Workshop in Second Life, 27.09. 5-8 pm

Workshop in Second Life

Ilias Marmaris

The futuristic dreams from the nineties and the myth of virtual reality become reality in the beginning of the 21st century. Interactive 3D worlds are not anymore product of fantasies of the hippie generations or techno promises driven by industry players. Fusion of Internet and 3D virtual reality brought powerful tool that these days penetrate more and more aspects of everyday life. The phenomena of virtual worlds are becoming new social and economical territories.

The online virtual worlds belong to a new form of information platforms that is called vectors. A vector is defined as any medium through which something is moved into space. Transportation vectors circulate objects and subjects as global commerce goods and the universal labour power.
What circulates in communication vectors is information.

The main characteristic of Second life as a vector is that its form and development is up to the users. Based on the open source software, it constitutes a social experiment of novelties production, both in the field of information hold and use and in the different forms of organising a global social space. At the same time, it is also a market that is based on soft –so far- rules, that are still however strict rules of the late capitalist reproduction.

It is a place where the users / prosumers* are actively using a 3D technologically mediated environment to foster the future potential of research and creation.
So, in a world where everything is created by the users, everything is already in one way or another cultural and has the potential to be art. Scripted sculptures and bots [objects that perform ­automatic actions] are great examples for questioning the agency or power of the art-object.

What this virtual world lacks still is the critical stance and an institutional presence that is not absorbed in the 3D world but can also react to it in creative terms. Although Europeans are the biggest group in Second Life (Europe 54%, North America 34 %), an institutional cultural critique and analysis of multiuser virtual environments seems to be still inexistent.

Consequently, some of the upcoming questions regarding art and cultural activities in the virtual environment of Second life could be the following:

-What will be considered art in these new situations?
-What is the role of art in these structural changes?
-How artists act or should act in the 3D world of Second Life?
-What they can offer?
-How they can involve the people?
-How institutions and galleries can use technology to create new experiences and
meanings, rather than to replicate their real life selves?

*prosumer: producer & consumer

Ilias Marmaris mb[at]hol.gr
Born in Athens, 1960. He completed his studies at the university Paris VIII in Urbanism (theorie critique de la question urbaine) and in Plastic Arts. His work as a painter focused on the origins of the visual and text based linguistic structures which formed the perception of painting as a common good, inside and outside of the institutional spaces. He has exhibited world wide, in galleries, museums, alternative spaces and his work is part of several private collections. He was member and co-fonder of international artistic groups in Paris, Milan, Eindhoven and Athens. He is the initiator and co-fonder of Personal Cinema group. Since 1993 he is working in numerous documentary films both commercial and experimental, for world wide production companies as PBS, NBC, BBC WORLD, ARTE, and WLIW, either as art director or associated producer. Since 1998 after the founding of Personal Cinema group, he starts working as a media artist mostly concerned with alternative video games and online 3D virtual environments. He uses several editing, composite and 3D programs. In 2002 he initiates the New media cultural/political project: "the making of Balkan Wars: The game" and its core video game project: ''the Balkan Mall''. He has written and published various papers regarding critics on aesthetics, politics and New Media, in European magazines, newspapers and web sites. Also, he designs and produces educational video-games as the recent "Resist", that focus on drug abuse prevention for adolescents. Together with the new media curator Daphne Dragona, he initiated the actual "Secondary Transludic Borders" project.