Sneak Preview: Imogen and the Pigeons

After the last 2 days of exploration and discussing with Bryn Oh, narrative immersion has a new dimension for me. Did you ever sit sweating and with shaking hands in front of your computer trying to stay in control of your avatar?

The latest installation by Bryn Oh is not only a story to follow, it is a puzzle, a quest and a game that demands your skills of combination and moving controls (the last should be easy for experienced gamers, but an effort for non gamers like me). Bryn said laughing: "Art must be challenging."

Walking this up?

And the work is great art, massive, multi layered, full of poetry, images, scenes, ideas, sounds, melodies - a masterpiece. Bryn worked 6 months for it. And from what I saw, it must have been more or less day and night. The tiniest details has been placed thoughtful and bursting with ideas. I found somewhere a little firefly at the wall. Clicking on it it played a beautiful melody, reciting a poem:

I fell in love one afternoon

and wrote your name on a white balloon

I set it free to fly above

and dreamt it was a flying dove

And upon that it is huge, huge, huge. Every time I was thinking the story should be done now, a new scene opened up. And as far as I know it is the first time, that Bryn placed so much of her RL works. But at the same time, every scene is a built painting too.

The story: Not easy to capture the multi-layered story in just a few words. It is told in poems, that you find by the progress of the exploration. At the ground level the visitor is seeing the ruins of a company: Rebirth Life Encryption. After going up a huge, open stair (either the fixed, winded one or in case you want more challenge the one, that rezzes steps in front of you while climbing up, started from a large red prim)  or using a flying chair you enter the entrance hall of a therapist. In his ordination you find out that his patients are obviously the heros of Bryn's former works. You visit them all in their cells and find and the end Imogen, the hero of the current story, who lost her child. She is fixed in her bed, staring at the pigeons in front of her window.
If you think you are done now, you are totally WRONG!

This is just the starting point of Imogen's story. Using a feather climbing up the walls you follow Imogen's dreams about becoming free like a dove and being part of the crowd. She works on a feathers dress and gets feathers woven in her hair. Her end is predictable.
If you think you are done now, you are totally WRONG!

We walk into a computer and learn that the company 'Rebirth Life Encryption' has saved her mind and memories for later reconstruction, but.....in Bryn's words: "The program, that her memories are stored in, begins to collapse because her memories of losing her child were like a virus and her desire to change how her life went was more powerful than the program and so it began to change it. It began to change how her life was recorded in the destroyed shop." A new life for her and her child is possible.

But there is a secret second end as well. Look at the end location for an item to sit on and you will see, how sweet Anna, the mass murderer from one of Bryn's previous works ,is treating the therapist.

I hope you understand now, that you cannot appreciate this six-months-work of an artist like Bryn Oh in just a 30 minutes visit. Take your time and plan to be immersed for several hours. Cheating is not possible, you will find yourself back home. Enjoy the sounds and the beauty, read the poems and follow the story by clicking every item to appreciate the details and finding hints how to move on. You will be rewarded richly with an experience that you will never forget.

Somewher.e in a shopping cart you can buy Bryn's avater as a doll for 150 Linden

Please do not miss the work! To me, 'Imogen and the Pigeons' has written together with Rose Borchovski's 'Inevitability of Fate' a new chapter of art history, the Experienced Novel.


Opening Sunday, Jan 13. Access is restricted to a small number of avatars to reduce lag.

Taxi: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Immersiva/11/125/22