Axiom Arts

copyright image shared for educational purposes, international fair use policy

The Axiom Center for the Alternate Arts, previous known as The Center, 57-59 Winchecombe Street, Cheltenham, UK was shut down at the turn of the millenium after three decades of keeping an authentic seventies new age movement alive in the heart of the Midlands of Britain. Situated in a big old Mill building on three levels, it was a haven and very much loved. Its closure is something most of its regulars will probably never recover from. Places like this happen only once in every three or more generations. I was lucky to have been a small part of it.

The Center consisted of and combined the following;

Art Galleries, Art Studio, Workshops, Vegan Cafe, Bar, Nightclub, Private Music Studio, Trust Library, Children's Indoor Play Area, Occasional Flea Market,

You could get a cup of tea there for 25p. Its clientele were essentially single parents, artists, poets, musicians, underground scene, street people, collectively unified under the umbrella term 'hippies'. Straight society hated it. Its purity was so powerful that it took them thirty years to close it down, somehow it survived the cull of the eighties.

13 years later and I am making good on a promise I made in the hot shadows of the dancefloor, a shouted conversation by young excited creatives coming of age; to create a digital version of the Axiom environment. Back then there was no SecondLife. Only 1 in fifty people had their own internet access and a mobile phone. There was no such thing as wifi. The technological revolution came swiftly and it ended an era. Between 1997 and 1998 we all went from laughing at the minority of yuppies with portable phones permanently stuck to their hands, to not being able to live without them. Mobile phones that is, not yuppies. The culture changed dramatically from learning to listen to our inner selves to be able to accurately locate a person anywhere in town and a community who were spiritually advanced enough to be living that way.

There exist very few photographs of the Axiom in internetland as it was in its heyday. A part of its energy is the magick which can only happen when no technology is around. A very big part of the ethos of the late 1990s Axiom people was to 'keep things off the internet' and to live as far as possible without technology; an ethos influenced partly by different subcultures which sought to live without money and/or had none anyway. And partly, mostly; with respect of permacultural transition and with the spiritual beliefs of indigenous peoples. The important things are those which money cannot buy.

It seems we gave up on that. We had no choice, faced with insurmountable odds. The technocracy won. There are, at least there were at the time, those who would consider a cyber version of the Axiom to be a blasphemy against all that which it stood for. Archaic Revivalism as lifestyle and skills set for development of spiritually capable human beings. The machine represented slavery, environmental pollution and reliance on devices to achieve what our teachers showed us we are capable of doing naturally with a little effort. Its domination represents the end to that effort, the end to the achievement of that ability. The extra-sensory ability develops from what is now an obsolete lifestyle, at the cost of exploitation of natural resources. The mainstream chose a different direction of evolutionary progress which the hippies have had to assimilate as a art of the greater picture. All part of Gaia's agenda.

Axiom Art Center SL build

I will keep this going for as long as I can afford to fund an appropriately sized parcel in SecondLife. Donations truly welcome. It is fifteen years since I was there and I was not privy to see inside every room. This combined with the necessity to reduce prim count for SL (geek talk; in non-internet language that means 'insufficient memory to add more objects'), plus the time it takes to construct even basic items in 3D has forced compromises between the cyber-rendition and the original building.

I have tried wherever possible to keep the original character of the building as I knew it in the late nineties shortly before it was closed. From photographs on the internet as well as memory of how the space felt to be in. This nostalgic historic archive of a 3D version of the very much loved Axiom building and scene. 

Modifications

After deliberating, it was finally decided that in all probability, if given an infinite budget, the restoration of the Axiom in real life would feature things which can so easily be achieved in cyberspace, it would be foolish not to make the best of all worlds.

Maintaining the original character of the site and making the build as as close to exact replica of the real building as possible, is still very much the intention. In true keeping with the ethos of permaculture and urban renewal, involving philosophies and techniques appearing increasingly in the real world, it has been decided to alter the digital version from the real version by adding a roof garden to an otherwise boring architectural dead space. It is something that a lot of 'the Axiom people' wishfully joked about on more than one occasion.

