Where Art Imitates (Second) Life

While SL is the established mega-hit in the virtual-world arms race (currently nearly 12 million "residents" -- a resident is a uniquely named and registered avatar -- and expanding briskly, with 40,000 to 60,000 residents active at any given moment), it is not without competition: MTV Networks has been creating a group of SL-style worlds to compete with social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook , no doubt preparing for the inevitable coming of 3-D social networking interactivity.

If They Build It, Will You Come?

Which raises the question as to why anyone besides the chronically dateless should care about second Life. Two reasons: First, it might be wise to plan for the inevitable. SL's growth arc suggests we'll all soon have our own avatars. Second, you might like it. Until you enter and explore Second Life, you simply can't fathom how addictively immersive it can be -- and how visually seductive for creative types, who are drawn to SL by its infinite artistic capabilities.

Though one could argue that all of Second Life itself is art, artists are using the unique tools of SL to redefine art itself. Of course, digital art has been around for decades-as an early Siggraph conference attendee in the mid-'80s, I recall the extraordinary creations of David Em, an artist who gained access to the supercomputers in Pasadena, Calif.'s super-secret Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

However, what's new here is this art exists in a space that's accessible and interactively enabled worldwide. Second Life is a "sim," otherwise known as a simulated environment, in which anything can be built using objects called "prims," or primitives. The tools available in Second Life to design the prims allow for staggering effects: SL artworks are unfettered by real-life constraints on shape, size or materials; artwork may have unlimited forms and properties, and may be easily or continuously modified; visitors may teleport or fly into and "through" the art, which can scale, replicate, shift or change in any way its creator wishes, at any speed and within any time frame. Multiple creators can collaborate in ways never before possible, and art can "cross over," with various permutations between real life and Second Life.

Telling the Tale

This brave new art world is being chronicled by Richard Minsky, creator of SLART, a journal and Web site about art in Second Life (Minsky's avatar is called "ArtWorld Market"). The art world in Second Life is flourishing and expanding: There are over 400 galleries there and, as Minsky points out, over 300 non-profits (mostly universities) are building campuses in SL.

These organizations are using Second Life for every kind of research and study -- creating medieval cities and replicas of Egyptian tombs, for example. Art departments are teaching art in SL's "metaverse," with Second Life as the medium. Architects are working in SL, where their 3-D building models can be experienced more realistically using avatar walkthroughs. "SL isn't easy," Minsky concedes. "It requires work, but once you find these places, how amazing they can be. If you know SL, you understand ... if not, it's mind-bending."

Virtual Voices

Artists have migrated into Second Life from various media, drawn by its accessibility and unlimited technical possibilities. Some are bridging the two worlds in novel ways. Filthy Fluno (Jeffrey Lipsky) is known for his commissioned narrative portraits of avatars in SL, using extensive interviews to encapsulate each personality's essence. Avatars can hang photographs of themselves with their Fluno portraits in their SL home galleries; they may also purchase his real portraits (often in pastels and charcoal) or high-resolution prints to hang in their real homes.

Fluno is also a developer in SL; he has created an island called Artropolis devoted to art and artists. "In real life I worked at building a community around art," says Fluno, a former arts administrator from Massachusetts, "and I brought those organizational skills into Second Life."

His network of collectors, patrons and enthusiasts expanded exponentially through his exhibitions in SL, and many RL exhibitions and commissions have followed in far-flung places like France and Portugal. To further blur the boundaries between SL and RL, these exhibitions might be accompanied by streamed-in "live" performances by musicians from halfway around the globe, playing in parallel exhibitions in Artropolis.

Sabine Stonebender (Gary Davis) is a Houston-area artist who says he "never intended to become a digital artist; I fell into it. I had tried a lot of media as a graduate in studio art, but when my family got a Windows 95 computer, I became a hi-res graphics junkie."

Stonebender attests that he can do art in Second Life that is simply impossible in any other medium: "I can hold light in my hand; I can play with plasma like Silly Putty. I like messing with people's sense of reality; I don't have to deal with gravity."

Seven Wonders

In SLART, Minsky calls Stonebender's Zero Point development "one of the Seven Wonders of SL ... a sci-fi fantasy psychedelic Op Art installation sculpture that ... [is] an amusement park ... with illusions of infinite depth." Minsky took me on a tour: Zero Point is practically indescribable. Swooping, falling, environment after environment washes over, under and around Minsky's avatar; textured tunnels rich in chiaroscuro, lush with color, ornate with detail and form, provide sensory overload on every level.

Artist DanCoyote Antonelli (D. C. Spensley, based in San Francisco) calls Second Life "the museum of the future ... its network transportability brings my work to the world." Having been a gamer for over a decade, he extols Second Life as "a great opportunity to harness my game addiction and use it positively for my career as an artist." In addition to his animated sculptures, much of DanCoyote's work derives from his previous experience in live performance art, which "relies on chance intervention; setting a group of parameters into play and watching them work out"-in the style of, say, John Cage, whose work he admires.

ZeroG SkyDancers, DanCoyote's most recent work in Second Life, involves network performance, with avatars logged in from all over the world, executing complex aerial acrobatics to a customized score on a massive floating stage/platform while clothed in 800-meter-long "cascades" that are visible from a great distance. The results are stunning. "I manufacture movement," says DanCoyote. "My work is native to SL, and a large part of what I do is conceptual and theoretical." He calls his art "hyperformalism: formalist abstraction created in a hyper-medium such as abstract 3D digital space or pure mathematical space."

However, don't let Second Life terminology put you off. For the uninitiated, the language used to describe concepts and processes in SL is foreign and daunting, but the experience can be sublime. You can choose to be an artist in Second Life or simply take in the sights. Think of it as an adventure in an exotic and remote place ... dip your toe into the cyberstream, put on your best avatar and get a (second) life!