Lemon ZKM
Arghl. Grid down, blogging time… Some very nice guy, Lem Skall has written about ZKM Island, and the philosopher bots. (He was a nice guy even before he wrote about us, I once had a nice long talk with him, and he showed me the Not Possible IRL blog…^^)
“[The bots] are also probably the most sophisticated example of a concept that I am surprised how rarely it is used in SL. Let’s call them “human fixtures” until someone thinks of a better term. These human fixtures are an integral part of builds and in the case of the chat bots in ZKM they themselves are the build. And this being SL, human fixtures don’t have to be really human, so they can be little green aliens or robots. Their essence though is that we are conditioned to react to their presence similarly to the way we react to the presence of other avatars (or to humans in RL). For instance, the sight of a servant’s human shape in the large hall of a palace makes a big difference in our perception of the place as opposed to the same large hall being completely deserted.”
“The avatars are the artpiece“, that’s what Philip said about the concept of ZKM. And “that certain feeling, communicating with a real avatar, cannot be beaten” was, what I told him. It’s a good feeling to be understood. 
At least by a few… Funny, there are not many that can find anything at all on ZKM. Is it the way how people tick? Almost no one of the SL-Reporters I invited found ZKM interesting enough to write a line about it, with some very rare exceptions (Gilbert Wise has sent me an article he wrote for the SL Magazine lateley, and of course the bus guy^^). There is a SL-Mainstream, and for some people the n-th Avatar beauty contest or mall opening seems to be more interesting than our stuff. Just like in RL©.
I for myself try to keep building Sims for the masses (hey, I make a living with that!), and still bring into that the suprising, anarchist element.
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