside, this time recording every move! Of course, I look nothing like my avatar and we don’t share a name either so it could still be anyone but for the ability to screen-share in Zoom. That way, I can at least show that I am who I say I am in the two environments.

This is the from-scratch video. There’s no audio because remembering to speak (and not to swear!) while wrestling various prims into place is as yet beyond my capabilities. You’ll see I also forgot to make it daylight!

At the end of this session, I had a building with a floor, walls, and a roof. Not everything is lined up as yet but I do have a glass ceiling which pleases me ridiculously. I did discover, though, that even in SL, you need a door in a wall or you can’t get out.

Et voila, the Copper Gallery! The cones are just cone-shaped prims with wrap-around textures made from my own paintings. Like many more things here, they can be re-sized and re-shaped as required and positioned wherever suits. Initially, I was registering my presence on my second plot of land and in this instance, I was trying to see if they ‘fell’ through the glass roof. They didn’t!

New signage. My ambition is to offer exhibition space to other artists, and I would really like to do this for students of my university, although I can see getting them into SL might be an issue.

Discovered during the process above that my ceiling had vanished! I can’t be sure how that happened other than to say I had been adjusting its opacity at some point.

30th July. I’m moving into interior design mode now, considering ways of maintaining simplicity, creating also a sense that art is more than the contents of a building, it can also be the building itself, and here more than anywhere. I made a tunnel lined with ‘texture’ derived from two of my paintings and sited it at the entrance. At present it seems quite tight so I may widen it. The arch is made by taking a rectangular block with an arched surface, stretching it to a size suitable for manipulation, then hollowing out the core. Once looking more like an arch, you can stretch it to any size then, choosing the surface, apply a suitable texture. I made one of these then copied it and sited it in sequence with the first. This allowed me to apply a different texture to the inside surface. I’ve linked them now so I can move them as one if necessary.

SCH 2024