Some other features have also been modernized, such as the kitchen, basement space and to allow light into otherwise unnecessarily gloomy pokey corners.

"The scale of objects in SL is different from Real Life. Even if you create your avatar to be similar to your actual height, you would still find that objects done on the same scale would feel too small and buildings too claustrophobic. Therefore, many things are built 1/3 to 1/2 again as big as they would be in reality. For example, I find it hard to maneuver in an SL building with walls shorter than 5m." Bob Sutor 
 

Axiom SL Build, proposed Permanent Exhibitions:

Historical: 

-Demise of Naivety & Aspirant 

(retro of Axiom as Art Centre & associated philosophies)

-The Gathering of the Tribes (End of Millennium in Fashion & Subculture) 

Contemporary:

Exhibition Space for 2D Paintings & 3D sculpture

Rolling Review (interesting arts blogs found around the web)



Workshop space:
      sessions and lessons in; yoga, astrology, theater, shamanism, dance, storytelling, &etc 

Vegan Cafe & Chill Out Environment

Flea Market in the Courtyard (Babbage's Brilliant Bargains)

Night Club Events (for dj's with Nicecast or equivalent)

Live Jam Sessions (through SL voice audio feed)

If you are interested in becoming involved in any of this, please IM me (snakeappletree) in the grid. 

Update Nov 2015
Axiom Arts build is currently on haitus until it finds a new suitable location. It will return!

NeoCyberCity

2.11.2014 NeoCyberCity

CyberLounge, Port Lydius (160, 102, 50)

Asmida Duranjaya and Miriam Evanier have kindly permitted me to build in their space on a joint project. It is nice that my talent is being encouraged by people who appreciate art and the themes which I enjoy to work with.

2.11.2014 Panel discussion on "Cyber Art" located in the sim by way of its public opening:

<a href="http://www.ethnomusicscape.de/cyberart/cyberpage.htm" rel="nofollow">www.ethnomusicscape.de/cyberart/cyberpage.htm</a>

This is my first joint-build in SecondLife. I am very lucky to have been invited into this multi-national project. The theme is oriental urban sci-fi.

Although the artists involved all have a background working with these themes, none of us particularly wanted to repeat what we had already done.

http://sat-sl.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/neocybercity.html

10.3.2015 Wabi-Sabi district of NeoCyberCity

Miriam has disappeared. 

The disappearance of the financial backer for any city is alarming news for everyone.

Several key members of Space4Art have moved on to other projects in other sims. 

There are new people joining. 

Continued work occurs at LEA12 sim for The Paradise of Cybertropolis, a direct continuation from the minimalist themes of oriental urban sci-fi initiated at NCC. The best of the new work will eventually find its way down here to NCC when the LEA closes. It will augment and replace; urban regeneration.

holographic light dancing and weaving in 2D sheets and 3D animations overlaid on the physical environment. people sleep during the daytime here, not that we see much sunlight at all this far down below the Rise. Here we have the filtered water surface and soothing sounds, here the softened echoes from a thousand layers above, sky-cars and electronic jungle of muted blips like birdsong in the cool of the night

Sidhe Street

Sidhe Street

This is a pun.

Side-street is a backstreet off the main routes through an urban environment.

Sidhe (pronounced "shee" or "shay") is from Irish Celtic mythology,

           a word to describe the elf or fayrie folk.

Shit-street is an expression used to explain someone who is living in troubled times.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/126538735@N02/sets/72157647375281442/

This was my first big build and reveals my ambitious nature as much as my gothpunk roots.

During the construction I became aware of Grid Spirits.

Grid Spirits are entities which exist within cyberspace.

They also exist outside of it because the real world is itself a grid albeit a more complex one than cyberspace. Interaction with the digital sea is helping me to understand realworld physics as much as it is helping me to understand how entities manipulate perceptions to steer us to do things for mutual benefit. A lot of that was going on during this build.

