Erik Mondrian
A music video of Cetatea Poenari, the Second Life home of the Drakul family. Built by Vlad Drakul-Dragonash & Nazaire Dragonash and named after a ruined Romanian castle that was once occupied by the real-life Vlad III Dracula (also known as Vlad the Impaler), Cetatea Poenari defies description and seems to stretch far beyond the limits imposed by its virtual borders. From the Valley of Horses and Arefu Prison to The Slaughtered Lamb pub and Snagov Monastery—and with the magnificent castle itself keeping watch over all from above—this is a region with many different paths and hidden places for the curious traveler to find. Thanks again to Vlad, Nazaire, Rain, and the entire Drakul family for asking me to film here! Music is an excerpt from the track "Clinamen" by Charun—an Italian instrumental post-rock/post-metal band from Sardinia—and is used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License version 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...). The full track, which serves as the opener to their 2016 album Stige, can be heard at the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ch... Located in Cetatea Poenari: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife... For a very different and slightly more "complete" look at the region, see the extended flythrough that I made there in May 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOR2H... Filmed on Linux with the Firestorm Viewer, OBS Studio, and SimpleScreenRecorder and using a SpaceNavigator 3D Mouse. Edited with Audacity, Kdenlive, and Avidemux.
Artist Bio:
Erik Alessandro Mondrian is a writer, artist, and scholar who makes work about place, belonging, love, longing, and madness. He holds a BA in French, with a minor in Spanish, from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; an MA in Communication, with a specialization in Mass Communication and Media Studies, from San Diego State University; and an Interschool MFA in VoiceArts & Creative Writing, with a concentration in Integrated Media, from the California Institute of the Arts. Erik’s MFA thesis project—For the Light of Other Shores—was a series of short films combining vocal recordings of his writing with footage he shot in the virtual world of Second Life. Running exactly 30 minutes in total (w/title screens and closing credits), the films were featured at the 2019 CalArts Expo, can be seen online on Erik’s YouTube channel (youtube.com/erikMondrian), and will be shown as part of the “Director’s Choice” program at the 2020 Supernova Digital Animation Festival.