Museum 9, Now

• Virtual Museum Schielandhuis
• Paul van de Laar, real exhibition
• Five March, virtual reconstruction

It seems strange to say, but nowadays Rotterdam fails to generate more history. Rotterdam is part of Holland and of Europe. What is happening elsewhere is happening in Rotterdam. Big festivals are organized, scandals are revealed, skyscrapers are built. But this is all like it is everywhere else. The end of local history.

Five March: Rotterdam was generating history starting around 1850, by growing incredible quickly, by scandals around the harbour, with figures like Pincoff. Also giant builders like GJ de Jongh, who built the inner harbours, Maashaven, Rijnhaven and Waalhaven, big like former cities. Then the modernization of the city, sacrificing whole popular neighbourhoods and prefering a rather conservative design for a townhall. The war and the destruction and clearing of the inner city. The reconstruction of the harbours after the war. All very exciting. Nowadays we live in peace and more stability. Rotterdam has a local television station and a local whether forcast. But the rains comes from England, and the financial crises from the USA, the oil from the east...

The character of the exhibition is changed in the last rooms. Real historical items are replaced by video screens. Nice chairs and paintings left behind. Events are shown, like the summer carnaval. Reality of objects is replaced by ‘new media’. In fact this can be seen as a preparation for the virtual exhibition on Second Life. Already the way to show the bombardment of Rotterdam in 1940 is done in a way suitable for Second Life. History in this was is as virtual as a virtual world.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Astronomy

5 went for a small search on astronomy. Astronomy is about universe, planets, stars, galaxies, space, and the big bang, for instance. Without doubt much more.
Astronomy as a science is observations and theory, like physics, chemistry, biology etc. Theory always checked by observations, although there is a small knowledge loop involved: theory shaping what can be observed. The history of astronomy on the other hand, for the science unimportant, shows the magnificent struggle of human beings to become able to observe without being dictated what to see by others, kings, dictators, popes, religion, old writings,. The Babylonian priests observed eclipses, right to Ptolemy (around 150) observations were made freely with the naked eye, then the Almagest of Ptolemy somehow became a sacred book, and “real observations”, without prejudice, stopped. Until Galileo, who made himself a telescope using the principle of Huygens, observations were curved back to those of Ptolemy, heavily supported by the church and leaning on Aristotle.
So it took a while to put the sun in the centre of the planetary system. It took another while to place the sun in the outskirts of our galaxy and our galaxy somewhere in a big framework of a curved universe. Hubble of course “identified” the first galaxies as such in the 19th century, the universe was shaped by Einstein, his general theory of relativity the 1920ties , and the shape of our own galaxy after the second world war, with radio astronomy.
Well, what can 5 find back of this in Second Life?
First 5 visited

Jenika's Astronomy Park of Jenika Connolly
Which is a nice start. Jenika presents telescopes, which offer images of the wonders of the universe. The images are shown when using the "sit" for the telescope in a central circle. But don’t think buying a telescope in real life will show you these very intriguing pictures. With telescopes “for the amateur” one can observe very interesting things like the moon, the planets and groups of stars, maybe even the Andromeda nebula (the nearest galaxy), but never the images of the Hubble telescope. Jenika also makes eyes and paintings!
Then 5 found an extended exposition explaining about observations and astronomy in:
Physics and Astronomy

Very nice equipment is shown and a very joking picture of an astronomer not being able to observe through his small telescope because of pollution in the air….
This is a bit what you can find in public observatories with movies about the universe and domes where they project stars on. It is the presentation of science, an introduction to all kinds of aspects. A bit about instruments, o bit about observations, stars, galaxies. All very neat and objective. You can get a list here of other Science-Related places in Second Life, like eco-systems, marine and biology exhibitions etc.

