AM Radio has sent a message to his group announcing that he will be closing his spaces in Second Life in six months time, to allow people time to visit and to say goodbye to the luminous and much-loved creations.
Rowan Derryth has interviewed AM Radio for her Ekphrasis column, and you can read about AM’s work in Second Life and beyond in two articles: Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
The message reads:
The Quiet and The Far Away
Dear Friends,
I know there are folks who visit my sims daily, weekly, or monthly and that these spaces have become a part of their experience in Second Life. I am announcing the closing of my spaces 6 months in advance so that it won’t come as a surprise, drama, or rumor.
It is merely the end of a series of artworks. I continue to paint, sketch, photograph and write about my time here on this little rock collection that’s spinning and hurtling through space.
IDIA Labs of Ball State University has been gracious to host my work without demand or requirement. The sunsetting of the IDIA Lab sim is the result of positive and thoughtful input from IDIA, myself, and many of you.
I have archived the work already, and I appreciate the impulse to want to save the work.
The work though was as social as any avatar in SL, making friends with many of you and enabling so many positive experiences many of you have let me know about. ALL OF YOU are what the artwork really was. It isn’t in the prims, the textures, or scripts. It was in your willingness to explore and experience the world in a way I tried to share it. My time in SL has been like having hundreds of people analyzing my dreams every morning. I have learned so much about many of you, but truly learned so much about myself.
Please feel free to continue to visit. Please encourage anyone you know who will miss the spaces to visit them with you. See my picks in my profile for landmarks.The extent of my estate is a foothold by the water. All are welcome to the infinite within it.
Sincerely,
AM Radio
Visit the spaces at:
The Quiet – http://slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/150/79/23
The Far Away – http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dreamworld%20North/220/130/22
A Little Further Than Before: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/145/229/3476
Superdyne: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/164/183/3024
Surface: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/164/183/3024
The Ferry: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/133/160/1309
You can see more of PJ Trenton’s pictures of AM Radio’s work on Flickr.
Prim Perfect 
Sad news. 😦
Sad news!
This is where I wish Linden would step up and do something to preserve some of the more excellent builds that have been created over the years, some sort of archive or museum, so long as the original creators agree.
Even if they don’t display them all at once, they could rotate them in and out of a collection of say ten museum servers and announce the schedule so they could be visited.
Very sad news indeed. I have only been to two of the sims and they are amazing works of art. He will be missed. 😦
I would urge Machinima Makers to record what is here now. As the transitional Art of Virtual Worlds is so very delicate. 🙂
AM Radio licensed his “The Far Away” installation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. There’s a downloadable OAR file of the entire region here: http://opensim-creations.com/2010/07/14/further-away/
I’m going to miss them
A little tribute : http://www.flickr.com/photos/rionasl/3557134015/in/photostream .
“I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall. I no
longer know what there is behind this wall, I no longer know
there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer
know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there
are walls, and that if there weren’t any walls, there would be no
apartment. The wall is no longer what delimits and defines the
place where I live, that which separates it from the other places
where other people live, it is nothing more than a support for the
picture. But i also forget the picture, I no longer look at it, I no
longer know how to look at it.”
— Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
Thank you for letting us know. I love AM Radio’s work and will miss it.
I noticed that the “Surface” Slurl is not quite right. Try this one:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/142/93/2058
Cheers,
Nita
I have wonderfully potent memories of these sims stretching back 4 years, and even if I rushed back today and took more photos, it would just seem to be grasping after something that is too elusive… and all the better for being so. I appreciate AM’s giving us this notice. It’s totally “in character” for him to do so and of course, I wish him well in all future ventures both artistic and otherwise. And I look forward to revisiting his SL art spaces in my mind’s eye whenever they choose to bubble up into my consciousness.
You can download an entire OAR file of AM Radio’s “The Far Away” from here: http://opensim-creations.com/2010/07/14/further-away/
Grab that file, put it on your own Opensim installation, and AM’s art will live forever. 🙂
Reblogged this on and commented:
Everyone should seriously go check out his sims before they close! His sims are so inspiring! I actually used to film on these sims back when I did SL much videos. Here’s a link to the video I completely done mostly on his beautiful sims! —>