Cherry Manga 2: FrancoGrid and More

Katia Venegas: Cherry Manga artiste futuriste aux talents multiples lorsqu’il s’agit de se dépasser ou de nous surprendre. La poésie est dans chacune de ses réalisations, la beauté également, aussi, le réalisme d’un monde décadent que ses créations soulignent pour mieux y échapper en s’envolant, gracieuses et dansantes, créatures étincelantes, immatérielles, uniques... Architectures de cristal aux formes inédites, l’art renouveau du futur… Un style marqué reconnaissable entre tous, une évolution constante de ses techniques et de son imaginaire, font d’elle l’artiste visionnaire de notre futur.

You don't have to know much French to see that Katia Vanegas is a fan of Cherry's art. She was the first gallery owner to exhibit Cherry's work in Second Life, and moved to FrancoGrid shortly before her. Katia's region Parc des Arts (now to be found on Craft Grid) soon had a spectacular build that the Safari visited in 2014, on FrancoGrid, a moving and powerful installation on the theme of AIDS.

FrancoGrid was founded in 2009 and had, as the name implies, an almost entirely francophone population. It was already a vibrant, art-centric community when Yann Minh introduced  Cherry and her partner Archael Magic, a nifty builder himself, whose Alpha Base is a fantastic scifi playground, to opensim in general and FrancoGrid in particular.

Archael and Cherry in FrancoGrid 2012

The Opensim option was an opportunity for Cherry to go big. No upload charges, much lower - often zero -rent to pay, much bigger prims and linksets. The chance to experiment with mesh without the penalties of dealing with the Second life mesh uploader was an obvious draw. And being able to import her art from SL, to give it a home under her own control, and in settings vastly more - well, vast, no longer crammed into a gallery or limited to a little bit of a sim, this was all to the good.   

Terra mater on Francogrid, 2012

Naturally, as with all big house moves, there's a considerable amount of work involved. Packing and moving your treasures, getting your bearings in the new place, finding out about the neighbors, coming to terms with the possibilities, the utilities, the air and horaires of a new place is always something of a culture shock whether experiences in the real world or in the virtual. For Cherry, this was true, in particular regarding the Free full perms culture of FG.

Terra Meter Day 7

Cherry Manga: my stuff is free because Ssm told me when arriving in FrancoGrid, while I was putting no transfer perms etc. to my freebies, that anything in internet is hackable or copybot-able. He told me that the true value is not the pixels themselves but the time spent to make them. That's not totally true now with this NFT thing, but it was quite right at that moment, that, to get paid, you would have to be hired to make things and be paid for the time spent on it. Exactly like a graphist or a web designer is paid. Well, that  said, I think I am by nature, quite generous, I have to pay on osgrid for my regions, but I am offered regions elsewhere, that's quite generous too! So my way to thank the community is to give my work away, also if it can inspire/help people building to understand things like "look how it's made", it's great too.

Freebie store, Le Village

Tao Vacano, head of education and member of the administration council on FG, remembers the impact Cherry made on FG right from the start.

Tao Vacano: At the golden age of our grid by offering to take care of the host region, she made our small associative grid a place to visit.

Meeting area, Le Village

Cherry re-imagined Le Village, the community meeting sim, with ladder chairs, and a trunk-shaped shop. She redid  Accueil, the Welcome sim, with its organic teleport hub, strange sounds, and fantastic water creatures.

She also built the airy sim 'Hypergrid', the gateway region to other grids.

One of the many events on FrancoGrid during these years was the Haiku Speed Build event, filmed by Cherry. This fascinating 'competition' was to render in the language of 3D the sense of a haiku, with a limited time available for the construction, lending immediacy to the interpretation of the spirit of the words. Truly poetry in motion, and meant to inspire students to get involved in 3D building and design.

These new projects in opensim did not, however, put an end to Cherry's activities in Second Life. This was a long period of co-mingling between grids, with events like Anne Astier's art show Welcoming Women which had a double vernissage both in SL and on Francogrid.

Fest'Avi was perhaps the most famous event connected with FrancoGrid.

First Fest'Avi show, Spring 2014

Tao Vacano: FrancoGrid's annual Fest'Avi competition allowed everyone to have very original avatars immediately upon creating an account, and also as freebies on a dedicated region, and elsewhere. Cherry was instrumental in that event.

Slim-line Cherry

 For a creator as interested in exploring the possibilities of avatar art like Cherry, this was a golden opportunity to participate. Opensim has always had plenty of original content, much  by creators like Linda Kellie, Aaack Aardvark, Avia Bonne, to name but three. Very little original content-building had been focused on avatars, partly due to people bringing stuff from Second Life, and partly due to a lack of interest by a lot of opensim geeks who were not bothered by the look of their avatar and far more interested in experiments in scripting and building than in personal aesthetics. 

The Meta_body event organized by Meilo Minotaur and Capcat Ragu informed and inspired editions of Fest'Avi, but the event itself was pure opensim -prepared and promoted to fill a need and also foster the community spirit. Avatars would have all different levels of technical sophistication, with all kinds of styles. It was above all a way of giving back, and being part of a huge team, team FG.

