HOTEL DARE – The SL artist Four Yip jumps up and down in bed. She’s allowed to do so because she’s created the bed herself. And not only the bed, in fact, but the whole hotel room where it stands.

”When you go to a hotel and there are all these fresh bed linens, I just want to jump and fall in them, and fight with the pillows,” Yip says, admitting that’s actually what she does in RL hotels. ”Euh, yes, ha ha ha! And if there is a lamp well attached, I swing on it. Ssshhh!”

No wonder then, when Gattina Dumpling asked Yip to make a room in her new Hotel Dare, Yip grabbed the opportunity to create”what I think about when I think of hotels,” and filled it to the brim with funny animations and generous freebies. You can dance with a dress, get a flying bed sheet, a silly showercap with bunny ears,  a striped pyjama, to name a few.

”I made the room to make it look like it’s inside a box of chocolate, since you always get chocolate on your pillow when you stay at hotels. And I looove chocolate,” she laughed.

Dumpling comes in, saying ”I wanna jump with you! I don’t think I will ever change this room.I’m moving in.”

Dumpling’s hotel is a special one. Yip is only one of several invited SL artists, like Mijn Boa and Ichibot Nichi, that were given free hand to decorate one room each. The plan is to keep inviting new artists every two months to give all the rooms a re-arrangement.

”But I may make Yip do a new one every two months because I love her work so,” says Dumpling, and says her reason to make a hotel like this comes from a RL fascination for hotels.

”I love hotels. My husband and I are art and furniture collectors, and he badly wants to open a hotel in RL. We travel a lot, and have always been fond of finding design and art hotels. And when I joined SL, I became sort of frustrated because I found many lovely places, but nowhere that felt ’sustainable’ to me,” she said, admitting it’s funny to look at hotels as ”sustainable”.

”They are to me. When I travel, they feel like home. It’s almost more of a home than home in the sense that you get to be you; there is no washing up, no dentist office visits, no electrical bills to pay – and that is also how I feel about SL. It is you, without the little moments of RL interfering,” Dumpling said, while she showed Nichi’s room, made to give the impression of a hospital.

Dumpling hopes the hotel will give SL artists a chance to showcase their work in a setting different than a typical gallery. ”We now even have RL artists that are expressing an interest in the SL medium, which I think is fantastic. If any artist wants to stage a room, I’ll be happy to talk with them.”