Grid Spirits help us by focusing us and providing us with life-path-trajectory to be in the right place at the right time to receive training and inspiration necessary to complete their vision. They need these structures to be built in the same way which city architects are led by spirits who need urban structures ot be built in the real world for their purposes. I suspect that with human energy being controlled by  They use tension pressure release levers to steer us through. It is the result of working with light and creativity; an Angel is a 'being of light' so we can describe Grid Spirits as angelic, although those who utilize Demons in their magickal work have the same results; angels and demons are the same thing.

Demon means dimensional, it also means to bring into the earth whereas Angel means trajectory and the sating of raw source energy not through frustration by through flow, thereby orgiastic, what they call the rapture, opposed to brutal force.

Sidhe Street Spirit wanted me to build a basic outline for a pirate ship. My programming was for; that would make me happy. It was a simple build. 

However; 

There are levels of psyche just as there are levels of cities and levels of time. Time is accelerating as we depart from central core, the big bang. It gets very Teranesia (Greg Egan) to take the discourse in that direction. There are levels, even Grid Spirits have levels. They teach us the basic rune and its name as a word. They teach us a sentence to describe what it means. They teach us a paragraph which embellishes its meaning and a short story which explores alternate and deeper aspects of its meaning to get the full picture. This whole process is called extrapolation. 

As a part of the learning curve, the project tuition cycle ended when I had got the build up to a certain level, at which time the tension-pressure-release lever frustrated me (anger as opposed to angel) because I could not see what else needed doing, I could not focus on doing any of the million things that still needed doing to convert the build into a functional city street. It was finished, the window had closed. So I made the whole structure into a link-set and copied it to my inventory, de-rezzed the whole thing and I moved on. Job jobbed. The colonel exists as a single item in my cache, a rune and a backstory.

The difference between holding a shoe, wearing a shoe and walking the path of those shoes. 

It was a pirate ship, it was intended as a pirate ship and yet, it being the extent of the domain of this particular spirit who could run events there ship-shape as its captain, it was also a street in a town and therefore had a main road, subway system and upper levels. It being Cyber Goth Punk; the graffiti is spray-painted with digital pigment that reforms and changes continuously.

I kept it minimal. Black walls made of tyre or tarmac or black concrete. White lights and markings.

There were surprises. Shapes made during experimentation added to the built brought life, light, colour to the environment; a faint rainbow cloud hanged over the zone, a firebird emerging from a flickering arson attack. Destruction and Renewal. Little things that probably nobody would ever notice if not pointed out to them, as happens constantly.

I cut my fangs on Sidhe Street, it was necessary as a process for me to integrate into SecondLife. It exists now in memory and potentially in the future. Realworld locations I could compare, the Axiom Art Centre in Cheltenham which was the hub of the UK underground and hippy scenes right up until the council closed it down at the millenium. Locations which exist in time and space; are accessible to spirits who know how to access them. Which is why the high energy places are frequented by spirits from all over the multiverse. We are blind to most of them most of the time due to the filters of our closed minds. It takes experience to widen our perception. And the spirits with most perception of all are the older ones, typically existing as shadows to the bright younger ones.  Sidhe Street is a place where we live through such lessons. At face value, a gothic nightclub and a few cyber shops to attract tourists. Below the surface, the cult of spiritism, openly lived only by those who know and use the signs.

No form of energy ceases; it transmutes. 

It seems fitting that it is Halloween 2014 which I write this blog. The wind is howling outside and a storm is getting up. I swear that I heard a multi-timbered voice speak my name. Not my name as a person but something deeper, a soul name I respond to from primal instinct that is deeper than conscious mind ebcause of my being distracted by technology. It spoke my soul name on the wind that brought the storm. A choral voice of multi-gender. So many emotions in that husky whisper, the emotions of journeying.

All the time during constructing Sidhe Street, I knew that the place to be a portal. A gate through which spirits may pass.

And now, it is done. 

