#016
Dancer: Zoe Llewelyn
Club: Fab Glitter
1. What are your 3 favorite places to dance?
Fab Glitter is the only place I come to dance these days.
2. In social terms, RL Dancing and Avatar Dancing might be pretty similar. But in physical terms they seem pretty different. Can you talk a little bit about why you like to dance and what the experience of it is for you?
Dancing in RL has always been a strange experience for me. I am deaf from birth, but in clubs when I was young, the vibration and feel of the loud music made me love dancing.
In SL I don’t get that same sensation, so I dance in SL for very different reasons than I do in RL. Here its a purely social setting for me to hang out with friends and talk. In RL its a form of self-expression in a public space.
3. Can you say a little about Avatar Bodies? How do you like to look? Do you think about how others will perceive you? Do you think about how other avatars look? Are there any particular looks that turn you on or off?
Well, I am an artist, designer, and fashionista, so how my avatar looks, dresses and is seen is important to me for a lot of reasons.
In RL I am a middle-aged deaf Cherokee woman with arthritis and more grey hair than black now. SL allows me to present myself more as I see myself in my head, instead of how people in RL see my exterior. Here I am in control of what people see. It is liberating, and gives me a huge artistic outlet.
Of course, we all have looks we prefer; things we are attracted to in ourselves and in others. Some of the trends in avatars in SL lately may not be my own ideas of beauty, but then that is what I love about Second Life…we all get to express our own opinions on how we want to be seen by the world.
4. What else should we know about you or about avatar life?
Second Life, and any online virtual community like it, can be a social lifeline to those who may be more isolated, marginalized or cut off in real life. There is a lot said these days about how virtual life is causing us to interact with each other less…but few people talk about the flip side of that. For many of us, virtual life can help us gain connections we lack in RL.
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Jeremy Owen Turner
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Vanessa Blaylock
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Yordie Sands
I am riveted by this project. You may remember when we first met, I asked a question much like the one that seems to govern this project. I feel gratified to get so many different answers! Thank you. I hope you blog about your practice — how you do this: do you target dancers before the interview, or do you go to the different sites and peruse the crowd to find one that interests you?
Hi Christa! Actually “Dancer #16″ was the first one I’ve done (the others were done before my, hmm… “Medici Princess Resurrection” – and believe me, with so many Popes & Cardinals in my family, and the engineering of so much power and position in Vatican City, if anybody should be able to pull off a modern-day resurrection, it should be a Medici Princess)
Even though this was my first “Dancer Profile,” I think I can answer your question. And how lucky was I to talk to Zoe! So much refined beauty and elegance combined with clarity and articulation about her world!
Anyway, step 1 is — OHHHH — this should be one of those “Open Art Cookbook” .Re/cipes I bet!
Step 1 – go to a different Dance Club. There are probably less than 365 active ones, but the idea is to go to new places before repeating places already visited.
Step 2 – pick somebody. I suppose there is a tendency to pick the more interesting or more extreme avatars over the more vanilla appearances, but to a large degree you get who you get. Even a crowded club isn’t, in a way, that crowded. People come and go a lot. You can read someone’s profile and by the time you look up they’re already gone. You ask some peeps and they just never respond at all. Some say “no thank you.” Some say ok, but then never answer the questions.
At Fab Glitter I actually had 3 people say yes, but then one changed her mind because she looked at my profile and seeing that I was only 1 day old, she concluded that it must be some kind of scam. Another was actually really flattered about it, but she never answered the questions. And the 3rd was Zoe.
Step 3 – Take Pix
Step 4 – Ask questions. We use an SL thing called a “Notecard” which is just a little text doc you can give to people. I hand them the notecard with the 4 questions, and then they type in it and give it back. (well, sometimes they give it back anyway)
Step 5 – process pix & publish!
You know Christa, everybody can do these – you could do one, or a bunch, too. You could even mod the questions if you wanted to ask different ones. It seems like what we’ve learned so far is to keep the number of questions really low, and to ask leading questions. If there’s a way to give a 1-word answer, a lot of peeps will do that. It seems like the series so far has shown a lot of wonderful people who are beautiful in different ways. I think they’ve all presented well, but not many are as articulate as Zoe.