Prison

Keeping with the theme of bleakness and desolation, I followed a link in Ziki Questi’s blog to visit Prison, a creation by Cica Ghost.  Prison is a sim-sized installation of metal bars and doorways.  It’s stunning.

Parched earth, rusted metal, dry grasses, leafless trees.  It looks in one moment a vast, abandoned building site and in the next a post-apocalyptic ruin.  But neither of these descriptions really fit perfectly, because you understand straight away upon arrival that this construction is complete.  It is not something left unfinished or the result of destruction.  It is meant to be this way.  And that unsettles you.

There are two ways of exploring the island.  You can – and will, the moment you arrive – cam up into the air and start exploring the many angles and lines from there.

And you can also explore by foot.  Here and there are placed individual chairs upon flagstones, where you can sit and contemplate the meaning of prison.  The bars are solid, but there are places where you can walk around them.  The doors obstruct your passage, but walk into them and they slide away.  What kind of prisons appear so foreboding but actually can be walked straight out of, other than those which we construct for ourselves?

Everything, incidentally – from the bars to the grasses to the chairs – is made by Cica, who has been creating in SL since 2010.  It’s worth highlighting, in this age of designer sims constructed out of other creators’ content (not that there is anything wrong with this), that this entire piece has been made by one person.