I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling
Gemini started off as a joint idea of Vicki Concertina and Katina Cazalet.
Katina brought to the team her experience with SL gallery work, blogging and talking about herself in third person. Vicki is the mind and soul of the project: besides those mundane aspects you shall never speak about for Arts but that involve paying bills, you have to thank her for the organization, light direction, photo selection and all sort of important aspects of the task.
We started off as an in-world virtual art gallery in Second Life®. (You can see how serious we are about this project by the fact that we used ®). The gallery was born out of the simple consideration of how varied the erotic photography scene is, and how many talented artists don’t get chances to give exposure to their remarkable work aside from the magmatic flow of their Flickr stream and groups. Therefore, making ‘another art gallery’ seemed like an idea worth pursuing. The name Gemini itself stems from arts and event presentation. A fancy latin word indicating “Twins”, it symbolized the mechanic that guided the gallery since its first iteration, reprising Katina’s initial foray in the art gallery world paired with the strikingly talented Nicasio Ansar. It was based on pairing up two artists, and have two different exhibitions running at all times with a central party and event area.
What Gemini planned to accomplish has consistently been to offer a platform in-world to artists to have a selection of their work on display, and organize events centered about the exhibitions. We wanted to do it in an enviroment flattering for the photographs, and we put great effort in the creation of an enviroment favourable to photographers and arts enthusiasts at our own sim. The gallery has run its operations in its own sim for 3 years which is quite a long time in Second Life. Through these years besides the gallery activity the Gemini team has been busy building almost no-stop: there have been several movie premieres and events (even weddings!), each with dedicated customized sets and often exclusive locations always offered free of charge out of love and admiration for the work of the filmakers, photographers, friends we had the pleasure to host. At the beginning of 2021, we thought it was high time to give a full makeover to the sim grounds, and for that we hired a fantastic designer who greatly inspired us in our decorating efforts in the past.
Megan Prumier designed the wonderful town of Portocorvo (Port Crow), a very special location with the unique brilliance of a twilight with so many stories to tell. It is a compelling location to explore and we are sure many of you will enjoy it greatly. We dedicated a special section to it, and it is yet in its infancy.
We have been lucky enough to meet many artists and each of them has enriched us and given us a chance to collaborate and feel part of a greater and ever evolving world. Thank you to the photographers and even filmakers who have been on the sim to make their art, display it or both, thank you to the DJs , beginning with our friend and lead dj Zuby Bloom, who designed a futuristic club very aptly named “WetWare” (points if you get the reference!). And of course thank YOU who are reading this. We hope your visit to Portocorvo will be an exciting and inspiring one, and that in any part of the sim Gemini will be what you want it to be, and much more.