Category Archives: LEA sims^^

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Up up up he climbs, a distance of over 30 meters, before he enters the next room with weary arms. Certainly a different kind of flooring here, more like a wall with those dripping windows just climbed past.

And then the flowing hair child again positioned above it (Visionary, Lucid, imaginary friend, et al), upward turned head halfway out of the water again. Elongated like the beanbag version encountered previously in a southern room. Or perhaps not a child in this case. A woman.

Here some background about The Artist is handy, perhaps even necessary. A review by blogger Kate Bergdorf of Oluja’s 2015 Metamorfaces exhibit provides the best story I found online. Obviously this life altering event fueled the creative impulse of that exhibit, which carries over into the present. Faces — many emerging from the water like the one before him — abound in “Glass Jars”. The Musician can’t imagine.

He climbs one last set of stairs, emerging above-water at a small platform with colorful pillows. He takes a seat and elects to drink a proferred coffee, which he finds satisfying.

He stares over at the ghost or soul of what he’s sure is a representation of The Artist now, rising above the duplicate one “trapped” in the water just beneath. Emitted or projected spirit double again. He feels he has absorbed all he can from the LEA11 water sim now, and must move on to newer, different concerns armed with this gleaned information. He’s in an individuation process, a journey of self discovery. He is The Musician, true, but now knows or remembers another half, larger but with lighter atomic weight. A different element. He is oxygen, he is hydrogen. But what is he as a whole? He thinks back to Ear and camping out on its upper ledge. The talk with Wheeler at the bar…

The Musician was going to return to the canyon with the glass jars chronicled in the LEA11 01 post from almost two weeks back to explore more, but thinks he understands what is going on there as well now. No need for a revisit. This is The Artist again, creating an archive of messages in glass bottles or perhaps The Artchivist in the future separating the messages from the bottles for further study. Another 2-n-1. Time does not have a strong gravity here. The gestalt is understood through repetition of images — lietmotif. An attempt to grok the whole through the parts, like the proverbial elephant in the room. But this is as far as he can go with it currently.

Before taking his leave, The Musician did have one other place he wanted to revisit: LEA11’s purest, whitest room tucked away in its northwest corner. His now elongated, white body half out of the water, he assumes a heavenward position.

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Ah yes, I think it all may start to come together in this series of rooms. The girl again… lots going on here. Let’s take a look around…

Definitions hanging on the wall: onism and ambedo. The Musician pauses to absorb.

The Musician has trouble identifying with the onism definition, which, summarizing, is the frustration caused by being trapped in one body in one particular space/time moment. He *likes* compartmentalization. He doesn’t want to be in multiple places at once, like this particular sim’s inhabitant sometimes named Visionary or Lucid is. *She* is multiple. I am one,” he says to himself. “I am The Musician,” he states again, asserting his identity.

Ambedo is a difficult definition for him again. He’s a thinker, head in the clouds. The act of experiencing vivid sensory details in the environment is rare. He dwells in the cathedral of his thoughts. But (for the author), there’s always (Real Life) Bigfoot…

Another one on the next wall: occhiolism. A mouthful!

Again, he has trouble identifying with the definition of him being very small, insignificant — a sample size of one. He doesn’t have these problems (!). Yet maybe he should. He tries harder to identify. He thinks back to the idea of art extending beyond itself, backwards and forwards in time, even sideways (into parallel dimensions), to encompass not only itself but the whole universe. Everything is part of everything else. That’s what he thinks. He is as much within John Lennon as Lennon is within himself. The 4 Beatles knew the idea of (nested) shared experiences. That is his mantra. That is his holy grail Greek island of Patmos The Beatles sought for at their absolute peak but missed out on. They were looking outside, when they should have been looking within. But maybe the two, outer and inner, could have become one at that moment. He thinks of a name: Patmos John. He remembers being old and young at once. Lidsville — he must remove the lid (again).

Even though he is different from The Artist (maybe they should compare Briggs Meyers personality test results), he can learn from the differences. *That* is expanding beyond his sample size. Satisfied for now with his thoughts, he observes more…

The crux of the room… and another definition on the wall: exulansis. He begins there.

