Second Life has become second nature for three enterprising Australian artists, writes Clare Morgan.
Imagine an art gallery where you can not only touch the works on display, you can walk over them, sit on them, even fly through them. Such actions would doubtless send security staff into apoplexy, but in Second Life, the world is your oyster.
Today three Australian artists unveil their exhibition Babelswarm in the 3D virtual world of Second Life, an interactive sculpture based on the mythical Tower of Babel. For those who like the old-fashioned gallery experience, there is a "real" show at Lismore Regional Gallery. Christopher Dodds, a visual artist, Adam Nash, a musician and 3D real-time artist, and Justin Clemens, a writer, all from Melbourne, were last year awarded a $20,000 artist-in-residence grant from the Australia Council to create a work for the online social networking world - believed to be the largest grant of its type. Their real-time 3D work Babelswarm combines swarm theory - the outcomes of collective behaviour - and the story
of humanity's effort to build a tower to the heavens, only to have it destroyed as punishment for such arrogance, along with man's unified language.
Residents of Second Life, represented by their computer-generated avatars, can speak or type messages into the installation; voice-recognition software converts their words into letters that fall from the sky to create a tower. Lismore Gallery visitors can take part by speaking into a microphone and watching their contribution to the installation on a wall-sized screen.
... and from there I went to their Blogsite: BabelSwarm ... the sky is full of words http://babelswarm.blogspot.com/ without getting a Second Life account I haven't seen the work – but somehow the images I've seen are computer generated two dimensional graphics... in a way I guess I've reassured myself – for sculpture there is nothing like being there.
Jenny Rickards
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