Visioneering '26 - Kate Nova

The Group

Evangineer, Monki, facilitator Sofia, and I made 3D Vision Boards in SL today. At the end, Wren joined us to view the boards we had created.

Facilitator Sofia Sakura discussing today’s visioneering activity.

The Activity

Our facilitator Sofia Sakura explained that every year her fleshvatar and family make vision boards, and that this year she thought it would be interesting to make 3D Vision Boards here in Second Life. She talked about the four cardinal compass points and some key questions to consider as we worked:

What is calling to you in 2026?
What kind of inspiration do you want more of in your life?
Starting a new creative project?
What do you want to learn or understand more deeply?
What kind of thinking supports you best?
What ideas or questions are calling for your attention?
Let your vision board support the way you think, learn, and share ideas.
What helps you feel steady and supported?
What kind of relationship do you want with your time and daily rhythms?

Our group listened as our facilitator Sofia Sakura (center) explained the Vision Board 2026 activity.

Visioneering

Let’s explore with prims, textures, etc!
This is just the first go of giving ourselves some time with our dreams and visions for 2026
Your vision board isn’t asking anything of you, it’s just here to be of service

In the Venn Diagram of Identity and Persona, there will always be a large overlap between Fleshvatar Self and Avatar Self. Call it a persistent, or universal, or Meta Self. If I’m a Conservative Christian in First Life, it is unlikely I’ll spend my Second Life days running around espousing a Liberal Atheist worldview. It’s possible, but unlikely. I will, almost necessarily, bring my ideology into my avatar life. Yet there are also differences. My fleshvatar has affordances and constraints different from my avatar self. And here at the dawn of 2026, my fleshvatar has goals and plans, where my avatar mostly doesn’t. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I come to SL to play. And that play need not be overly structured. Still, if it’s just “Shop-Dance-Repeat,” that could get old. Feel repetitive. Or pointless. Do I, Polly, as an avatar, have goals? Hopes? Dreams? Today’s activity seemed like a nice opportunity to explore this question.

I started by making eight prims. I didn’t know why I was making them, I just made them. In this project I found that making and stretching and shaping happened simultaneously with visioneering. It wasn’t so much, make a thing to represent X intention, but make a thing and flow into the intention it seems to offer. I colored the four prims closest to me with the Additive Primary Colors: R-G-B and White. And the four prims closest to the camera I colored with the Subtractive Primary Colors: C-M-Y and Black. I’ve always loved that these two systems, Additive Color, like light, and Subtractive Color, like pigment, are two faces of one system. The painter thinks they’re working in a subtractive world, and the photographer thinks they’re working in an additive world. Yet if we zoom out, it is one world. The Subtractive Primary Colors are also the Additive Secondary Colors. And the Additive Primary Colors are also the Subtractive Secondary Colors. One large, or zoomed out, or meta-system, viewed from two different points of view. This felt somewhat like my Venn Diagram of Fleshvatar Self and Avatar Self. Different faces and different affordances, yet when zoomed out, when considered from the meta-layer, one system of color, one system of self.

The first thing I created from my eight color prims was the large, magenta cape. I thought of it as a cape to wear or a shroud to live in. Partly decorative (you should see my wardrobe for 2026!) and partly a cocoon. Not too isolating from the world, but an opportunity to contemplate, grow, and meditate. A sort of chrysalis space that might appear dormant, but where experiences can be processed and formulate strategies for moving forward.

I put a dome over the whole creation transforming it into a sort of Snow Globe. Second Life is, in its way, a snow globe. There is whatever First Life we inhabit, and then for a time we can enter into another world. Snow Globes are typically so small that they are single-user worlds. You and I can’t really experience the same one at the same time. But other worlds, like books, music, and films, are snow globes that you and I can experience at the same time. You might be familiar with this idea that many Tech Bros have embraced, that we are actually living in a computer simulation. Just yesterday at Coffee Talk, G shared that new research proves that idea impossible. That the complexity of the universe is so great that a computer system within that universe cannot perform enough calculations to simulate the entirety of it. I found this news comforting.