Trouble once more. Is there a particular experience which he couldn’t communicate with others, or felt like they let him down with the inability to understand and grok? Creativity itself, he supposes. The idea of putting pen to paper and pick to guitar. How many songs has he written over his lifetime? Hundreds? Thousands? He’s chosen a path long long ago. Yet he has compatriots: Lennon, Harrison, the Beatles as a whole. But not Dylan, oddly (Bob or Thomas). He’s read much but not enough he feels. How did it feel as Joyce wrote “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake” for an uncaring mass. The bulk of Charles Ives’ music was composed at night in total secrecy as he worked a high end New York insurance job during the day. Creativity… that is the experience for him that he cannot share with others. Union with the muse. Yet he can look around and see others of his type, his “ilk”, hehe. He knows he is not alone. It’s just out there there are teachers, parents, athletes, businessmen, laborers, many with dreams, yes, but all working on a different plane from him. Even the differences of being an Artist and a Musician, he realizes. He studies the tableau closer…

The child — named “imaginary friend” in this case; a new twist! — now holds George the teddy bear in both hands and stares at him lovingly, we assume. Building blocks of monochromatic color lie around her, some animated and moving about the floor and even air as if possessed. Other childhood objects lie strewn about: a pogo pony; what’s called a “rabbicorn doll”; a tiny balloon in a *glass jar* complete with miniature clouds and flying birds; a moon with a face, perhaps a pillow.

And then, lo and behold, on the rug next to this: models of the LEA11 rooms. Microcosm! So this is definitely the work of The Artist.

And what is this? The seed matroshka. He’ll keep this in mind.

Onward/upward!

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The Musician turns around in his tracks to encounter another straightaway. Another conundrum. “What is this fresh madness?” he finds himself muttering, but then regrets it. There is meaning here, he senses. He touches his chest and then his brow. “Both are needed,” he says, “just like in penning a good rock tune.” And he’s had several ideas along those lines since he began his investigation of LEA11. A cutup of a George Harrison song comes to mind.

He walks forward again. The image begins to “explode” when he gets about 20 feet from it. Clouds? A head in the clouds again.

His mind drifts back to a George Harrison album cover. No, not George but John: “Imagine” (another head in the clouds). The Musician must focus, however. He checks some of the names attached to the object. “Glass jar dreamer” comes up. “Dream pixelportrait” as well. This must be The Artist, thinks The Musician. Maybe it is just the different creative roles we play in life that separates us, he speculates. I am a Musician, you are an Artist. Inspired I could write a song (or create a song cutout) from this image. After penning it, the song would become part of the overall event. The art does not stop here at the creation, but extends into each person who views it, even far far into the future. Art — all creativity — has resonance far beyond what we give it credit for. The Musician realizes he’s reimagining the art just by experiencing it.

He moves even closer. Flesh tones.

He glances to the sides, noting that ubiquitous, flowing haired child on seahorses through curved openings in each direction. The pink seahorse to the north, the white one to the south. And not quite in line with each other. The Musician, or I should say, I, baker b. or Baker Bloch, the creator of The Musician, directly contacted The Artist today (i.e., Art Oluja) about a matter involving the pink seahorse and its rider. If I understood the reply correctly, the object has the ability to rotate in place, sensing when someone is nearby. The Musician decides to experiment with this new information.

He drops out of the space with the pixelated cloud being. Yes, the object points to where he jumped from now.

He stands on the opposite side — it points to him again.

Mystery solved. This is like Carrcassonnee’s (formerly!) all seeing eye that followed you everywhere. A seeing eye horse? He must get back on track. Where to forth next?

Turns out he’s staring right at it.

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In the room directly above the one one with the colored map of the brain revisited the night before comes this tableau of objects very similar to another room described in the LEA11 07 post. We have the return of the Visionary child, here presented as a type of giant bean bag that you can lie upon, and named “Lucid” in this situation. Three ghost like doubles emit from her body, extending about a third of the way up to the high ceiling. Beside her is the beige teddy bear named George again, but, perhaps curiously, *not* a Curious George doll, which instead looks like this. Is it a replica of a teddy bear once owned or perhaps still owned by The Artist? The bed they lie on is suspended from the ceiling by silver cables.

