Every now and then I grow weary of the visual (and yes, sensory) overload in Second Life, and long for something simple, something not so.. primary. And lately, rather than unplugging and heading for the beach (yeah, sad but true; I live in Santa Barbara and still do most of my surfing in SL), I am more likely to slip away into the wonderful world of wireframe.

Wireframe is a place beneath a place; a world where nothing is hidden, where you’re confronted by the stark reality that we are all math after all, and where, like Superman, I can see right through you. In fact, I can not only see right through you but also through the building behind you, and on and on all the way to that wiry horizon back there. For an artist who tends to spend too much time in an abstract-expressionist frame of mind, it is pure delight to wander this minimalist utopia. It clears the mind, calms the soul, and reminds one of the structure, the underpinnings of it all… the mesh we are all made of.

When all is revealed and one sees that mesh, that gridwork – oddly enough, it still contains much of the emotional content of the textured world. A motorcycle becomes a lacy whirl of linear confection, as though it were made to eat rather than ride. That lovely woman who moves so many parts of you is transformed into a beautiful web of glossy sugar strands. I’m looking through you, The Beatles once sang, but even though you’re not the same, it’s still you. Sugar is spun into cotton candy, after all.

To go behind the curtain is to see virtual life in its raw form, without the seductive power of texture, to see the ‘reality’ behind the illusion. I love this part of the metaverse almost as much as I love the surface world, probably for the same reason I love to wander the deserts of the southwest in rl…. it is nature at its most honest; a place where nothing can be hidden, a place where the ground meets the sky and the eye meets its maker.

To get to this magical place, just head for the Advanced menu, scroll down to Rendering, turn right and scroll down to Wireframe. Or, just double-shift using the keyboard command Control-Shift-R, and you’re off.

Author’s Note: For those readers who saw this when it was first published and might be wondering if they were imagining things, I decided to pull the photo of Chrome and Juliette and replace it for one simple reason: this closeup of a custom Harley chopper more clearly illustrates the point I was trying to make regarding the delicate beauty of the wireframe mode. Besides, I was getting tired of seeing my face up there. That’s two, I know, but…

Thought it might be time to focus once again on Juliette, the lovely and loyal subject of much of my attention in Second Life. She is the face and figure of all of my digital artwork, the focal point of my search for the human heart and mind within the avatar. Fortunately for me, though, she is kind, generous, and very, very patient. She has to deal with an obsessive perfectionist, after all, and pulls it off with grace and poise. Can’t figure out how she does it, actually.
Suddenly, however, a new side of her personality has begun to emerge. To give her a break from the lights and cameras I began a series of photo shoots using myself as a blissed-out rock star for the subject of my next painting, and Juliette took one look at those shots and decided she was not gonna be left out of this party. She has long wanted to be on stage, she claimed, and not just as a pretty face. She wants to be a rock star herself, dammit, and then went on to inform me of her considerable musical talent and experience. I was floored. We then, of course, had to go shopping. Women.
The photo above was taken at Bowling Green State University, where she began to unpack and test her new guitar – a classic Stratocaster from KLP Productions, one of the best musical equipment builders in SL. She has been rocking the house ever since; the studio will never be the same. We also picked up a gorgeous set of drums, btw, since she is multi-talented, and, well, drumming runs deep in this family. We’ll talk more about that later, though; looks like this story line has just begun.

Well, we been workin’ mighty hard over the past several weeks, crankin’ out one masterpiece after another… almost all of them involving Juliette and her considerable modeling, acting and dancing skills. She worked so hard during the holiday season, all in preparation for the upcoming show in Berlin, that I decided to reward her with a new chopper from MLCC motorcycles. She is one hot mama now, and has a surefire way to get away from the paparazzi quick as a flash. You go, girl. You really, really go.

Visit MLCC in New York City:  http://slurl.com/secondlife/MLCC%2C%20NYC/103/231/21/