Catching Up with Some Old Friends

The Inworldz Dreamz and Visionz festival has been a good place to catch up with some of the artists involved in Treeline's 2010's latest work, as well as seeing some new faces. Soror Nishi, who played such a large part in making Virtual Treeline 2010 a great success, continues to go from strength to strength creating new plant species to inhabit new spaces in the virtual universe. For Dreamz she gave us a new and colourful species of bean. Soror's work has become more and more polished and professional and I'll do a blog soon devoted to her amazing island Inworldz.

Another old Treeline friend, RAG Randt, has moved from an emphasis on 2D into 3D without losing any of his zany sense of humour and ability to make a statement with this work. His build for Dreamz was a giant tree, inhabited, of course, by monkeys doing all manner of crazy stuff in a crazy restuarant with a refridgerator full of bananas (what else?). It's great to see RAG move into full 3D, and I enjoyed a glass of red with his monkeys.

Last, but never least, another 2010 Treeline regular and great supporter, Alizarin Goldflake, has been honing her building skills with her first full sim build in Inworldz. Alizarin goes from strength to strength always amazing me with the attention to detail and beautiful textures in her work. Scripting has also become an integral part of her repertoire.

Alizarin's underwater build for the Dreamz Festival was up to her very high standard, with incredible underwater plants and the most appealing seahorses I have ever encountered.

It's been ggreat to catch up with these old friends at Dreamz.

InWorldz Dreamz and Visions and Treeline 2012

Treeline will be on again next year, and once again I'll be working on a virtual component of the real world event. I'm told the Treeline website will be updated soon with details. In 2012 Treeline will have an education focus. More about my involvmenet later, but it's now time to ramp up this blog again and start noticing what's been happening with trees, botanicals and organic things in virtual worlds.

The Dreamz and Visions festival in Inworldz (sponsored by Jeri Rajah) seems like the perfect place to start. I've had a quick look and there's plenty there for inspiration. Some of the artists involved in Treeline in 2010 have builds at the festival, so I'll be blogging about their pieces as well as exciting new work.

This morning I got no further than a very interesting build by La Toymaker. The work is a massivley complex installation for a small 30X30 metre plot (which is what each artist gets at the festival) and has intriguing storylines and a fairytale coach floating in the sky pulled by horses you can ride.

What caught my attention were the whimsical wooden figures, as if tree roots and twigs had come to life - the spirits of the trees perhaps. I particularly like the root figures escaping from a painting (below) and the very expressive man (above) who seems to have something to say about what's happening on the keyboard.

Congratulations to La Toymaker for a great piece. I look forward to visiting it again.