Written by ina on Wednesday, 18 of March , 2009 at 12:47 pm
Tags: nyotaimori
PRESS RELEASE
March 17, 2009
Contact: Lora Constantine
Inachi Presents Avatar Nyotaimori on Second Life
Shakespeare, Second Life and Skin City, Second Life—In the midst of a virtual reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England, an avant-garde virtual sushi restaurant named Inachi unveils its first gourmet dish. Dubbed “Nyotaimori,” the platter features an artistic arrangement of finely-priced sushi adorning the nude avatar body of virtual celebrity Codebastard Redgrave. The sum of sushi prices on this Nyotaimori reaches at about L$1,000,000; its purpose is to be dismantled by its audience as every “edible piece” of this virtual culinary sculpture is sold off in a single fundraiser to benefit the SL Shakespeare Company. The presentation opens to the public at 1 PM PDT on Saturday, March 21st at the Blackfriars Theatre.
Not surprisingly, the prolific Ina Centaur is both the founder and artist of Inachi and its Nyotaimori. As with many of Centaur’s projects, Inachi began as a hobby, “Inachi started out as a somewhat offbeat-obsessive project to document and semi-immortalize in virtual-world-3D, some of the sushi I’ve tasted. And then one day a friend showed me a picture of nyotaimori, or female body sushi. It all became clear to me that day—both the name ‘Inachi’ made sense, as well as how I might turn these sushi-Lego things I’ve created into… a feast for your eyes!”
Inachi in its most literal translation to Ina Centaur’s native Mandarin Chinese means “Ina, go eat!” But, since Centaur’s discovery of “female body sushi” last May, the translation, while still retaining its homonym, became ??? or, literally, “One Take Eat.” Centaur explains its significance, “The translation sounds flip, but I think it’s cool that the translation back to English also affords a theatrical pun. My SL Shakespeare Company project has been something I’ve been trying to raise funds for since its inception in 2007, and basically everything I do in virtual worlds goes to fund it. Also, I think the translation fits how we’ll manage to present nyotaimori as a viable artform in a very material and commercial virtual world: people will simply take (pay) and eat each piece of artful virtual sushi goodness.”
To Centaur, this Nyotaimori event is both art that represents Second Life, and a social experiment, “Art is essentially an interpretive representation of an object, in the general sense; in this case, the object is the virtual world of Second Life, and Nyotaimori is kind of like a satirical symbol of it. Inachi’s Nyotaimori recasts a nude female avatar into both culinary and ethnic art via an artistic arrangement of sushi. The individual pieces of sushi are cast in a state that will soon dissipate, as each piece is taken, just as the artful sims of Second Life are dismantled due to the decree of limited resource budgets. The avatar in this avatar body sushi presentation is famous and has media appeal, just like how Second Life has it. But, the art lives in the manifestation of its sushi, just like how Second Life wouldn’t be anything without its user-created content… The social experiment would be to see if people’d bite.” Despite its novelty and representation, Centaur is uncertain but hopeful about Nyotaimori as a means to fund inworld art, “Most of my fundraising attempts in virtual worlds have failed miserably. I hope this one is different enough to meet its goal!”
On a happier note, when asked to comment on her choice of designating Codebastard Redgrave as her maiden Nyotaimori, Centaur comments, “I think Codie is incredibly sexy, and Second Life might find it interesting to undress the sushi off her—literally!”
About Inachi (???)
Inachi is a fictional restaurant set in the virtual world of Second Life. Ina Centaur, its founder and head chef-artist, serves hand-made virtual sushi with exquisite detail and care in performance art settings. Its main store is located in the underground metros of Skin City, Second Life.
