Please allow a few seconds for sculpted prims and textures to rez. Sarlumn is a conceptual art space in four levels connected by translucent planks. The entire build is at 500 m -- be careful not to fall off (i.e., unless you are wearing a scripted object with Flight-Assist). Note that clicking on some of the objects will open notecards with supplementary information. Note that Sarlumn is a Free Culture Space: all content is free to copy, modify, & redistribute. Luego habra una edicion en espanol. Un de ces jours il-y-aura une version francaise.
This work draws upon a few primary themes and ideas. Broadly, it is a response to the corpus of existential philosophy, psychology, and literature, especially the writings of Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hesse, Rank, Becker, as well as Joyce and Bertrand Russell and others more obscure, such as the American poet Robinson Jeffers.
The trilobite is a recurring symbol, a creature that thrived for hundreds of millions of years until it was erased in a mass extinction that annihilated 96% of marine species (70% of terrestrial vertebrate species). The trilobite is an extraordinary reminder of the awesome primary horrors of Nature that most people reflexively put out of their minds. At the center of the lower platform is an invented planet with a yellow-green atmosphere and two moons -- akin to the many worlds that astronomers have discovered in the last decade. This is a terrible symbol, too, that has captivated the modern imagination: alien worlds and the vast barren landscapes that cover them, bereft of cities and farmland or even tiny insects, but having surface conditions that preclude even the most robust forms of life on Earth. These are the sublime and horrible "deserts of creation" that Anna Barbauld writes about, the indifferent universe that Tennyson abhors in his In Memoriam (LIV-LVI). Some of these passages can be found on the first level, on the monoliths as well as floating above pylons, along with texts by Mario Benedetti, Jean-Paul Sarte, Mary Shelley, Hermann Hesse, and others. The images orbiting the alien planet show sand dunes on Mars, lunar craters, trilobite and triceratops fossils, as well as ancient petroglyphs from western Australia.
The third level holds a sculpted-prim model Ediacaran organisms that were snuffed-out at the end of the Precambrian, when complex multi-cellular life emerged and diversified at an explosive rate. Opposite these fossils is a model of the surface of Mars in Candor Chasma, acquired by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft.
Apart from the uneasy recollection and awareness of the overwhelming expanse of time and space (physical and cultural space, natural and historical time), another important theme in Sarlumn is the "iconoclast" who shatters the comforting myths that people tell about themselves to gain a positive self-evaluation (pictured are Darwin, Galileo, Duchamp, Socrates and Nietzsche). The intermediate level is a chess board -- a conceptual piece that recalls these remarkable spirits: extraordinary souls who have started (the cognizant portion of) mankind reeling and gasping in the grip of existential nausea. These larger-than-life personalities are compared with Nietzsche's Ubermensch, or Otto Rank's "Artist": the lone courageous usurper who rejects the symbolic enterprises of his fathers to create a new life-way that is less fettered with dogmas and trivialities.
Also on the third level, a rotating cylinder is etched with inscriptions in Akkadian, ancient Greek, Latin, French, and English (the enduring wisdom of civilizations that have perished). At the foundation is a passage in cuneiform, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest story and its first existential lore. The Greek is from Socrates' Apologia. The Latin text is from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, and the French is one of Pascal's pithy and devastating observations about human nature. The highest text is written in English, but spelled using Urubast -- a phonetic script invented by the curator to reflect symmetries in the phoneme system (originally conceived as an artistic experiment), evoking a future time. This phrase was taken from one of Bertrand Russell's essays. The contents are left as an exercise for the visitor (or you can ask me to send these to you).
Apart from these works, the visitor will find drawings and some writings by the curator (me), as well as two monoliths in Urubast. (An Urubast cipher is located on the lowest platform.) The black monoliths are an undisguised reference to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and the Obsolescence of Man. Exhibits inspired by his hopeful vision of post-humanity and the history of this very notion (from Frankenstein to Neuromancer) will become an important theme in future additions to Roulin Space.
The Making of Sarlumn
Sarlumn was constructed on this 512 sq-meter plot of First Land ("Roulin Space") in late August of 2006, and has since undergone many refinements. The original build consisted of only 117 primitive objects and was expanded in 2011 to include twice that number. I (the curator) produced all of the sounds, sculpted prims, and the vast majority of textures. The sculpties were made using software that I have written for generating free-form worm objects without branching. (I am happy to answer questions about how the content was created.)
Curator's recommendation:
Select one of the following "Sky Presets" from World : Environment Editor : Advanced Sky Editor : Sky Presets: "Incongruent Truths", "Sailor's Delight," "Sheer Surreality" or "Barcelona".
Contacting the curator
Visitors are welcome to post comments below (a kind of guest book) or send them to obaphuacs (at) gmail.com. I constructed this build partly in order to meet creative and curious people in Second Life -- drop me a line and I'll see you in the metaverse.
