Update of my project

Here is an update on my project:

Second Life is a dreamscape made up by its real-life participants. In this fantasy world, our wishes, desires and dreams are manifested in the objects we create and in the way our avatars behave to relate to each other. It is a world which in many ways mimics the real world, but with different connotations. It is also a world which for many is hyperreal, the experience from which affects their real lives.

The challenge for me in creating a work in SL has been how to distillate my interpretation of this virtuality in order to demonstrate in my work what Second Life means to me and my avatar.

In the end I decided to focus on two aspects of SL, which I found to be its most striking characteristics : Creativity and Play in the virtual world. Or put it more precisely, our desire to continue exploring our creativity through our playfulness and our wish to share this desire with fellow human beings even in our adulthood.

Mimicking the form of a sphere in a real-life playground, my work “N00sphere Playground” is an interactive sound installation in which adults via their avatars join to create a sphere of enjoyment through play and experience of sounds. Beneath its surface is an underlying notion of noosphere, closely related to Henri Bergson’s idea of “Èlan Vital” and its role in evolution.

(N00sphere Playground at HUMlab, photo taken by the sim’s manager Didge Burroughs a.k.a. James Barrett)