Throughout the years, Cherry Manga has accomplished the rare feat of maintaining a notable presence both in SL and Opensim. Her 'extrametaversal' experimentation includes forays into Tilt Brush as you can see in this video. Google has discontinued Tilt Brush but there is an Opensource version if you are interested in trying it yourself. It's a brilliant way to augment inworld art in further layers of surreality.
(By the way, please take a moment to watch all these videos in Youtube, like, subscribe and comment if you can, it's a nice way to show your appreciation for the hard work of the machinima makers.)
Around the time the Pandemic began in Europe, Cherry got busy Second Life, with an impressive 8 installations in little more than a year. It was a welcome increase in activity from the point of view of her many fans and colleagues.
Bryn Oh: I have always enjoyed the work of Cherry, she is one of the rare artists who sees the virtual space as its own medium rather than attempting to mimic real life art. Her work often uses the unique traits of the virtual space to create some really special contemporary art
Apmel: The last time I mentioned Cherry Manga before I stopped blogging was about a reminder of the inevitability of death in animated surround scenes by Cherry Manga @ DiXmiX Gallery 2020. Thank you, Cherry Manga, from "the old branch".
Here are some images and thoughts about Apmel's visit to that show. and a video of the build by Wizardoz Chrome.
That same month, Yoon filmed Cherry's build 'Strange Garden'. When you inspire someone to make their first machinima, that's something pretty special. 'Strange Garden' is a monochrome adventure, an ornamental park, pieces of mind, some monumental and unmoving, others as animated and ephemeral as whispers. The installation feels submerged, water-bound, yet paradoxically full of light, as if pooled passion and pessimism are suspended in an amniotic stream of thought.
On a not unrelated theme, we have a machinima by Cherry herself, of 'Stat d'esprit', an installation made up of 20 scenes illustrating idiomatic expressions, with music by JadeYu Fhang filmed at vroom Short's VeGetAl Planet. Over a period of about an hour, the successive scenes play a neat psychogenic dance, calling into question the meaning of expressions in French, and by extension (and contrast) their equivalents in English.
Also in February, a collaboration with the writer Bsukmet Imniali. Cherry provided the setting, and Bsukmet Stormcrow the words - 'The Demise'
For those of us who find the climate of SL pretty toxic, either suffocatingly fawning, or corrosively envious, or else chokingly snobbish, Cherry has managed to navigate a discrete and focused path. With pep and passion, but also plenty of generous humor, which earns her the highest accolades among the prickliest and pompous of personages. Two more builds worth revisiting in machinima are 'Monsters' and 'Molecule'
SaveMe Oh: I like her as a person and she builds very well but as an artist she means zero, mostly a copy from everything you have seen before, only bigger, larger or better build, but never it has any relevance, new ideas or exciting content. Don't waste your time and only write about SaveMe Oh, the only artist in SL. (who is very happy with Cherry's help on technical matters).
In the summer of the same year, at the Hannington Endowment for the Arts, machinimist Wizardoz Chrome filmed "Endometriosis" Installation by Cherry, with music by JadeYu once again.
Wizardoz Chrome: Cherry's works in addition to being stupendous in terms of build, tell stories and speak to us even without words. Her works tell of life in all its facets. I like to film them to remember the feelings they generated. Years ago I was very impressed by her woman alone in the dark , with red as the other predominant color. She was the woman of "Endometriosis" Installation at HEA in SL 2020. What can I say, except that Cherry's works should be savored - all of them, they are perfect and never banal.
Morlita Quan, a friend and collaborator throughout these years, has one of the hardest jobs of any interviewee, when asked to choose 'the best bit'. How can artists pick a favorite creation. Still...
Morlita Quan: To choose a single song to define the style it's maybe a bit hard, because each album covers diferent styles, but always the base it's experimental /noise. Actually making more melodic and immersive touches, so maybe I could define our collaboration with the latest song : Vulnerability
In April 2021 Cherry was at the Maison d'Aneli showing 'Khaos' art with Jadeyu Fhang
Aneli Abeyante: Cherry Manga is a passionate and sensitive artist who makes us vibrate with her creations. Her world belongs only to her, always in search of finesse and harmony in the subjects she proposes. She masters practically all the different components, her works are always at the top of the technology, I appreciate the intelligence of her subjects.
Projects in Opensim include participating at the 'My Protective Sanctuary' ensemble show on Interstellart, OSGrid, the psychedelic show 'Mind Odyssey' on Continuum grid, the 2Lei build on Craft Grid, and contributing with the Little Prince build on sim Exupery with WizardOz Chrome and Tina Bey, another artist much admired by Cherry. Tina is a confirmed fan.
Tina Bey: I met Cherry by chance at an Opensimfest 2020 where her installation was next to mine. Since then I have been following her work with great interest. I think it combines perfectly: the poetic language, with a balanced spatiality, organizing the environment, of its installations without turning them into chaos. It has a very well distributed monochromatic boundary.
