Isadora Fiddlesticks: What brought you to Second LifeŽ? How did you discover it? Claudia222 Jewel: I was always interested in learning more about 3D. I got curious, I think. My first impression of SL™ was not the best, I must say, due to the fact that I could not build and had never taken enough time to get to know the possibilities. However, after 2 years, I came back to give it another try and began slowly learning what we can do in the sandboxes, like most builders. I think having no money left me to try and make use of prims, and the limitations made me want to learn sculpties. Having a Mac laptop made it a little hard to build at times, but I loved it so much that it did not stop me from trying. I later found software for making sculpties for SL, and it was like a dream come true for me. I started to spend most of the free time I had, outside of my full time work, creating sculpts and texturing them the way that I wanted, and by making vehicles to fly around in SL that were a little different than the usual, which nobody seemed to understand because they were different and many found them a little scary. I realized then that I needed to put them in their own world to make them more understandable for people, so that they could accept them as their own. IF: What was the first thing you did? When did you start to create builds and installations? CJ: My first creation was an eyeball made from a friend’s texture. He wanted to show me
the splinter he had in the iris. I saw the texture and it instantly fascinated me. I was very proud of what I did. The reason I started my first installation was because I tried to help my friend, Farstar Enoch, get more visitors to her new sim. It was a fantastic new sim where many of my friends would hang out. I had no money to contribute and knew that Farstar wanted to have a gallery on her sim to show art. I started to contribute by doing this project where I put the things that I made in the air to have more open space to enjoy SL. I was never very fond of the walls in SL, or even RL replicas of houses, because my camera gets stuck in them; I also see the insane possibilities flying gives us here. The space to make things very simple would be an impossible thing to do in RL. Another reason was the personal loss of a family member. Building in Second Life helped me to learn so much next to my usual daytime work. Here, I am trying to relieve myself from the sorrow inside me. In SL, I can create something and it seems to be alive, while others have to leave us. IF: How do you define your style? CJ: This is a difficult question for me because I want to create without forcing my style too much on others. I believe we all have inner growth and understanding of beauty or expression. By accepting that this is coming from me at this moment, it becomes me at this time in my life. Most of the time, I let myself be guided by intuition and not so much by a