Category: Amusing, Designs, Projects
Written by ina on Sunday, 15 of March , 2009 at 6:28 pm
Tags: , wall of sculpted genitalia
A blast from the past that came up just a few days ago ;-P
Drama sux… but a long while ago, I adopted a pair of drama llamas and put them on guard on both ends of my Wall of Sculpted Genitalia…
(You see, there was a group of girls from the Convent who randomly chose that location to worship back in 07, and I thought the only way to consecrate the grounds would be to create a shrine to their Freudian demon…)
So, when drama strikes, you are welcome to relieve yourself on a wide and long array of sculpted genitalia… ride-friendly on the spot and in all colors and several sizes! (Sculpted Condoms are free for those who end up getting too cozy with them…)
(Beware: the wall is gender biased! Not that sculpts of the other gender look anything other than ick on SL…)
Category: Amusing
Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin
rating: 4 of 5 stars
[ The Mistress of the Art of Death series recounts the adventures in medieval England of Adelia Vesuvia Rachel Aguilar, a rare woman trained as a medical doctor in the famous schools of Salerno. Under the summons of King Henry II, in Book I, Adelia arrives in England to solve a mystery concerning the murders of many children. Though disgusted by him at first, she meets and falls in love with Sir Rowley Picot, but chooses to undergo an unofficial relationship with him in order to maintain her independence. In Book II (The Serpent’s Tale), the King’s favorite concubine Rosamund is found dead, and Adelia is summoned to solve the mystery. Adelia has settled into a home in the fens with Glytha—and Rowley’s child, whom she is determined to raise without him. (After Adelia had spurned married life with him, Rowley had taken the King’s offer to become Bishop Rowley.) Book III in this historical fiction saga (with its own quirky dose of forensics) puts Adelia in the midst of the uncovering of truth in legend. :]
The story begins in the year 1154 A.D., when a cathedral-destroying earthquake strikes Glastonbury, England, creating a fissure in the earth—where the alleged remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere’s bodies would be found. Twenty years later, King Henry II fights to gain his lands in Wales—against a people who don’t recognize him as King, believing that King Arthur (who lived in the 6th century) is still alive. Henry thus summons Adelia away from her otherwise normal life to investigate the truth of Arthur’s bones—and, he hopes, to prove to the Welsch that their so-called King had long ago died.
Adelia is traveling with Lady Emma Wolvercote (the abbey choirgirl in Book II, raped by the late Lord Wolvercote), when the King’s men arrive to take her off course. Arriving in Glastonbury, she and her manservant Mansur (officially, the “doctor,” to save Adelia from ignorant accusations of witchcraft), are greeted by the abbot, whom, with suspicious openness, allows them to inspect the remains of the alleged bones that are believed to be Arthur and Guinevere’s. As expected, there would be those resistant to the discovery of the truth behind the bones, and our heroes thus narrowly escape death several times from attempts to put them off.
Although once a woman baffled and embarassed by how others could sacrifice their life for the love of a man, Adelia—on the brinks of death by aphyxiation with Rowley in a sealed tunnel—finds that she would be ready to do that for Rowley. Our heroine and her beloved survive, of course, but the incident would set about a course of confessions and revelations that would explain both Arthur’s bones and the relations between several unlikely parties in this small town.
Ripe with both historical and forensics details, the novel entertains and educates without detracting much from the story. Most memorable is a touching conversation in a rose-garden in summer between Adelia and Emma on love and circumstances, wherein Adelia, in her pedantic nature, goes off a tangent discussing historical contraceptions, notably venerable pessaries soaked in vinegar. Another interesting fact revealed in the story is that preserves or Worcestershire sauce are the best means to clean historic swords preserved in muck—this was used to reveal that a rusted sword that had saved Adelia’s life was, in fact, Excaliber. But, though the story is lovely at times, it is a work of fiction. Although Henry II was reportedly its owner at one point during his reign, no one now knows where Excaliber is; the author admits in the endnote that the dates of certain events are shifted to render them in accords with other events. Nevertheless, who’s to say things didn’t happen as they did? Even the study of history in academia is prone to changes, as new findings challenge existing notions.
Interestingly, unlike its predecessors, Book III ends in suspense—as one of the villains Adelia narrowly escapes in the woods looks on at her passing in menace…
View all my reviews.
Category: Amusing, Reflections, Reviews
