Miramar Extraordinary Beauty's

MeiNem Art Gallery Presents:

2011-08-05T13:22:00.000-07:00

The wonderful Tangos of JoRed Mcbeth

MeiNem Art Gallery Presents: JoRed Mcbeth's Tango & Vida

Come all for a wonderful night of TANGO and ART

to: MeiNem Art Gallery (SL)

Tomorrow at 3pm SLT

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER ISLAND

2009-10-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

On Friday 9th October 2009, Yoko Ono will be in Iceland (in the real world) for the annual lighting of IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. Later the same evening, at 10.30pm (Reykjavik time), Yoko will unveil a new IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on IMAGINE PEACE TOWER ISLAND in Second Life.

UNVEILING: WORLDWIDE DATES AND TIMES

The unveiling ceremony will begin from approximately the following dates and times:

Oct 9th 02.30pm Anchorage

Oct 9th 03.30pm Los Angeles

Oct 9th 04.30pm Guatemala

Oct 9th 05.30pm Chicago

Oct 9th 06.30pm New York, Montreal & Toronto

Oct 9th 07.30pm Rio de Janeiro

Oct 9th 10.30pm Reykjavik

Oct 9th 11.30pm Liverpool & London

Oct 10th 00.30am Europe

Oct 10th 01.30am Baghdad

Oct 10th 02.30am Moscow

Oct 10th 03.30am Karachi

Oct 10th 04.30am Dhaka

Oct 10th 05.30am Bangkok

Oct 10th 06.30am Shanghai

Oct 10th 07.30am Tokyo

Oct 10th 08.30am Sydney

Oct 10th 09.30am Vladivostok

Oct 10th 10.30am Suva

Oct 10th 11.30am Auckland

Oct 10th 12.30pm Kiritimati

You can check what time the event will be happening in your location here.

LIGHTING UP TIMES AFTER THE CEREMONY

After the opening ceremony, the Second Life IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will begin its cycle of illumination approximately 15 minutes after sunset on every Second Life day and will remain illuminated until dawn. The days are much shorter in Second Life than in the real world. Sunset happens in Second Life every day at the following times, both am and pm:

01.30, 05.30, 09.30: Chicago, Baghdad, Bangkok, Vladivostok

02.30, 06.30, 10.30: Anchorage, Montreal, Toronto, Reykjavik, Moscow, Shanghai, Suva

03.30, 07.30, 11.30: Los Angeles, Rio de Janiero, Liverpool, London, Karachi, Tokyo, Auckland

04.30, 08.30, 12.30: Guatemala, Europe, Dhaka, Sydney, Kiritimati

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER ISLAND in SECOND LIFE

When you arrive at the island, you will first visit the VISITORS CENTER there you will find:

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER DOCUMENTARY FILM

explains the history and philosophy of Yoko Ono’s IMAGINE PEACE TOWER.

IMAGINE PEACE POSTCARDS, BUTTONS, T-SHIRTS etc

are free and for you to share with your friends.

IMAGINE PEACE & IMAGINE PEACE TOWER BOOKS

are available to read in the VISITORS CENTER.

ONOCHORD DOCUMENTARY FILM

explains more of the history and philosophy of Yoko Ono’s ONOCHORD.

ONOCHORD TORCHES

are to hold in your hand and flash “i ii iii” (I love you) to one another.

ONOCHORD POSTCARDS

are to explain the message and send to your friends.

Outside the VISITORS CENTER and around the island you will find WISH TREES.

Make a WISH and your wish will also be sent to the real life IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland.

Also outside the VISITORS CENTER are some boats in which you can travel around the island.

CONTROL PANELS are stationed around the island, and teleport you to different vantage points on and above the island. It also enables various modes of dancing. Here’s the locations you can teleport to:

The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER WISHING WELL consists of white panels inscribed with the words IMAGINE PEACE in 24 different languages.

There are 4 CLOUDS – at 125m, 225m, 300m and 500m. Inspired by the writings from Yoko’s GRAPEFRUIT and her album artwork for IMAGINE and LIVE PEACE IN TORONTO, these are platforms where you can take in the view, meet, talk and dance, while clouds magically form under your feet. You can fly or teleport between these platforms using the CONTROL PANEL, and from the top platform, you can take a parachute jump back down to the base and enjoy the view.

The HOT SPRING SPA. Volcanic springs are common in Iceland. In fact, the real IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is entirely run on Geothermal Energy from naturally occurring hot water. Here is a place to meditate, unwind and enjoy the view.

