The Abandoned Theatre

.: I fell in love one afternoon
.: and wrote your name on a white balloon
.: I set it free to fly above
.: and dreamt it was a flying dove

The Puppeteer By Bryn Oh

The Puppeteer

December 12, 2010

Liza Veliz: It looks like a graveyard

Bryn Oh: Yes. The story behind Immersiva is that it is an abandoned theme park so that is one of the abandoned buildings.


When I was a little girl my favourite fairy-tale books were the kind where you open them up and they have a room inside. Sort of analogue three dimensional. Pop-up books. My favourite art works were little boxes where the paintings were three dimensional too.

Bumper Cars

I think we found the digital answer to them in Bryn Ohs exhibition Standby at IBM.


When I first stepped into the abandoned theatre it looked like a graveyard to me. It has an end of the world feeling and we step into this years later, still there are these statues there telling us the whole story.


Like the lava bodies of Pompei. Only Bryn Oh's poems tells us a bit of what happened there, and with the machinimas we find inside some of them, or if we click around a bit that also tells some of the story. Well, its Bryn Oh, she loves to hide stuff inside of them, it 's like being on a treasure hunt to visit her installations.


I walk through the water and am amazed by what I find. There is this box, like the art work from my childhood, with the Puppeteer on its bicycle and beside him is the oil painting with the same name.


Bryn Oh isn't ending the story of the Rabbicorn without giving us clues as to what the next story will be about. After Rabbicorn we will get stories of other characters we run into in her Rabbicorn fairytail.


“Am planning to do this on big screens in installations IRL,” she tells me.


This will be interesting. Sort of Open The End in a new way. Multi-media theatrical art installations.

Lady Carmagnolle Theatre

In Standby we are taken through the story by teleports and at each tp we get a new poem and a new scenery of stage. It's very thrilling.


If you watch the whole thing from above it is like watching shadows of the inside of a dream. Big and black it stands there in the sky with the look of Mordor. And when you cam around this you get little glimpses of each theatre stage within its mountains of cliffs. When you travel through it, it's like walking through the dust of lava within a volcano, which is why I think of Pomepei even more.

Willow and Piano

Pompei is the city inside an old vulcano in Italy, where the shades of the people who died instantly are preserved for us to see and fantasize about.


I met Bryn Oh at the old theatre in the entrance, where Lady Carmagnolle is on the stage.


“Is this it, Bryn Oh?”

“No, I have further plans, but I want to see how this exhibition goes first. And I need a rest.
But as far as concerning Rabbicorn and The Daughter of Gears, it is over.”

“But you can't leave him trapped inside of her memory?”

“He is not, if you remember the first scene you will notice he has memories of his own with him.
They are just joined forever now.”


So quite romantic.


You notice I write of Rabbicorn as a him? Instantly making same mistake over and over again. Bryn says HER and I write HIM. Rabbicorn is a girl. For those who care about gender that's useful information perhaps. And it makes me realize I am also one of you. Even if I didn't know. Bryn Oh is also fighting for same sex relationships. Or rather makes a story from that view. Even if she never quite says it. This I find very interesting and charming. I think her fairy tales will do much good in this world, in class with what Pedro Almodóvar does with his movies.

Almodóvar is the one who puts transvestites into his movies in a way that no one can disrespect them, with class. 

The NY scene of rock music has done the same, only there androgyny is what makes people love the lifestyle. Well, queer is okay. But still we need stuff that treats it as okay. To make our own worlds okay with this. Not even queer people are always accepting... of course.


Well, that's my thoughts.


Now back to Bryn and The End story Standby.


You need links.
The trailer for Standby.



Rabbicorn story first life book.


Daughter of Gears story


I asked Bryn if the oil painter is finally taking the part of Bryn Oh now seeing all the oil paintings everywhere.


“No, I don't think so. My oil paintings lose too much of themselves when brought into Second Life. Their resolution, detail, colour, texture and so on. They become a shadow of what you would have seen in RL. So they get to be background scenery for me in this world.”


Bryn Oh's mastermind is a well known oil painter in RL and this is the painters way to experiment with a new art form. She has worked with IBM before and went to school for Softimage and Zbrush. Her own sim, Immersiva, was donated by Dusan Writer, and there she lets Bryn Oh live her life as an artist of pixels but she also lets Bryn Oh move out into the RL world too. Her machinimas at Shanghai 2010 World Expo and the exhibitions at different museums and galleries in North America and Europe are examples of success for this oil painter's experiment. It's been possible to get an avatar of pixels to be recognized amongst the artists of flesh and blood..

More useful links
Machinima
http://brynoh.blip.tv/
http://www.youtube.com/user/BrynOh#p/u


Bryn Oh's blog
http://www.brynoh.blogspot.com/

The world is changing and we along with it.

Thank you for reading.

Liza Veliz
Senior writer
Press Pass Blog