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Second Life -- "A libertarian paradise where there are no zoning laws"
3/19/2008
Doug Anderson just completed a thesis in Second Life that earned him a masters of science in art education from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design ("MassArt"). He is an art teacher at Prospect Hill Academy, a charter school in Cambridge and Somerville, MA.The title of the thesis was "Force Sun Midnight," displayed in a Second Life "sim" (a simulator with its own CPU in a server) and also in the Massachusetts College of Art and Design ("MassArt"), Arnheim Gallery -- complete with its own 3D goggles so the art leapt out at you from the wall.
The medium totally engages Anderson -- thus the reference to paradise. He explains: "Second Life's strength is in being a stage set for human interaction. I don't consider any of my work done until people show up. When you go there with a bunch of friends and start poking around, the artwork is complete. My work borrows a lot of basic structure from video games, especially open-ended games like Myst: The idea is that you are in an environment, you don't start with any clear objective, you have to explore a little bit, poke and probe a little bit to see what's going on. I leave a lot of cookies [not browser cookies, but little rewards for finding an interactive spot] or Easter eggs for people to reward careful exploration. You might click on something and find out that you can make a copy of it, or that it's animated, or that it responds to another object or makes a sound, for example. It might take a good 30 or 40 minutes to go through one of my environments and find all that's there -- or you might not find all that's there, so it bears repeated viewings."
When this editor visited one of Anderson's two exhibits, my avatar saw a plane about to crash into a street crossing with traffic stopped for a red light. My avatar, curious, flew up to see the plane more closely and it realized it could fly into the plane where the wing had broken off to see what was happening with the people inside. Fortunately, as my avatar was relieved to see, there were no people in the plane. But it felt uncomfortable being inside a plane about to crash.
How is such intricate and esthetically robust work possible in Second Life? Anderson notes that just in the past year, Second Life introduced a couple of innovations. First, the ability to make objects that are irregular or 'organic.' "I can use any number of programs to make the object and then can import them as a texture into SL," Anderson comments. "Before that, if you wanted to make something like a tree, you had to use dozens or hundreds of objects that were never convincing. This technology came along in the middle of this work and so I had to master that technology." The second is the addition of voice chat. "It was introduced last year very slowly at first but there was a tipping point and now people can talk instead of typing," says Anderson. Voice was important so that he could lead people through the show and narrate as he went from place to place.
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