Inspired by John and Yoko’s film ‘Apotheosis” (which was all filmed from a hot air balloon) you can take a ride around the island on the IMAGINE PEACE balloon.

Some other pictures:

The IMAGINE PEACE Parachute.

The ONOCHORD Torch.

IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE LIVING LIFE IN PEACE

John and Yoko’s dream comes to Second Life®

by Jura Shepherd, ROLE MAGAZINE, October 2009.

Piercing the sky above one of Second Life’s most northerly sims, stands a tower of light that began life as an artistic concept in the mind of a young, wild-eyed artist over forty years ago. The tower, named IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, will be officially open on October 9, 2009 and will stand as a symbol for universal peace. It is part of a life-long dream of Yoko Ono, the artist who conceived the idea for the real world and who commissioned it’s creation in SL.

The tower will replicate, as closely as possible, its real world counterpart which opened on October 9th, 2007 on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, Iceland. The terrestrial version is made of fifteen powerful searchlights manipulated with mirrors to form a column of light that is tall enough to not only reach cloud cover, but has been seen to penetrate well beyond it. According to the University of Iceland, the light is so powerful that, if within the column itself, the light would still be visible with the naked eye from space and could be easily detected with instruments from much further away from our planet. The base of the tower is an elegant but austere cylindrical structure made of white stone that is meant to symbolically represent a well, specifically a wishing well. Circling the well are engravings of the phrase “IMAGINE PEACE” written in 24 different world languages.

There are 15 spotlights in all. 9 shine straight up from inside the well and 6 are in the ‘corridors’ around the base and are reflected up by 6 mirrors.

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER’s wishing well concept is one that is a continuation of Yoko Ono’s interactive art. After the passing of her husband John Lennon, Ono began to collect wishes based on a traditional idea from her childhood. “As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.”

“All my works are a form of wishing” says Ono and indeed she has collected over 850,000 wishes since she started the project. In a 1996 interview, Yoko Ono explained: “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: every piece of paper has a wish on it, I don’t read it, and all of them will be put in one big tower of a sculpture, like a totem. It will be a very powerful sculpture… a tower which contains wishes of the people of the world of our time. All in one tower!” What may have seemed like an abstract concept at the time is exactly what she did. The wishes Ono had collected over decades are buried under, and made a spiritual part of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER.

The story of how IMAGINE PEACE TOWER has come to be in Second Life begins with SL developer Bernard Herzog, the elder of the father-son duo Herzog-Brenham. Inspired by the real world project, Herzog built a tower of light on the New Brighton sim that he owns. He took pictures and sent them to Yoko Ono’s IMAGINE PEACE website with the hopes of simply having them published to the site but they actually created a great deal of interest.

Ono would eventually see the pictures and it was agreed that if there was to be an IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in SL, it would need to be an accurate relative to its real world counterpart, and that Herzog-Brenham would be the ones to build it. Ono is known for forward thinking and was open to the idea of her concept crossing into virtual worlds. Bernard tells us, “It was not a hard sell and when I eventually met Yoko, she seemed genuinely excited and very open to the idea.”

Herzog-Brenham was introduced to Tetsuo Hamada and his son TetsuRo, who were responsible for the building of the real world IMAGINE PEACE TOWER and were supplied with blueprints, detailed documentation, and photos to work from. Herzog’s real life son and SL business partner, Dannyboy Brenham, has created scripting to handle the tower’s lighting sequence, which will happen at SL sunsets 6 times a day, as well as a special HUD to be used on the island and the handling of wishes sent in-world. Herzog says “I believe it’s as realistic as it can be”.

The HUD operates the free Onochord torches and preloads textures to improve the experience of the tower lighting up.

Bernard Herzog: “It’s a fantastic honor to be working on something that is so close to Yoko’s heart, albeit in a virtual world. I hope it captures a small part of the experience of visiting the real tower for many people who may not be able to travel to Iceland.” In many ways, it’s an honor to have the tower in our little world at all but it does seem fitting considering the global reach of Second Life.

The above was all extracted from: IMAGINE PEACE & ROLE MAGAZINE

From October 9th you can teleport to the Second Life IMAGINE PEACE TOWER.
More info about the real world IMAGINE PEACE TOWER
More info about Yoko Ono’s WISH TREES
More information on SL Developer Herzog-Brenham

A DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE

2009-10-05T10:30:00.001-07:00

by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

John Perry Barlow