Ina Centaur Biography (Detailed Version) - Draft 0.02
Written by ina on Monday, 2 of June , 2008 at 3:46 am
(This is the long version of my biography. For the concise version, please view this page. IC 2008)
Twenty-three year old Ina Centaur is currently pursuing the life of an independent artist who is both her own patron and maestro. Her current pallette is based in digital media, particularly multiuser virtual worlds.
After serving as developer and consultant for a number of “Web 2.0” startup’s in late 2006, she finally followed a slashdot article down the rabbit hole to Second Life. While she didn’t immediately get drawn into the vortex of Second Life, she did the second time she returned in early 2007.
On Second Life, she started out mainly as a freelance architect and speed-build sculpter, but soon got caught up in the administrative and graphical affairs of sLiterary Magazine. The publication started out with the unique theme of publishing only metaverse fiction – and ambitious goal of establishing the new genre of metaverse fiction. It grew to become the metaverse literary journal, and earlier this year, expanded into sLiterary, Inc., a real life nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering literary and artistic endeavors in Second Life and other virtual worlds.
Because she did not believe in putting money into a game, she started sLiterary Magazine with a 512m2 “firstland” in her humble “Art in Black & White” gallery in Shiot (whose art now shows up in several prominent location – including Adiatha Bishop’s Henry James House project on SL) and about L$137 left in her account. This wasn’t enough to purchase either a dispenser solution or publishing factory, so she delved into LSL to create both her own dispenser system and inworld book solution. The systems evolved into web-linked applications SLtracer and SLdonate, which tracks data and stores them in an external database for different visual output.
Until late 2007, when she built her current computer, Antecso, she used what she often referred to as “the most expensive Dell available in mid-2002.” The funds were purchased from the remaining amount of a major scholarship that enabled her formal education. The main distinction of the system was its 1 GB of RAMBUS ram, which, interestingly, ran better than 2 GB sdram systems. But, Second Life used to crash quite frequently for her, so she developed SLchatr, an application to store and save her chats, and also to allow them to be read in real-time by an external agent.
sLiterary Magazine’s inaugural issue came out in March 2007. Despite being a SL-based publication, it’s notable for paying writers between L$1 and L$10/word “for writing new fiction”, which is comparable to RL writing market rates. Until very recently, the magazine ran as a “true-ideal nonprofit”—all revenues raised were directly paid to writers; all staff worked as pro bono volunteers. Although the magazine’s administrative system was only something she haphazardly inherited, Centaur managed to make the system work. sLiterary fourished from a 512m2 to a 4096m2 parcel in May donated by a patron, and then in June, a 65536m2 island simulator for 2 months donated by a patron.
In June, she acted as the building coordinator for SL4B’s Year 4 island simulators and telehub, and helped coordinate the setup of parcels and booths to represent both the writers and writing communities of SL and also the fashion and skin designers of SL.
In August, she opened her inworld skin store IC-Skins, which sold (and still sells) “the most photorealistic skins on Second Life.” The store was made possible, in part, from a repository of original and royalty-free human photography sources accumulated from the SL Face Project, which she started back in March 2007; its goal to “diversify the avatars of Second Life through high quality affordable custom solutions” is still upheld through IC-Skins, which provides some of the most original skins of SL. IC-Skins debuted with a fashion show at Skin Fair 2007, and enabled her to fund the purchase of the sLiterary sim. The sLiterary island sim now hosts the main entrance to the SL Globe Theatre, a humble writing retreat called Anodos, the Robert Jordan Memorial, the sLiterary Events Center, and also the sLiterary Art & Writing Gallery “AWG,” an inworld gallery of notable SL art. sLiterary has held the longest running biweekly author interview show in conjunction with a top itunes literary podcast—since May 2007. It was also the main inworld location for SL meetup’s for NaNoWriMo 2007.
Also in August, she held auditions for the SL Shakespeare Company’s inaugural play—Hamlet. Back then, this was just a hobby project, but the enthusiastic response from the community expanded this into something much bigger. Centaur has been both executive producer and artistic director for this project, a hybrid role of sorts. She has created an array of art mixed with advertising in the various SL Shakespeare Company playbills, actor posters and outfit vendor posters, directed (with Enniv Zarf) and financed two of the miniproductions, and created the skeletons of a capital campaign.
The SL Shakespeare Company produced a “machinima storyboard” in October and a teaser machinima for Hamlet. As announced, it showed its premier live theatrical performance in February 2008 in its miniproduction of “Hamlet: Act 1 Scene 1 Extended.” In April, with a special pre-opening date on the Bard’s birhtday 4/23, it also showed “Hamlet: Act 3 Scene 2 The Mousetrap.” Centaur was significantly involved in all creative aspects of the plays.
In the time between all of these major projects, Centaur also took on a number of commissioned architectural works. The thing she found the most interesting had been the different ways which “patrons” react – in general, quality wins the money – providing that they can actually pay! While working incognito playing the role of the “impoverished artist,” she encountered an alarming number of cases where a sum would be promised by a certain type of individual, and never actually paid – or, rather, swindled in the various ways that the virtual land mechanisms of Second Life could allow. Such experiences have pushed her into working exclusively on her own projects, forcing her to become her own “patron-artist.”
In February of 2008, she acquired three more island simulators in addition to sLiterary to facilitate a mass audience for the SL Shakespeare Company’s live theatrical performance. Primtings is, simply, a primmed paintings museum. Skin City is an artistic remake of Frank Miller’s Sin City and features a consolidated location for the skin and avatar fashion designers on SL. And, Shakespeare is a sim that features the various significant architecture of the Bard’s life.
…
In what she often refers to as another lifetime (2002-2006), she triple majored in Bioengineering, Physics, and Philosophy at UCSD, and “audited” unofficial minors in Literature, History of Science, and Theatre. While she took courses at the graduate level in Physics, she found that the more she delved into theory, the more she became convinced that physics was only “mysticism with symbolic justification”:
“There are some pretty maths to fill up the puzzle with. But, at the end of the long day or years of symbolic manipulation whether by hand or numerical computation, you have to interpret your results – using the so-called ‘physical intuition,’ and it’s often more gestalt than piece-by-piece justified… Basically, you come up with an interpretation that has something to say about some of the major experimental results, and even if it makes little ‘sense’ from an overall view, you simply fight for it or get enough people to believe in it, and if you’ve got enough political pull, people will naturally make interpretations of their experiments in favor of your theory…” When asked to summarize her view recently, she stated, “The ‘PageRank of Science’ is like the PageRank of anything – it’s a popularity contest and although ‘SEO’ is often referred to as references in papers in physics or Erdos numbers in math, it’s all a people thing… population inevitably leads to popularity.”
When asked why she took such a major career change, she answered, “There’s really no such thing as the study of one particular subject putting you closer to the truth. For a long time, I believed that scientific truth was the absolute truth because it was steeped in empircal and ‘real’ results. But, that’s shallow and only true from one perspective, similar to how Newton believed there was an absolute center of the universe in his interpretation of his own physics. Putting on a different set of Kuhnian lenses, the old truth becomes a falsehood. And, in the end, it is really only about your own experience of the truth… it’s all as uncertain as art – where the only value that you can derive from it for sure exists in the creation of it… and fame or whether the piece survives you is all due to that political pull again… and should be taken as extraneous.”
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