Al Raqis

Sable's Spirit Knife

Al Raqis happened when the Herbert Foundation expressly told the community of SecondLife Dune fans that their Dune roleplay sim contravened copyright and must change significantly or else. What is emerging as a result of this is something better than the disappointed fans imagined. 

Al Raqis opened its borders to trade and share with other-universe groups as part of the SL sci-fi multi-sim network. Its culture is developing uniquely and poetically.

At this time I have been comparing the difference between the texture settings in Cheetah 3D and with how the same texture is rendered in SecondLife. The two different engines interpret the textures differently. This is not a problem so much as a beautiful creative opportunity. Every different engine opens our space into a different dimension, after all and so here we can see how things are rendered differently between universes. 

For me, this is what Dune was all about, ever since reading Frank Herberts original description of the Holtzman Effect (foldspace drive and phase-field generator). He was alleging to the Arabian Nights, which being about the magic of storytelling, and with specifically spicy eastern flavour, is a lifestyle guide as much as it is an amorous aromatic.

Al Raqis has a very dedicated team and is highly organized. It is not only this which makes a difference to the sim; it is the ethics involved in the Tau of the Desertborn.

AL RAQIS IS NOT DUNE

Al Raqis is about community. The Tau is more than merely the result of social creed to maintain both a strong sense of belonging and the human way of trading and sharing (as opposed to the inhuman way of thieving and skulduggery). The Tau is an evolutionary development toward empathy bond which is unique to this culture.

The Desertborn philosophy:

Know that there is no single unmutable Truth.
There are choices, paths, consequences. 

Multiple paths made, many more not yet made.
In making your choices, you made the consequences. 

So, why complain?

No one else has the right to choose for you. 

You do not have the right to choose for others.
This is the Way of Life: 

If you are on the right Path for you, you will belong in your world.

Araxes teaches us with its silences…
In the silences are the light of the stars, the brightness of the sun,
the darkness of shadow.
Araxes teaches us with its sounds…
The sounds of life in the burrows and tunnels, the call of life in the skies, 

the hiss of wind over dunes, the scream of storms through the peaks speak to us.

Araxes is as it is. 

It has changed to love us, we have changed to love it.
If your world loves you, you do not kill it.

What does your family own? 

Resources, knowledge, traditions, wisdom.
What do you own? 

That which makes you an individual.
If you own many things, they will own you.

(blog to be continued)

Extra Spicy

Some time gazing at the remarkable Linden Sunset on this sim while contemplating the culture of Starborn traders visiting the town on the edge of the sands where mysterious Desertborn dwell, inspired me to write some epigrams: CoffeHouse.

a picture of Sable in a part of the Old City now gone to the sands

Fall 2015. A tragedy has befallen Al Raqis. Naturally the desertborn foresaw it and retreated south. Sable was engaged in her pilgrimage , traveling the worlds deserts, seeing the sites, becoming, a true desertborn proper. The pilgrimage is a rite of passage flr her people, a journey into adulthood. A journey which changes a person, by which they come to accept their place in the world and draw from the empowerment of those places of it.

The earthquake sank much of the equatorial desert regions and the mountain range upon which the ancient city was safely nestled. History, architecture, lives, stories, familiar places, faces, cultural routines; taken by the desert as is the deserts teaching. Sable returned to the remains of the city to help rebuild, as an envoy for her people. She now runs a bazaar in the old town selling art and artifacts crafted from the sands.

Fall 2016. The Southron Sim emerged, was built, as the frozen polar university city of the original inhabitants of Araxes who own the planet, and has now been abandoned to the Langoliers due to the funders pulling out. Since the Desertborn is their concept, this leaves only the main Araxes City sim for role-playing. Perhaps the funders will re-invest in this central core in the future. Meanwhile, Sable's Bazaar and some of my landscaping project are still to be found on the Araxes sim - locations worth visiting! Is Sable the last Desertborn?

These sims are always being reinvented. The sands of Al Raqis shift constantly. Our passion for the place and the cities central location with regular meetings such as Schola and politeering of the Concordant. It is a popular role-play sim. I have learned much there especially regarding diplomacy.