Burning Life 2009: The Roof Is Gone

October 19, 1:14 PMSecond Life ExaminerApollo Manga

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The Roof Is Gone, the collaborative work by Miso Susanowa and Misprint Thursday in Second Life's Burning Life 2009, is a creation that you must see and experience for yourself. The few words and photos in this article don't do it justice and can't convey a sense of an experience that merges elements of the artist Salvador Dali, Hurricane Katrina, RNA, DNA, music, the LA Riots, the Northridge earthquake, the Apocalypse, tesseracts, the Crucifixion, and the Winchester Mystery House with the artist's personal experiences. This picture shows one level of the interior; you'll find more pictures in the slide show below.

Looking at the structure from a distance, it's clearly inspired by Dali's painting The Crucifixion, with the same color and three dimensional cross shape, but without the painting's Christ figure and propped up by scaffolding. Up close, if you play streaming media, listen to the music on it, and wear the HUD that's available as you enter, the experience becomes haunting and clearly shaped by Miso's personal experience of waking up to find the house in which she was sleeping sliding down a hill during the Northridge earthquake and news reports of Hurricane Katrina.

Throughout the structure, you'll find little challenges, hidden spaces, clickable objects, flying debris, and always the haunting music and a little girl's voice mourning what's been lost. Miso Susanowa wrote the song and Misprint Thursday incorporated it into the video. As it loops endlessly, with debris that includes curled photographs swirling through the air, the sense of catastrophe and loss is pervasive.

The artist describes basic structure of her creation as a hypercube and that inside she has created four spaces "to mimick the evolutionary process of all of us, and each person. Baby, child, adult, mature. Mineral, animal, vegetable, human." She says further that the propped up nature of the structure and that "evolution is not a stable process. Nor is growing up. Things fall apart and we do the best we can, as nature does... disasters happen."

However, despite appearances, the artist doesn't see this as a gloomy creation. Just the opposite. Its shape of a cross shows the hope she sees in the catastrophes that inevitably occur. She says that the structure she has created is "a little tilted, a little battered, but still standing. Because we overcome, as nature does. Our past defines us, as our evolutionary past defines us," but that we must "have faith that... continuing, rebuilding is worth while...I suggest that this process, known to every adult is natural... and needs addressing now or we will all feel loss." She says further that we need "to see patterns... we are over specialized, I think we are missing some important patterns and we need to know them. So I try to show... how these complex matters relate to an individual... a process of evolution."

The photographs in the slide show below will give you some taste of this creation, but you need to experience it for yourself. Second Life members can visit it at slurl.com/secondlife/Burning%20Life-Black%20Rock/27/18/25.

You can read about Burning Life's Ten Principles in Burning Life 2009 is open and see photos in the seven photo previews by clicking preview 1, preview 2, preview 3, preview 4, preview 5, preview 6, or preview 7.  Burning Life is inspired by and closely follows the principles of Nevada's Burning Man.

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All photographs in this report are by Erik Gordon Bainbridge.