Revisiting Susa

My name is Susa. We come in pairs.

'Susa Bubble', by Saskia Boddeke, text by Peter Greenaway

Confusion, conflict, and consequences;  love, life, and loss. That's the story of Susa Bubble, who went to bed single and woke up double. It's a very long story, stretching back to the golden age of art in Second Life. It is the brain child of Saskia Boddeke, in virtual worlds Rose Borchovski. From 2008, about a year after Saskia joined SL, she has been sharing chapters in this tale, via a symphony of multimedia -sights and sounds, video and music, images and objects, wonderfully woven together into unsettling and detailed Big Art.

And it is a family affair, with contributions by Saskia's husband the well-known filmmaker Peter Greenaway, (read more about their CVs here) and their daughter Pip.  The story of Susa stretches out over well over a decade, and well into the real world. Check out the pictures of  'Why Is It So Hard To Love?'   the 2020 installment of the Susa Bubble story, at the  MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. 

But real world galleries can't keep installations up forever. In virtual worlds, SLEA land grants expire, and Second Life sims are notoriously expensive. You won't be surprised to hear that Two Fish, Rose's region there, is no longer online. That makes sense, as Saskia is very busy in RL with film projects and installations all over the place, from Lithuania to Lucca.

Thankfully, Saskia has preserved and made public a lot of her virtual work in the form of machinima. Here is her playlist for the Susa Bubble story The installations have been captured by other great Second Life machinima makers including Larkworthy Antfarm and Iono Allen. The film shown here by Iono was featured at the World Expo in Shanghai, back in 2010.

Even more thankfully, you can still walk inside one chapter of the Susa story - The Arrival (2015).  

Miraculously, the build is still up, after all these years, over on grid Aire Mille Flux, owned by Marc Moana. 

Welcome sim, Aire Mille Flux

At first glance, there's nothing odd about two children going fishing. The Arrival is just a big fish tale.  

Soon, though, there is an uncanny reciprocity between the bubbles, and the Bubbles. 

Fish fly and float, rather than enjoying the freedom of the sea. 

At first blush, it's not clear how much that fish is enjoying its embrace. But to be fair, the baby doesn't seem any too happy either. Perhaps it's sending us a message...

They catch the fish, and quite simply, it dies. But there's nothing simple about this build. There is so much going on. The merry-go-round, and the televisions, the theater and the jagged skeleton of an umbrella, and of course, all the Susas reacting to aspects of childhood that we all can recognize.

Being doubled is fairly standard for inworld people, we almost all have two names that we're equally comfortable with, depending on the context. And notions of time, identity, trust, and serendipity seem to expand and contract wildly as we grapple with a global, anonymous, multiversal, self determined and passionate online society. 

The childish joy and fear that comes with exploring both the inner and the outer world, that's a key part of Susa's journey. We are as lost and as found as the Susas, and our actions are often as casually consequential. That is what keeps it constantly fresh, eerie, enchanting. It's one of those eternal  universals - conflict. It's inside every one of us, and very much part of the world we live in.

HG Address:    hop://grid.aire-mille-flux.org:8002/The%20Arrival/108/34/21