Sunday, September 9, 2007

Recipients of the Inaugural Australia Council Second Life Artists Residency


We are proud to announce that we have been awarded the inaugural Australia Council Second Life Artists Residency. A project-based grant, at AUD $20,000, it is the biggest grant to be awarded for Second Life work.

We'd like to thank the Australia Council for recognising 3D Multi-user Virtual Environments (MUVEs) as a medium for serious art. For a public funding body to give such significant support shows vision and commitment to innovative post-convergent practice.

We will collaborate to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life, which converges possibilities of literary, music/sound art and real-time 3D arts practices within the virtual world. There will be a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a voice-driven interface.

The installation, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, will use voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The behaviour of the individual letterforms and the meta-tower will be informed by swarm theory.

Our team consists of Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman). Details in the People section at right.