Novelist Suzi M or Xirconnia Morph says The Asylum is a tribute to both Limelight, (formerly a club in NYC) and the Eastern State Penitentiary. She states that "It is not a reflection of madness, I promise. :)"
I beg to differ. Suzi I think you're too humble! I think you've perfectly captured a visual metaphor for being just a little bit "off".
What if my reality were not shared by my friends or neighbors, and I could show you exactly what I see from my perspective. What would it look like? What would it feel like?
Well I think it might look a little bit like The Asylum; Stairways and floors are narrow and crooked, cracked and perilous. An ominous merry-go-round spins silently all by itself at the end of a long, cavernous basement room. Skeletons boogie, better than I do, on a psychedelic dance floor. A circular staircase climbs to.., nowhere. Ghosts playfully menace, until they become tedious, and human fish swim in very normal aquariums. Granted, this is not the "I hear my dog telling me to kill you" kind of over the top insanity, but more of a "I'm having trouble focusing on our conversation because there are ghosts poking me in the side," type of crazy. Which raises the question, if I see things like this am I insane? Or creative? And perhaps these states are defined by how beneficial the results?
The genius of The Asylum is that it is educational, you don't notice it's lessons right away, it's oddities creep up on you. Only after you notice something you thought was there, that really wasn't, or find yourself falling through the floors.., yet again, do you begin to understand that what at first seems empty, is chock full of strangeness and surprises. It encourages philosophical musings; is the definition of insanity based on common culture? Are you insane because they don't see what you see, or is it their flaw? If you see crooked floors and human fish, what degree of insane are you? The brilliant layout of the build itself helps keep you off balance as you try to read meaning into what's there, or what's not.
On the real life side Xircon is a writer and has a room dedicated to her written and artistic work in the middle of The Asylum. If you read her novels you'll know that one of her characters wakes up in an asylum and that parts of The Asylum are modeled from the novels. She has a free short story to download on her page with Smiling Goth Productions. It's called The Lazarus Stone and boy was I hooked from the very first sentence;
"The body they carried with them was starting to smell." Insane? Creative? Who cares, it's delicious and all about the results anyway right?
Silent raw and powerful, The Asylum allows you to experience reality from a very different perspective. Uncomfortable of times, it allows you to imagine what it must be like to live with a slightly skewed sense of reality. How at times this view could be frustrating and/or lonely.
But more importantly The Asylum forces you to examine your own ensconced definitions. Maybe you'll think twice before applying labels to people you may not understand, who don't see what you see.
Be prepared to keep this place in your thoughts for a long time, after all, it is a place of the mind.
There is a HUD you can pick up that you can use to mark educational builds in SL You can pick it up at the Asylum or im me and I'll shoot you a copy. And don't forget to mark The Asylum itself!
Suzi's Imortal War Trilogy From Smiling Goth Productions
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