Liberate your avatar; the revolution will be social networked

This paper brings together the practice-based creative research of artists Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon, culminating in a collaborative interactive installation that investigates new forms of social and political narrative in multi-user virtual environments. The authors' artistic projects deal with the ironies and stereotypes that are found within Second Life in particular. Paul Sermon’s current creative practice looks specifically at the concepts of presence and performance within Second Life and 'first life', and attempts to bridge these two spaces through mixed reality techniques and interfaces. Charlotte Gould’s Ludic Second Life Narrative radically questions the way that users embody themselves in on-line virtual environments and identifies a counter-aesthetic that challenges the conventions of digital realism and consumerism. These research activities and outcomes come together within a collaborative site-specific public installation entitled Urban Intersections for ISEA09, focusing on contested virtual spaces that mirror the social and political history of Belfast. The authors' current collaborative practice critically investigates social, cultural and creative interactions in Second Life. Through these practice-based experiments the authors' argue that an enhanced social and cultural discourse within multi-user virtual environments will inevitably lead to growth, cohesion and public empowerment, and like all social networking platforms, contribute to greater social and political change in first life

Interactive works for urban screens : a practice based study into building new ways of engaging communities in urban space through interactive artworks for urban screens

In our urban environment we are surrounded by strangers, observed via surveillance cameras and connected to millions via the global digital infrastructure. Our media is pervasive and immersive, implicit in everything we do, as the distinction between the real and virtual becomes increasing blurred. Whilst pervasive screens are becoming an essential personal tool, large format public screens form part of the furniture of our urban architecture. This study will ask how we can maximise opportunities for cultural engagement using urban screens and how this can impact on our culture. In the last ten years urban screens have been installed across the world, including in twenty-two cities in the UK funded by the BBC and Local Authorities for the Cultural Olympiad. The aim of the screens was to address local communities in order to reflect something of their respective location and community, “with a full programme of locally run community and sporting events”. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigscreens) Urban screens have a huge potential to play a role in changing the way that the public engages in urban space. Lucy Lippard identifies “place” as a hybrid of communal memories (Lippard, L. 1997, p9) and proposes that artist play a key role in offering community a framework from which to tackle issues, and debate. Urban screens are usually located in busy shopping centers and are ideally located to attract a broad demographic to contribute to a memory of place embracing an inclusive multicultural and tolerant approach. Through this thesis I explore how interactive works for urban screens can offer opportunity for public participation in the urban environment. Kristine Stiles and Ed Shanken propose that a key factor in interactive works is that they offer “agency” which involves freedom to make choices and to be creative in order to make a difference. (Stiles, K. Shanken E. 2011, p32) Through my literature review and current creative practice, including urban screen projects in collaboration with telematics artist Paul Sermon; “Picnic on the Screen” for the Glastonbury Festival BBC Village Screen 2009 and “Occupy the Screen” for Connecting Cities Berlin/Riga 2014, I explore how interactive artists can optimise agency, opportunities for play, creativity and self-representation to a diverse audience in order to change the way that we engage in the urban environment. Through this PhD I have developed a framework for engagement with public audiences through play

Liberate your avatar : the revolution will be socially networked

1. INTRODUCTION: NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL NARRATIVE This opening chapter provides a creative-practical perspective on Second Life through a survey of our work as visual artists, set against a theoretical and philosophical backdrop that combines poststructuralism and semiotics. Our practical examples of merged and created Second Lives draw on our mixed-reality installations in the form of encounters between Second Life and First Life. Starting from created communities in Second Life™ (cf. Sherman’s social encounters, and Fizek and Wasilewska’s creation of second bodies, both this volume), our aim is to provide a visual backdrop and practical examples to this underlying theoretical and philosophical discourse, where the disembodied participant and (re)-embodied avatar in our installations find themselves in an increasingly social and political second life context. Whilst the underlying theoretical framework of this chapter clearly identifies a number of critical and philosophical standpoints ranging from a post-structuralist position that follows the linguistic and semiotic guiding principles of de Saussure (1916) to the formation of the ego in relation to the body-image in Lacan’s mirror stage (1966), it is the artistic outcomes of our own practiced-based research that identifies and pronounces these theoretical stances within our art installations. Through the development of these artistic works since the early 1990s a philosophical discourse has emerged through experience and practice rather than initiated by theory alone, but one that is now completely entwined where we as artists feel both the theory and practice are at the forefront of our work. In what follows, we shall outline our respective practice-based creative research, culminating in a collaborative interactive installation that investigates new forms of social and political narrative in multi-user virtual environments. Our artistic projects deal with the ironies and stereotypes that are found within Second Life in particular. Paul Sermon’s current creative practice looks specifically at the concepts of presence and performance within Second Life and First Life, and attempts to bridge these two spaces through mixed reality techniques and interfaces. Charlotte Gould’s Ludic Second Life Narrative radically questions the way that users embody themselves in on-line virtual environments and identifies a counter-aesthetic that challenges the conventions of digital realism and consumerism. BOOK DESCRIPTION: This book aims to provide insights into how ‘second lives’ in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually, semiotically and discursively, specifically in the online environment Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft. The book’s philosophy is multi-disciplinary and its goal is to explore the question of how we as gamers and residents of virtual worlds construct alternative online realities in a variety of ways. Of particular significance to this endeavour are conceptions of the body in cyberspace and of spatiality, which manifests itself in ‘natural’ and built environments as well as the triad of space, place and landscape. The contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds include media, communication, cultural and literary studies, and they examine issues of reception and production, identity, community, gender, spatiality, natural and built environments using a plethora of methodological approaches ranging from theoretical and philosophical contemplation through social semiotics to corpus-based discourse analysis