Sunday at HIE

 The final day of HIE 2024 was on Sunday 21 April and once again, it was a mixture of presentations and performances, weaving together work in real life, with personal experiences of virtual worlds, along with some very big and impressive art.
The warm voice of Lorenza Colicigno was the first we heard as she welcomed the audience to take their seats, open the Subtitles group for their native language, and to turn on Stream.

Thirza Ember's talk was all about HG Safari, the history of the hypergrid touring group, its goals and its evolution over the past ten years, as opensim has changed and grown, providing so many interesting places to visit (and to crash in!)
Following the talk, we had the particle and NPC show by Velazquez Bonetto, called Meta-Reverse which was a celebration of The Museo del Metaverso, a large art gallery and collective run by Rosanna Galvani on Craft Grid. Sadly for technical reasons, the music for the event was missing for quite a long part of Velazquez's performance, but it was still spectacular.

Up on stage next was Druskus ZoneNations talking about tech ! Druskus is an IT guy in real life, and his lecture was titled Joomla JOpenSim, GDPR in OpenSim and Hype Metaverse. Joomla offers lots of great tools and tips to improve protect and enhance your website. GDPR is of course the law in some parts of the world, and super important! And of course, you should definitely join his social media platform , designed specifically for Gamers and Opensim folks. It's called Hype Metaverse . 
After Druskus, we all took a meal break and reconvened at 12 noon SLT for the final session, a mixture of Portuguese and French, with 3 really nice parts given by CapCat Ragu, Cherry Manga and Zoree Jupiter, introduced by the elegant Rosa Alekseev.

CapCat was first, in RL Catarina Carniero de Sousa, an educator from the city of Porto. She spoke about an important project she is part of that bridges the gap between the real and the virtual. It's called IPVerso and she is responsible for a region, on Craft Grid, of the same name, where students can work and experiment, and where from time to time she also holds conferences. CapCat's speech was an absorbing insight into the teaching outcomes and techniques used to stimulate students in this digital age.

After Capcat's talk, the event went into Cherry Manga Mode with a bravura performance from - oh I'm just going to say it - Opensim's best artist.
With music by the always astounding MorlitaM, Cherry put on a twenty minute performance that had everything - emotion, passion, delightful detail, awe inspiring proportions, dazzling moments of light and shade, in a cascade of sensations. We even got our feet wet.

Filming Cherry's performances is possible, but ask anyone who has attended one, and they will tell you, the film doesn't express it. These few poor gifs only hint at what it is like to be in the auditorium when one of her shows is on.

Cherry combines simplicity and elegance with complexity and a thousand intimate imaginings, exploring pain, memory, fear, our connection to the natural world, and joy, togetherness, reverence, just to name a few... What can I say. Next time you hear there is a special Cherry Manga performance, do your darndest to be there. You''ll be glad you did.

Speaking of great performances, our final speaker was Zoree Jupiter, a fantastic singer, as well as an artistic all-rounder, whose talk  "Como a jornada da vida me trouxe aqui" which means 'How life's journey brought me here'. 

Sweet and simply told in her characteristic style, Zoree enchanted us with her tale of life in the Azores, then in the USA and then of course also in virtual worlds.

And with that all we were left to do was enjoy the outstanding light show with special EEPs by Nyx Breen over on HIE Welcome region, where his outlandish stylish and almost devilishly good skies and seas took our breath away!

Hypergrid International Expo is done for 2024, but it will not be long until we begin planning the 2025 Edition. Want to get involved? Keep in touch with this blog to find out more, in coming months!