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Confront
your own avatar in Second Life as you explore the enchanted
forest.
This
installation allows the Gallery visitor and their ‘second
life’ virtual avatar to confront each other and coexist
in the same enchanted forest environment in a live interactive
public video installation. Simply stand in front of the video
screen within the set and use the control keypad arrows to
move you avatar around the scene. As you move around and explore
this virtual forest scene you will discover that it is not
only your Second Life avatar that exists in this space but
through surprise encounters your virtual avatar will come
face to face with its physical ‘first life’ counterpart.
This
project looks specifically at the concepts of presence and
performance in SecondLife and first life and attempts to bridge
these two spaces through mixed reality techniques and interfaces.
The project further examines the notion of telepresence through
the blurring between ‘online’ and ‘offline’
identities, and the signifiers and conditions that make us
feel present in this world. This work questions how subjectivity
is articulated in relation to embodiment and disembodiment.
It explores the avatar in relation to its activating first
life agent, focusing on the avatar's multiple identifications,
such as gender roles, human/animal hybrids, and other archetypes,
identifiable through visible codes and body forms in Second
Life. The project aims to evaluate the diversity of personas
and social life styles of the avatar.
So as
to explore this emerging relationship between the virtual
and physical, Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould have developed
a number of interactive installations using “Second
Life” that focus on the interaction and exchange between
online and offline identities through social practices, such
as performance, narrative, embodiment, activism, place and
identity construction. Their collaborative experiments seek
to question whether Second Life is a platform for potential
social and cultural change - appropriated as a mirror image
of first life. By consciously deciding to refer to this image
that is mirrored as ‘first’ life rather than ‘real’
life, the authors' central question poses a paradox in Second
Life when we consider Jacques Lacan’s proposition that
the ‘self’ (or ego) is a formulation of our own
body image reflected in the 'mirror stage’. However,
there is no 'mirror stage' in Second Life, which would suggest
that the computer screen itself is the very mirror we are
looking for, one that allows the user to formulate her/his
'second self'.
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