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| Little Prince build, Exupery, OSGrid |
Tina Bey: For all that she seems to me a great Artist, who brings together in these times when it seems that "everything is Art" she has the academic qualities and the youth of a New creation, two ingredients that she knows how to combine perfectly.
In 2021, Cherry agreed to build a special party area for the reconstituted HG Safari group's Cornflakes Week even, set for the last week of February 2022.
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| Cornflakes party, gif by Nara Malone |
The results were spectacular. The cardboard box-shaped build with its bubbly surface and many flying objects made an incredible dance venue. She also made an animesh companion version of the box as a free gift, and a special primary color EEP for the sky. It was a lovely gift to the HG Safari tour group.
For the Cornflakes Party, an annual festival unique to Opensim, and held every Februar,) singer songwriter Whirli Placebo played his guitar from inside an infinity box. The strange mirror effect added to the surreality of the event, completing the sense of connection with present friends, past, space, future, and fun that really sums up Cornflakes Week.
Whirli Placebo: I remember when I was a kid and I was so nearsighted I couldn't read a chalkboard. Putting glasses on, and seeing the wonder of everything clearly for the first time... this is the experience I have when in Cherry's artistic presence.
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| Detail from the Cherry Freebies region, OSGrid |
At the same time, Cherry was participating in a slew of art collective regions, in OSGrid and elsewhere. Cherry Freebies on OSGrid is an art region where everything is copiable.
Cherry Manga: I prefer work on my own theme, without any deadline, this is more freedom. Sometimes the theme is very exciting and can answer perfectly to a mood I am in, and then it's a true pleasure to work on it. Sometimes it's more difficult and challenging, but at the end, the challenge is an oppotunity to push own limits, so in all ways, it is always interesting. The only killer to me, is deadlines!
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| Cosmos freebie shop |
As well as offering the possibility to pick up a lot of her iconic sculptures, the 'Cherry Freebies' region on OSGrid showcases one of her current enthusiasms, the making of EEPs, which you can find on her region Cosmos on Copykat grid, together with some stellar accessories.
Opensim offers a huge resource and advantage of SL in this way - the pace of life is less frenetic, space is not at a premium, and setting up your own mini grid is a widely used method of experimenting and storing builds and installations. A free sim is a fairly regular acquisition by artists of quality. A case in point is Cherry's region Cerise on Craft Grid, the result of winning the first prize in the craft Grid birthday celebration in 2018 - the region is so pretty that rather than leave it up for a year, the grid owners have kept it online to this day. Also on Craft, her work has been much appreciated by the Museo del Metaverso.
Rosanna Galvani: In 2021, when I invited her to participate in 2Lei, the event for the elimination of violence against women, organised in Craft [on the Piu Donne Meno Violenza region] in conjunction and cooperation with the Second Life organisation. Cherry Manga presented the work entitled NO! A powerful and at the same time humorous work, which represented a strong warning to women not to be subjugated, to react decisively against all abuses, shouting 'No!' in a loud voice.
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| Cherry's 'No' build, with the wearable miniature version of the pyramid |
Rosanna Galvani: The work is funny because Cherry, being the expert artist of virtual worlds that she is, has made her work interactive, by placing the miniature work in a cube and making it wearable for visitors. Therefore, on the evening of the opening, along with the strong message to women, there was also a sense of great lightness and harmony, albeit in a stimulating and entertaining creative chaos. The joy Cherry Manga gave us in playing with her work was also a message of hope for the future. Thank you Cherry!
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| Part of the Jukebox build on CopyKat grid. |
Cherry's multimedia build Jukebox is also on CopyKat Grid, courtesy of Oni Kiri. Like earlier installations, this build is made of multiple scenes. In this case, 12 different 'rooms' each one accompanied by a piece of music significant to Cherry. Some of the builds include elements or whole scenes that connoisseurs of Cherry's work will recognize, but they are re-purposed and reworked with animations and lighting to make them even more lovely than the original versions.
Tao Vacano: Back in the day, I brought a lot of minor students to FrancoGrid, and Cherry helped me a lot in showing them around the grid, and she also liked to show them her creations. A few weeks ago I contacted her so that we could work together on an ambitious project, to transcribe a math comic into a virtual world where all the mathematics taught are represented in a 3p mindmap with a teleport gateway on historical Babylonian and Greek civilizations so that so students can ask for help via NPC avatars representing the great ancient mathematicians, it's a great pleasure to work with her again.
And finally, at time of writing, the new 'Terra Mater' is Cherry's current work-in-progress on CopyKat grid. Rebuilding from scratch some of her signature designs, this build includes songs by inworld artists like Morlita Quan and Whirli Placebo, whose song 'Broken' features. It's a big task, and at time of writing not yet finished, but here is the miniature version that Cherry presented at the OpensimFest in 2022, and filmed by Michael McHugh.
Wow, so much here! Thanks for the tip to watch the vids in YouTube. I still don't know how Cherry does these things which is part of the magic.
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