On the walls are many framed pictures… 10 by my counting, of which two are also self contained animations. These also hark back to the images in the book previously found in Visionary’s Room — we’ll call the present one Lucid’s Room for contrast. They may even be exact doubles of images from that book. Giant sea fans also extend up the walls behind the pictures, five white and one purple to be exact. And it’s at the top right corner of the purple sea fan that The Musician saw an opening to the next room, accessible through a ladder once more (as he accessed this particular room through same from the sea floor).

No time to lose… up he goes!

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“Well, this is certainly peculiar,” he says to himself. He can’t quite figure out what is going on here with this animation. He checks the name: something about a “prim portrait”. Is this somehow a representation of The Artist? The square particles making up the object keep jumping on and off the wall, attempting to reassemble, it seems, into a coherent whole. But the idea is too fleeting to understand. An eye maybe?

The Musician looks down the long room. More particles, seeming to head out the far opening.

He has no choice but to follow. In turning around upon reaching them, he’s amazed that the image on the opposite wall has stabilized. An eye indeed, it looks like. Stylized but recognizable. And the particles that once swarmed around him at this end are gone (!).

He walks toward the “eye” again. About 3 meters away the composite squares begin to fly off the wall once more, attempting to reassemble as he first saw them. So what to make of *this*? It’s different from any other experience he’s had so far in LEA11. And the conjoined rooms are unique as well; all other rooms he’s visited in the sim have been singular, as he’s reviewing them in his mind. In ways, this seems the most important so far, a statement room of sorts maybe. Things only come into focus when you move a certain distance from them? If you are too close, all appears chaos or only half meaningful at best?

And then outside the window on the far end of the room The Musician encountered one of those curvilinear, vegetative-like roads again, curling around that layered, central structure of the sim already examined and ending at its north “corner”. This is the object that extends from the sea floor all the way up to just beneath or at the surface of the sim’s water, a height of about 35 meters. The one with the circular bottom and the square-ish top that seems to reference the ancient concept of a squared circle.

Looking down.

Yes, he’s getting to the center of things for sure. He accidentally falls off the end of this road…

… and lands in the middle of another, similar road. Looking ahead, he spies the opening to his Ear Canyon, visited so long ago it seems. He had planned to make it a camping base, but that hadn’t quite worked out so far. It’s this confounded central building, luring him out of its safety. Like a Max Ernst painting, there’s no real logic to it. The Musician realizes he must use emotions in combination with intellect to figure out what’s going on in this sim.

Which is impossible, as stated.

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Now it turns out The Musician has already visited the room on the sea floor which he *thought* lies directly below the large black one above the water, spied from the chair he was just sitting in to the west. But he sees it in a new light now. The brain again…

… with a different part pinned, the front part. “Emotion”. Being a mental creature, The Musician has some trouble understanding emotions. The red pin here punctures a small heart on the diagram. Did The Artist put this heart there herself?

No hole in the roof of this particular room, unlike so many others. Night sky instead… fake opening. And sky on the floor as well.

The shallow, empty gorge he just traveled leads directly to its front door. The Artist obviously wanted you to visit.

The stairs are rusty.

*There’s* the rooms he wished to visit. To the south.

He better get to it.

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More rusty stairs. Which to choose?

White first. He had trouble sitting on the single pose ball within because of the rain prim, but finally managed.

Ahh yes: rain. Let’s turn up that particle count! Facing upwards, completely liberated from the sea (but still wet). Let’s check out the black room…

Yes, a familiar sight for me because of my January visit to Art Oluja’s mainland property at Wyrd. “Sophie’s World”, page 59. Jar — see through. Black out poetry. “life… in a jar… It is extraordinary”.

The Musician hadn’t thought of it before, but these various rooms with their openings could also represent jars. But why glass, then? Is it that everything we do is being examined by others whether we know it or not? We all live in a glass jar, like the proverbial glass house whose resident must dress in the basement. But is there a basement here? Is it the sea itself?

The Musician must figure this out! (But at the same time realizes he can’t.)