The third place is called Prospero's Astronomy Gallery
This is a private sort of gallery, explaining a few things like the birth of stars and planetary systems.
Also a very nice transparent map of the stars in the sky is presented which can rotate around a central earth. (Oops, 'central' have we returned again to Ptolemy? Well, no, th earth is just the place from where we see the stars around us. So to observe and find these stars, this position is the best.)
So the main focus on the moment is on the tools, telescopes, and the explanations. Of course theories like modern relativity are a bit beyond the reach of the general public, and Second Life of course is the general public.
The Carl Sagan Pavilion in the sim of the Illusion Factory is more a tribute to the astronomer, Carl Sagan. He was involved in programs to discover radio messages from extraterrestrial life in the 60ties. He supported a steady state universe. Certainly somebody who tried to think along other lines than the main stream astronomer.

A concise SL History of Art

Walking through SL is sometimes like walking through the landscape of some medieval icon. These paintings in their early stages create extremely stylized landscapes, some in very bright colors. Although the perspective doesn't at all follow mathematical logic, the emptiness of space is almost tangible. Just this emptiness is what one encounters al the time in Second Life. People in icons seem to fly, and trees are done individually and in great detail. The drawings are very sharp, the edges clear cut.
Later on in their more baroque style of for example the 17th century the icons get more dark, green-brown colored, and the atmosphere becomes dense, the contours are fading away. Even perspective becomes more regular. But strange enough, these icons seem te be much further away from the imagery of Second Life. Indeed the atmosphere is so stressed, and just that is missing in the virtual world.

These observations made Five think about the styles of art that well fitted for SL and the styles that will never be reached in the 3D-world representations which are nowadays available. Of course within the broad sweep of a style, exceptions are found, and even within the works of one individual painter one finds a large variety of approaches.

So are there other styles to be found which approximate the way SL looks at the moment. Five thinks of Caravaggio and his followers: stark light-dark contrasts, sometimes heavy perspective and bright colors. The renaissance in its discovering of a logically constructed perspective is of course almost to easy to connect with the perspectives of the SL world. Michelangelo with his clear drawings fits in very well, but he as a sculptor is thinking only about space and its effects. Leonardo da Vinci is more difficult as far as his paintings are concerned. These portraits display persons in great detail and mysterious inner world, and together with the blurred landscape in the background, it lifts itself totally from the "primitiveness" of Second Life.


On the contrary, the great Flamish painters represent just the opposite: Rubens and van Dijck, in their enormous paintings will never be approached by the imagery of the virtual world. Densely filled spaces, blurred contours, complex lighting and colors are all packed in a dominating composition which creates a great unity in the surface of the painting. The viewer is not able to move anymore in this space. Rembrandt organizes the surface otherwise, but with his thick paint and just enough superbly conceived light directions to create his famous inner worlds he also is far from the spaces found in SL. Neither, of course the impressionists, but then again the Russian constructivists, beginning of the 20th century, indeed it seems they “are” already Second Life.
The have this clear-cut ideas and concepts, the functional no-non-sense design of everything in SL. And the colors of Mondrian, his light, his straight edges are really as if he already dreamt of Second Life. Bigger canvases tend to me more blurred, although there are some beautiful very small paintings too. The landscape and whole imagery of Second Life is then more like a drawing at the moment, a drawing in fine lines and the colors mostly following the shapes. Wild painting tends to leave the form behind, the colors spread all over the surface, mingle and the space is neither open, nor rectangular anymore. These kinds of styles can be compared with the textures one sees in Second Life, for instance the graffiti in subways and in hidden underground places.


The cubists really form a problem for this reasoning. In its idea it should be at the side of Second Life, but in its appearance the space they create is not accessible at all. And besides that the cubists are applying the technique of spreading out their colors, so even more attacking the crystal clear imagery of open space.

Painting nowadays has a scattered global style, but the main feeling is dreamlike, with techniques coming from child paintings, heavy use of paints in it’s material form, so this will never apply to the virtual computer screen world. The style attacks the normal shapes and forms being in protest against the too rational world we live in according to these painters. The surrealistic legacy is strong and not to be fitted with SL, although some aspects of fantasy, coming from Science-fiction can be connected to the not so human shapes some avatars are taking on.


Illumination in a book of Gaston Phebus, Count de Foix of France.
Icon of the Holy Transfiguration
Rubens, Saint -Georg
Malevitsj, The woodcutter
Franz Marc