Life and Art in Second Life

Singapore.
The day four morning session at ISEA 2008 starts with Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel. Her focus, and the focus of all other papers in this session, is on virtual worlds and Second Life. She begins by noting the evolution of virtual worlds from Dungeons and Dragons offline roleplaying games to MUDS and other basic computer and online computer games, through to modern MMPORGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft. More recently, games such as The Sims, ActiveWorlds, and Second Life have acted more broadly as life simulations rather than games. (Giga OM research provides some useful statistics on the population of such worlds.)

Martha now shifts focus specifically to Second Life, one of many worlds inspired by cyberpunk novels such as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. They act as metaverses, as described by Stephenson. SL was launched in 2003 and gradually became better known; however, there is still considerable doubt about its real popularity beyond the hype, and Martha suggests that there is something of a downturn in SL following the downturn in the U.S. and world economy. But whatever happens to SL itself, SL-style worlds will continue - it has generated a new genre, a new language of online interaction, and this is significant.

Martha notes that the average age of SL users is around 30, and that chat, gestures, and movements are key forms of interaction here. Additionally, creating in-world content, making monetary transactions, teleporting, and recording photos, films, and voice in the space are also all significant activities. The basic unit in SL is the island, she suggests, and land on such islands can be bought, of course; some such spaces have connections (or are replicas) of existing first-life spaces - there is even talk of a Google Earth-style Second Earth.

The person owning a space in SL is ruler of that space - they can control it and set rules for interaction (and there now are the first in-world millionaires in SL). Indeed, there is a strong economy within the space, with exchange rates to real-world money - coming with this is a problem of money laundering and of taxing proceeds from SL activity. Additionally, a flotilla of publications around SL has popped up - from the Second Life Herald to SL arts magazines and many more.

SL is not a game, nor a social network, nor is it the first 3D platform or digital economy. What has made it so successful? Martha suggests that it is the sum of these elements, without pre-determined rules or objectives; it is a playground environment which becomes more attractive the more people use it. It is not digital life, but 'life digital' - a simulation which we choose to go to, rather than a digital space which comes to us through our everyday gadgets.

She describes this as a platform for 'cybrid' processes (as in, cyber-hybrid), and highlights the use of movements and gestures, the ability to break or follow the laws of physics, the combination of in-game and off-game economies, and especially also the embrace of Web 2.0 (or what I would call produsage) principles: users generate almost all content within the space.

Key features are that it gives power to the individual (over themselves, over the environment - and this also has effects in first life); its chief elements are to fly, to teleport, to view, and to create machinima content. But there are interesting contradictions here: there is no rain, heat, or cold, so why are there walls? There is no gravity, so why do people live on the ground? Communicating is through voice, so why are there mobile phones? Movement is through teleport, so why are there cars?

Martha now moves on to point to some of the art in SL - A Rose Heard at Dusk, Abyss, FlowerBall, PleaseWakeMeUp Idler, Lumiere Noir, her own SKINdoscope SL, the Turbulence Commission's curated exhibition Mixed Realities, and Jealous of Your Avatar?

Finally, continuing challenges include better integration with the Web, improved server performance, access limitations, lack of content control to police against pornography, money laundering, griefers,and copyright infringement, and a need for reflection on the meaning of SL.

The next speaker is Grant Corbishley. The focus of his team is to coordinate activities within Second Life with activities in the physical world - transmitting movement data from the game to the outside world, and vice versa, to facilitate border-crossing activities that affect or infect the physical world (and forever alter it). How can this be enhanced by or interfered with by artificial intelligence? Is there a third stage of being not in first or second life, but indeed of existing in the border itself?

A very simplistic first sample for this border crossing would be a feedback setup where shapes are drawn on a piece of paper in the physical world, scanned and transmitted into Second Life, altered there, sent via a printer back into first life, further altered by a human operator, scanned back in again, and so on. A second prototype was to build a kind of pedal-powered helicopter in Second Life which is powered through a modified exercise bike in first life.

Further, the team explored the use of an experimental Web camera which is able to capture depth, leading to a quasi-3D image that can be transformed into a SL representation, and developed a basic laser light show in both first and second lives, both of which were deployed inside a Second Life nightclub space, "Temp", on KoruKoru island. The laser show inside SL was able to be controlled by people interacting with it in the physical world. This offers real opportunities for future in-game and off-game nightclub design.

Denise Doyle is next, presenting her work in curating an arts exhibition on Kriti Island in Second Life. The purpose of this was especially to explore whether there were new artistic languages developing within the SL space. In the first place, such curation involved developing the island itself - rather than establishing a gallery space as such, the island itself was going to act as an exhibition space that may or may not be seen as a gallery in its own right.

Overall, twelve projects were included in the exhibition (nine were new works); some of the artists participated entirely under their SL avatar names, incidentally. Artists such as Angrybeth Shortbread have worked with people like Brian Eno and Duran Duran; Robbie Dingo has been a successful machinima artist, China and Chingaling Bling have created work around the war in Iraq, for example. Denise now shows a number of these works, some of which explore the nature of Second Life itself.

Technorati : ISEA 2008, Second Life, new media arts
Del.icio.us : ISEA 2008, Second Life, new media arts