The other day I asked Veleda what inspired her to make the talking and moving robot heads for our Monkey Mind build at SL11B(Seconds Life’s 11th birthday) and she said it something along the lines of that is seemed like a fun idea. And here you thought I would write down some overarching philosophical artistic expression. I could make one up of course.. but let’s leave it at this.

It is interesting to see that the builds is actually never quite finished. When Veleda was done with her heads, she added a core to the build, which is funny as I was doing the same. But my idea went along other line’s and it ended up as an arty thingy you can walk through. It is called data towers and the idea I had was to have the data stream upwards towards the central processing unit. But this is not a post about me, but a post about Veleda’s contribution.

Veleda made these robot heads who say Monkey Mind in binary. The name Monkey Mind is a Buddhist concept, meaning “unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable” . This made me think of the movie Koyaanisqatsi. In the hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means “unbalanced life”. Seems something philosophical filtered into the build after all, ey.
The robot heads are scripted to travel around the exhbition along piplelines of the same color as the eyes. Eventually they end you up at the top level. Veleda showed me the formula that makes the heads go. If I can find it I’ll post it here someplace. It’s quite mind-boggling. For me that is (not for Taubie).



Next to the robot heads Veleda made a central core unit to which Almut added this warped binary texture.


The core revolves with the various parts having different speed. Will look better on the movie I am trying to make.

And once you are done, you end up in the monkey house. If you take the blue head I think. Otherwise you end up next door.
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