During these colder months here in the Northern Hemisphere, I can spend a lot of time in Second Life. It feels real. It feels rich. And it is “real,” in that it is inhabited by living humans with unique personas and ideas. When we get to the warmer months my fleshvatar does a lot of backpacking and I often leave SL for long periods of time. Still, that treasured snow globe sits on the mantle waiting to be experienced and appreciated once more. My fleshvatar recently came across a photo of an old date. I haven’t seen that person in ages and yet it was sweet to remember this fragment of life that had existed. And so I have my snow globe within the snow globe of Second Life. If Linden Lab announced that they were shutting down the Second Life servers tomorrow, what bits of your snow globe would you want to preserve?

The black section in front represents a scoop that takes in all the experiences, often unexpected, that avatars in SL send your way. A single human mind can dream up a lot! Including characters with different personas who surprise us with the force of their identities. Here in SL it is a dimension beyond that as we interact not only with the characters in our heads, but with other human minds also experiencing the diversity of our SL thoughts and activities. The white section is a Hedge Maze of mind where I attempt to integrate all the new experiences scooped up by the black prim with all the things rattling around in my blue-red avatar brain.

I added two pose balls to the sculpture/vision board. One where I look into the snow globe/avatar brain from above, and this one where I gaze up from below. Like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant, our understanding of ourselves, our persona, our intentions, and this virtual world we live in vary significantly as we simply look from different points of view.

My avatar brain. Always turning.

After we’d each created our “3D Vision Board” for 2026, we gathered again in the center to discuss our projects.

Sofia (upper right) exploring our vision boards from a wide, aerial view. So much of this activity turned out to be about scale, perspective, point of view, and zooming in and out for me. It’s nice to see her taking a wide view of our visions.

Viewing Evangineer’s vision board. His board featured big themes of life and culture. The goals are powerful, yet so many of them are issues that I often feel powerless to address. It will be interesting to see how he, or I, can make something meaningful of our place in this large, complex world here in 2026.

Monki (Monkicat Giha) with her rich and cozy vision board. Several of us agreed that we’d like to live in it! The flowing water both visually and sonically was so nurturing. It’s funny, there are so many regions of pastoral and rewilded lands in Second Life. Yet if I only hop from home to clothing shop to art gallery to dance club, I don’t see green. It can be a journey of so many right angles. Monki’s vision board was a reminder for me to seek and experience the natural wonders of Second Life as well as the cosmopolitan ones.

Sofia working in the middle of her vision board. Her tiny island reminds me of my own first home in SL, “Polly’s Pixelbeach” which was just a tiny island on a tiny parcel somewhere on the SL mainland. Just enough to change my clothes and dance. It was delightful to see Sofia rez a circle of wooden spheres and then to paint them with the full spectrum of the rainbow. An interesting intersection with the primary color cubes that began my vision board.

The group exploring Sofia’s vision board. The rainbow half-spheres are “cups” that she can fill as her year progresses. She included a pair of trampoline lily pads which I’ve jumped on to get up to her cloud where her vision board can be experienced from an aerial view.

The Big Take-away

I love simply bopping about SL and taking things as they come. It’s hard to resist the beauty of the endless mesh fashions on offer. Or the unexpected immersiveness of dancing in one of SL’s clubs. I could easily spend my SL time shopping, dancing, art gallerying, and sim exploring. I could go to endless coffee meetups and take endless opportunities to say something clever in response to wherever the banter has gone. All of that is fine. It’s fun and easy and experiences a lot of what SL has to offer.

Today’s Visioneering activity convinced me that there can also be more. The activity that Sofia Sakura led us in today was truly special. I probably should not expect every day in Second Life, or First Life for that matter, to be quite this compelling. Still, today motivated me to look for more. For opportunities to engage, connect, and participate. To make avatar brains and snow globes. To do more than shop-dance-repeat, even though there’s nothing wrong with that.