Cherry Manga: They taught me everything, it helped me to grow, technically of course, but also ethically, I didn't have the same glance on what internet was, sharing content, creating assets. My builds changed radically from then too, I could think bigger, limitless, with people to help me with scripts if needed. Nino is my best collaboration, we love to work together, I have the ideas, he literally writes them in ossl, and it gives life to my builds. I can't thank FG team enough, I owe them all I know now.

Fest'Avi 2015 Express Your Avatar was filmed by Fuschia Nightfire, who also participated with her fabulous old man and old lady avies.

Photo courtesy Nina Camplin

Fuschia Nightfire: I remember Cherry making a snake woman avatar - the Naga - and she made a fuchsia version for me. It was something that really touched me, I loved it.

Fest'Avi 2016 took the process even further. Cherry and Praline Barjowski offered would-be avatar makers weekly meets to help with texturing, rigging, and assembling avatars. The combined results were presented in fanfare style, with beautiful sets, NPCs, music and particles.

Nino Whitman was a vital part in this process, putting together the complex timing of the event, and his was a positive experience, although a demanding one, due to all the scene changes and precise timing needed. 

Part of the planning document for the effects for the Fest'Avi show

Nino Whitman: Cherry  is a special artist in different technical arts such as 3D, imagery, photography, and others. I have been working with her for more than 10 years. She's an artist who uses computers for her art and not a computer scientist, that's why my help on subjects such as server operation and scripting relieves her of this weight and lets her express herself. on what she does best. Particular yes, but her generosity transpires in these works, sometimes not easy but true artists are people with character and who know what they want 😊.

The final episode of Fest'Avi was in 2018. The net result from all this work was a coming together of the community and a legacy of free original content that has yet to be overshadowed in terms of generosity by the group, and creativity in presenting that content by Cherry.

At the same time, Cherry's presence in SL was confirmed by a series of builds and exhibitions. Dividni Shostakovich, blogger and discerning gallerista,  hosted two builds, "Danse Macabre" in 2012 and "The Path" in 2016. The path was taken directly from the Fest'Avi build, so another nice cross-over between the two fields of activity.

Dividni Shostakovich: The Split Screen Installation Space (2010-2013, 2016-2017) offered artists an unusual combination: it occupied half a homestead sim to two artists at a time, and thus considerable area yet a highly constrained number of prims (a significant consideration before mesh). Cherry was one of the few artists able to command that combination of opportunities and limitations. And her installations had themes that the general audience could readily identify but were not explored simplistically (it's more common for large builds to be either highly abstract, personal, or flat-footed). For these reasons she was one of the few artists I brought to Split Screen twice. I have also seen her work at Francogrid, where she was able to integrate avatar motion into her constructions, creating spectacular performances.

'Insanity' was Cherry's principle installation for 2014. Fluid figures, agitated and alarming, their limbs expressive of inner turmoil, the build's limited palette reflected the dense monotony of trench warfare - the relentless inner contending with unwelcome thoughts and feelings.

Apmel: As all art buffs know Cherry Manga has been very creative over the years in other virtual worlds. My fondest memory of her work in SL is INSANITY from 2014 and her way to explain it: "...insanity is to be experienced with your own madness."

Archa and Cherry at the controls

In June 2017 Cherry, together with Archael, was invited to participate in a mixed reality event at the Nice art and culture center, Le Hublot.

The show had a real life DJ. MartOpetEr, and a real life dancing audience. On FrancoGrid, there were inworld dancers both real avatars and NPCs, and a series of dramatic scenes filled the region. All of this was projected onto the walls of the RL room. 

There was a fantastic infinity mirror feel to the event, as the digital spectacle leapt from the screen into the performance space, and then back into the screen again, in a blast of rhythmic color and movement.

Cherry's art has, of course, been recognized across Opensim from her first arrival there, although die to the spread out nature of the grids, connections don't always happen immediately.

Rosanna Galvani: I met Cherry Manga in 2015, when I invited her to exhibit one of her installations at the new Metaverse Museum, the one built by arch. Elif Ayiter aka Alpha Auer and inaugurated on 

7 March 2015. Her work, of a fantasy nature, is still housed at the museum and I can say that Cherry Manga is in effect an artist in residence at the Metaverse Museum.

Leighton Marjoram at Cherry Freebie on Francogrid, 2017

Another favorite build by Cherry was this one, on Francogrid, visited by the Safari and much enjoyed. The combination of new and old adds depth and significance to her installations, as you read the evolution of her imagination and technical ability through the various iterations of her sims, with all their delicious ambiguity.

Leighton Marjoram:  At university, I was doing  a project was about gender, identity and sexuality training in virtual worlds for counsellors and psychotherapists. I asked Cherry to create something and within two days I had my very own piece of stunning and thought-provoking virtual art.  It added so much to the final project and demonstrated how impactful both Cherry's art specifically and virtual artist generally can be. I could probably write a whole article about how these could be used in a therapeutic way.

Cherry has always been a huge support for the HG Safari project. She has accompanied us on many journeys, hosted the Safari on her regions, and supplied the visual entertainment at many parties - she even made this special Safari Avatar for the final party in 2018.

It was a beautiful au revoir. 

The continuation of this survey of Cherry manga's art continues in Part 3