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The Musician decides to take a different tact tonight. He will start at southern entrance to his self proclaimed Ear Canyon and explore the south side of the sim as opposed to the north, eventually moving toward the center and a finality. But he’s enjoying himself so much with the exploration of Art Oluja’s LEA11 exhibit. He doesn’t want it to end — wants to draw it out as long as possible. And there’s a lot to see for a single sim indeed. He’s not that close to being done yet.

At the end of the narrow ridge he hikes to access the area, he can view 3 holes stretching out in equidistant manner to the north-northeast Pretty deep ones, about 30 or 35 meters down each.

He jumps in each one to check things out.

First hole.

Red vegetation at the bottom of the two northern ones, which are also larger than the first.

Second hole.

Third hole.

The Musician rests on top of an underwater hillock just east of Third Hole. It was time to take in another room. He heads heavenward again.

Queer.

What is he looking at? Has he visited those two rooms dead ahead? What of the arch? Did The Artist plan this vantage point out, or is it a random cluster?

He checks the map. He’s facing almost directly west.

Hold on… the lower chair is a map of the brain (!). The upper chair as well. He missed this when entering the room because they were facing the opposite direction from him. Well, this obviously ties in to the theme of “partially submerged head facing upwards” seen in two other rooms already. And notice that the 2 of the 3 wooden pins pricking the map of the head on the higher chair are above water, with the remaining one just below. Up to down, they mark the parts for the brain labelled “hope”, “sublimity”, and “caution.”

Lower chair.

Higher chair.

Now this is interesting: there’s also the same brain diagram adorning the seat of each chair, but in both cases the map *stops* right where we would pick up the parts with the pins from the back cushion of the chair. This was probably done on purpose, don’t you think?

Back to the view from the upper chair: The Musician decides to explore the larger black room ahead of him. He briefly wonders if he can swim in this water when he abandons this idea of locomotion and drops back down to the sea floor. No need in keeping to the surface when there’s so much beneath!

Dusting himself off from the fall, he checks his bearings. He doesn’t think he’s visited either of the 2 rooms, black and white, you can view from the upper chair. Onwards and upwards!

Ooops. He almost falls into one of those deep holes hidden just over the ridge on his way over to the rooms.

He decides to walk around…

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Stacked rooms now: this is where The Musician begins to understand why he’s here, in this particular spot in this particular time. He’s unfolding who he is.

We’ll start at the bottom room, situated about 10-12 feet above the sea floor. Here we have apparently the same figure that rides the two seahorses, looking at a book this time entitled “Art Oluja lolcats book”. Direct reference to The Artist, then. The figure also has a name: “Visionary”.

The book can be thumbed through. All pictures within seem to depict figures in some state of repose. But what of the lolcats? Perhaps just a title carried over from a previous incarnation. Is the true visionary really asleep to the world around him or her, then? In tune with the inner world of dreams and fantasy instead?

Crumpled pieces of paper fill the air above, perhaps emitted from the book in some way. Are these dreams not fulfilled? None depict sleeping figures, however, but are more abstract. George (teddy bear) and The Musician gaze upward as a two-headed being.

Let’s move one room up, then, a taller, narrower one with long, “dripping” windows.

Within: two glass jars nestled in a bed of grass or weeds. The plot thickens…

Each jar has an attached notecard which may seem identical upon a glance, but read differently when examined closer. I won’t quote these in full, just say that one seems to represent a happier childhood wistfully remembered, with the other depicting a darker childhood better escaped from than trapped within.

The rider of the pink seahorse seems to look on in interest. Or perhaps this room is her immediate destination?

And then The Musician enters the highest of the three stacked rooms, seemingly above the same size and shape as the lowest. One object lies within, a doll figure named “Matryoshka 6”. The Musician touches the figure…

… and it flies apart into pieces.

But then, as The Musician watches on astounded, the shapes begin to fit back into each other one by one until the whole is recreated. This goes one step beyond a 4-n-1. It is a 5-n-1. But I think the 5th could represent the sum of the parts. A Steve Jobs quote about The Beatles could be relative here:

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

Wikipedia article on Matryoshka dolls:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll

The Musician visits one more room this night, a solitary one again with attached, streaming kelp like the “Cloud Room” looked at yesterday, but darker in tone. Barren within this time as well.

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