Salon Spotlight Guest Corro Moseley, CEO of Daden Limited, brought us a different kind of Salon yesterday.  We had a peak concurrency of 34, with lots of new faces, for Corro's show and tell of terrific tech, including the Nabatzag bunny, which provides information on avatars visiting an SL location to an equivalent bunny in FL - essentially, an FL doorbell for SL. Kiki the Parrot demonstrated networked chatbot technology, but the hit of the day was Halo, the walking, talking chatbot avatar!

Unfortunately, we had our first eviction for public rudeness. I've been running a weekly event for eight months in SL, and have had to eject four people: one for nudity with a one-Linden woodie when we were at a PG facility that explicitly prohibited nudity, one for commercial audio chat spam, one for a replicating-script griefing attack, and only one, yesterday, for verbal obnoxiousness continued after a polite IM warning. One person who can't behave in 32 weeks of events with an average attendance of over 30 is extraordinarily good odds.

The Salons are a verbal free-for-all that are unlike other prominent discussion events in SL. I refuse to moderate audience questions and encourage backchat and side conversations: that's what's made the Salons such a success, and enabled them to serve as a nexus of professional relationships and friendships that have spread across venues and even platforms: the Salon crowd is well-represented every day in Twitter chat!

Aside from trusting the audience to be smart and interesting, one other factor contributes to the Salons' success: the rule Namav Abramovic articulated so succinctly as, "Don't be a dick." That only one person has clearly violated that rule in 32 weeks is a testament both to the good sense of Salon attendees, and how high the bar for unacceptably obnoxious behavior really is - *ordinarily* obnoxious behavior is more than welcome!

I hope we'll have at least another 32-week run before our next incident.

Please join us next Saturday, January 26, from 1-3pm SLT at The Nexus in Extropia Core for Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon! Our Salon Spotlight Guest will be Dizzy Banjo, discussing his work on groundbreaking metaverse multimedia installations, including DynaFleur and the newly-debuted Parsec.

Dizzy is the principal of Dizzy Banjo Music and Sound, a mixed reality music company, primarily based in London but working throughout the metaverse. They provide bespoke original music, audio branding, audio logos and sound design.

DynaFleur presents the almost abstract close-up floral photography of Douglas Story in a very unusual way. The monumental and colorful installation is cradled by a specially commissioned landscape created by Poid Mahovlich. As you walk (and fall) through it, you are immersed in the densely layered sound design of Dizzy Banjo which is tailored to accompany the movements of the elements of the piece that surround you, all of them moving and changing in response to your presence.

Parsec is a fusion of scripting, architecture and sound, in which participants animate spheres and generate music by speaking or singing on the Voice channel, creating a collaborative visual and auditory experience within a surreal spherical space. 

Dizzy's work includes some of the most innovative uses of music and sound in the Metaverse, and this Salon is sure to be spectacular!


Video by Hamlet Au/New World Notes: