ColeMarie Soleil and her new album

ColeMarie i have written about more than a dozen times since April 2008 when I first met her...

The Koinup article I wrote about her started....

"I would quite like to be a great photographer;
and it would be nice to have a beautiful voice;
a talent for song writing would be pretty cool;
if, on top of all that I could make excellent machinima I would have to change my name because I would be ColeMarie Soleil.

Oh, yes, she makes great clothes and magnificent dance particles as well... hmmm...probably forgot something..."

Well, the obvious thing I forgot is that she is a very warm and generous person.

So...lots of praise for someone still relatively young (I think) who has still the possibility of rolling all these assets into a whole, repeated here because she has finished and released her first album on iTunes... called Soleil.





This is one of the tracks from the album.

Bryn Oh and Cole have been very close friends for a long while now and have collaborated on a number of projects, Cole having a special skill in interpreting Bryns builds as machinima.

“I have been tired of a lot of art in SL for a while now. I would see something that was beautiful and then I would ask the artist.... "What is the story behind this?" only to very often be let down when they reply "I wanted to make something beautiful." I just needed more than that.
As I got to know Bryn as a person I realized that we both essentially in our lives want the same thing. I think that is why I have dedicated so much of my time to documenting what she does."


I consider myself very lucky too that Cole did a video of Magoo before it disappeared into the aether ...

...which I make no excuse for showing here again..



She has an angle on Machinima, as I have said somewhere before, in that she understands that it is not a poor video but an art form in its own right, and I couldn't help thinking particularly of Cole when Peter Greenaway states that cinema died in 1983 with the invention of the remote control.
Greenaway has pointed out that since its first days cinema is linked to storytelling and he posits that the new direction for cinema/machinima is to present a purely visual rather than narrative experience.

Hence his latest machinima have no storyline.

....now, although ColeMarie has linked her music here to the work of an artist with a strong storyline (Bryn), she is never chained to that story. Her machinima takes off on it's own journey exploring forms, shapes and colours in a visual installation which, as I remarked earlier, I think Peter Greenaway would love.

As I was trained in architecture and the built environment I have a different attitude to art than some. Like architecture I see my art as a place where life can happen, it's a backdrop, a framework, and while I would very rarely impose a storyline on a viewer, I can fully appreciate that some like this .... after all, I like a film with a plot.....

...but a machinima like Cole's, a visual treat for the eyes as well as the ears... that's great work.

Congratulations, Colemarie, and we look forward to seeing the rest of the album set to visuals...

Soleil....you can buy from iTunes.

:)))

Cole and Bryn in another masterpiece..

This is a piece by ColeMarie for Shanghai and it is, of course, well up to her usual standard. It's called No Colour, one of the Open This End themes for the show there.

The build is by Bryn who excels in that desolate landscape thingy with a few odd plants by me...... as Cole quipped.......Bryn angst meets Soror weed.

ColeMarie is really bringing a completely new medium to life in how she uses Machinima, it is fast becoming HER medium, as she seems to understand how to use it better than those who treat it like a video, which it isn't (and can't be for xx years, (or however long it takes for the graphix to get to film quality).

Her talents with photo manipulation were the first thing that amazed me, maybe two years ago when we first met, and her work in machinima is a direct continuation of those skills she taught herself in 2D image making.

The fact that she also writes and performs music, makes great clothes and amazing particle shows etc, etc....just goes to show she is a mad autonomous robot disguised as a faerie.

:))