Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it’s open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.

I have always been involved with the arts world, from my student days, through many years making arts programmes for television, as a writer and, these days also as the artistic director of a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the ‘multi-player virtual world’ called Second Life, where I have the virtual name, Wolfgang Glinka.

Wolfgang Glinka and Colin Bell are interchangeable versions of the person known as Me, and my gallery, is an extension of many of the things I have done and others that I have dreamed of doing before anyone even imagined the enormous potential of virtual reality. Virtual reality, is as its name implies just another form of reality. Here, as you can see in my welcome notice to virtual visitors to the gallery, I have been able to curate an extraordinary group of artists from most branches of the arts – fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music. Actually all of my artistic passions.

Over the eight years of Glinka Gallery’s existence, and now in in fourth rebuild, we are getting bigger and bigger, the gallery has shown regular exhibitions by a family of regular artists, including our resident artist, Lash vv, creatives in both virtual and real worlds, who find freedom and support at what has now become more than a gallery, more of a creative arts centre.

We now have an ever-growing permanent collection of some of the work by our exhibitors over the years. I think of them as my friends.

I am a writer, a novelist and poet, and I have been experimenting here at the gallery with ways of putting poetry, in particular, on the walls, along with fine art. Therefore I have built specific spaces for poetry and created a role for a resident poet (Shyla the Super Gecko) who holds regular poetry reading events here.

I also put on exhibitions of my own work, especially my Fibs, short-form Fibonacci poems which lend themselves to life on the wall as well as on the page. They have their own home in the Fibonacci Gallery.

Here is my, well, Wolfgang Glinka’s short film of his, well my Fib, Reflections, published by The Fib Review and now also viewable on Youtube.

We also have a resident dance troupe, 21 Parakeets, directed by Joseph Nussbaum, a composer and choreographer, who has sought to make contemporary dance an equal partner here with fine art and poetry. His work is inspired by the wish to show challenging but also entertaining dance shows in our own custom built dance theatre, the Aviary Theatre, built by our buildings director, Tony Marino.

Since I’ve been running the Glinka Gallery, I have been able to develop my interest in photography, often too far down the list of my priorities, in a busy writing schedule. In the last eight years I have been pushing myself to make my photography an equal form of expression with my poetry. At first, I made photography exhibitions of my work mostly shot on foreign trips, buy recently I have developed my interest in photo-art, mostly known as digital photo-editing or image manipulation. This is a completely new world for me and I was excited to find I could attract a large audience for the first of my recent shows, Ecce Homo, (Behold the Man), an examination of masculinity at a time of crisis in male identity.

My most recent show is Dead Poets in Love, Queer Writers from Shakespeare to Burroughs. Here I am trying another experiment in bringing writing and photography together. This has been, maybe my longterm ambition for most of my life. In the gallery the texts float as an ethereal presence in front of my manipulated images of the writers themselves. In the movie of the show, I decided that it was better to leave out the texts. Maybe I will take this idea further in my next projects.

If the potential of the arts in the virtual world is new to you, and if you are interested to come to Glinka Gallery and to the other arts venues in the often under-estimated virtual platform, Second Life, https://secondlife.comhere is a brief look. We hope to see you there, maybe.

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Last week, as part of the ‘virtual’ exhibition, Remembering Blue, at my ‘virtual’ gallery, Glinka Gallery, I took part in a wonderful event with the ever-inventive ‘virtual’ dance company, The Sway & Dance Troupe.

OK, what’s all this stuff about ‘virtual’? The creativity and originality of virtual worlds are not celebrated enough in the ‘real’ world. I have been lucky at my time in the ‘virtual’ world called Second Life. I have been working there with fellow writers, film-makers, musicians and artists for over ten years now and it has been a glimpse into not just the what-could-be but also the what-can-be done.

Last Saturday, on the roof theatre on top of my gallery, circling in outer space, we put on a live fully-choreographed dance show to a live audience from around the world, with poetry interludes from my newly published poetry collection, Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing). I assumed my alter-ego, Wolfgang Glinka, in reading my poems and was happy to play second fiddle to my amazing colleagues Joseph Nussbaum, Boris Twist, Bryan Trefoil, Spankster Cyberstar and Marly Moon from The Sway & Dance Troupe. No need for Broadway or London’s West End, if this can still be done in that other ‘virtual’ world.

Take a look at this live video of the event, When I’m Gone, filmed by the talented video artist, Akiko Kinoshi. I think you’ll see what I mean.

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Eight years ago, I took my first timorous steps into the virtual computer world known as Second Life. It was an extraordinarily confusing experience having to create a new image for oneself in a massive online animated game where you  begin with nothing and, ideally, pursue or discover dreams of what you might do if you really did get the chance of a second life. Eight years ago, my second life persona, Wolfgang Glinka, couldn’t even walk across a room without falling over – a bit like an infant in so many ways. Eight years on and I am, I guess, a veteran of this world and I have had a truly interesting time. Now, for the first time, I’ve collaborated in making a film, Sortie, which is premiered (on Youtube) today.

I perform poetry a lot in Second Life, running a poetry event every Thursday, Wolfie’s Poetry Surf, when I’m joined, live, by poets from all over the ‘real’ world. Now, both my lives, real and second, have combined giving me many chances of crossing backwards and forwards between them as I pursue all the writing possibilities that come my way. Now, I am Colin Bell, Wolfie Wolfgang or Wolfgang Glinka, a triple personality perhaps but no, not really. I’ve just embraced the wonderful possibilities, if used wisely, that the worldwide web offers us all.

The film, directed by the splendid Boris Twist is a visualisation of my poem, Sortie, written earlier this year but promptly forgotten until Boris asked me if I had anything dark enough for a Halloween film.  Once I’d found it, it became a real pleasure for Colin Bell to record it and for Wolfgang Glinka to appear as narrator.

Take a look – I’m thrilled by Boris’ clever use of my poetry. Most important of all, the whole project was fun.

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