BURNING LIFE '05: THE PRIM WIKI OF SEIFERT SURFACE

Another glimpse of Burning Life 2005-- context here.

In the best of traditions, Seifert didn't really apply for his plot in Burning Life. Rather, he found an open, unclaimed spot, and comandeered it.

"As in, nobody was doing anything with it, so people went and did things anyway," he explains. "This being Burning Life, that seems appropriate." He set it up as a collective building project which anyone could-- by enabling modify rights to their contributions-- add or subtract to it. A 3D wiki, as it were.

"I just wanted to see what people would do," says Seifert. So someone comes along and builds a green-jade, Saturn-like planet, and someone else happens by and adds eyeballs to the planet. So now it's a planet with eyes. Mr. Surface builds two rockets, and by now, "it seemed reasonable to have the rockets pointing at the eyes. So now it looks a bit worried... Then someone else turned one of the rockets around, and added speech bubbles... people riffing off other people's ideas is I think the best thing to come out of this."

By the time I came by last Sunday to have a look, Seifert estimates 10 to 20 Residents have added their effort to the Prim Wiki. (He originally dubbed it the "Wiki Build", but others came to calling it the Prim Wiki. Not the name Seifert Surface had in mind, but "[i]t's a wiki though, so in that spirit, even the name is fluid.")

So far Surface is pleased with the results, though he'd like to see Linden Lab tweak the permission system so things like this could happen more often even after Burning Life. "I'd really like to see something implemented," he says, "say a way to assign a parcel of land to be 'wiki', which would mean that anyone has full permission to edit anything on that parcel. Who knows what kind of things we would see?"

Inspecting the progress thus far, Seifert Suface laughs. "I just noticed - someone added some fire ants crawling over the poptarts!" Behind him, I point out that someone has also built an impromptu 9/11 memorial next to a spinning portrait of Chairman Mao. I say this seems like an odd place for a 9/11 shrine, but Surface just shrugs.