Denise Doyle

Immersed in Learning: supporting creative practice in virtual worlds

The Immersed in Learning project began in 2007 to evaluate the use of 3D virtual worlds as a teaching and learning tool in undergraduate programmes in digital media at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. A question that the research set out to explore was what were the benefits of integrating 3D immersive learning with face‐to‐face learning for students who were already comfortable inhabiting the digital realm? The purchase and development of Kriti Island on the Second Life grid saw the online virtual space rapidly assume a sense of real presence, and become a focus for collaboration, nationally and internationally. The successful submission of the Kritical Works in SL project to the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Singapore 2008 meant that Kriti Island hosted 10 international artists’ work produced in and for Second Life, with a further exhibition, Kritical Works in SL II, launched at ISEA 2009 in Belfast. With the ongoing research new questions have emerged. There is now a deeper focus on the use of the Second Life platform for creative practice and the exploration of concepts that are impossible in real life. This article reflects on the development of an island for research and to support creative practice and creative collaboration and comments on its current and future use in the School of Art and Design.

Embodied narrative: The virtual nomad and the meta dreamer

Abstract This article charts the relationship between and the experience of real and virtual worlds. Like the travellers of the earlier centuries who returned with information and curiosities from distant and previously undiscovered lands we bring back with us our narratives, our stories and descriptions of our experience of embodiment in these new landscapes. We find that inhabiting the spaces of these virtual worlds is challenging our relationship to our own. We explore, through the construction of digital narratives, the experience and journey of Wanderingfictions in her metaverse, Second Life and Dongdongs trans-national travel in the physical world exploring the Web 2.0 environment as metadata to articulate the users virtual identity. Data was collected in the form of narrative; each took their turn to write from their world; like a collection of postcards or snapshots of experience. Through the emerging dialogue we discover a combination of dis-ease, fear, but also wonderment of this new shift, this new view, where we are able to live in and embody multiple realities. Exploring these various conditions challenges us to investigate our physical availabilities as travellers in these virtual environments. A non-human body as metadata offers us resources for thinking in more sophisticated ways about virtual technologies. User Generated Contents and 3D Virtual Worlds such as Second Life bring new forms of participation. These two main waves on the net are contributing to the systems of informatics in their structures, behaviours and interactions of digital knowledge and narrative. The narrative reveals the complexities of dealing with identity politics in the environments of virtual spaces. It observes how our early, though rapidly changing, sensibilities are responding. We are in transition. This article finds that we will only truly become post-human when our memory of being ‘only human’ finally fades.

Art and the avatar: the kritical works in SL project

Abstract As 3D Online Virtual Worlds begin to assume a sense of presence in real terms, there is a growing interest amongst the wider international artistic community in Second Life (SL) as a platform to develop creative practice. A number of artists and designers have continued, for some time, to specifically work with the SL building tools and programming language to explore the potentials and limitations of the platform itself. Other established real world artists have also begun to explore their own concerns within the SL space. The purchase and development of Kriti Island on the SL grid in 2007 saw the online virtual space rapidly become a focus for collaboration, nationally and internationally. The Kritical Works in SL (2008) project invited ten international artists to construct art works on Kriti responding to one of the themes from ISEA2008: Reality Jam. The new (and existing) works aimed to identify new approaches emerging when interfacing between real and virtual space and asked if there is a maturing of the languages used within SL? Is there a commonality of approach and emergent experience? What are the characteristics of the virtual fabric of the platform and what inherent opportunities are there in this interface as virtual space? This article discusses recent projects produced for the exhibition on Kriti along with other significant projects recently developed in SL. There are at least two approaches that can to be considered when exploring SL for creative practice, beyond the potential of using SL as a presentation space that echoes real life gallery spaces. First, SL explored as a space for performance and second, where the audience or avatar plays an intrinsic role in the work produced or even where the audience becomes the performer of the work itself. The SL space can be a performative space for both the artist and the audience. Finally, this article will consider how the emerging languages of artistic and creative practice on the SL platform are determining our experience as audiences in these online virtual spaces.

Phenomenologies of Practice: The Artist in Virtual Worlds

In the field of art and technology engagement with virtual worlds as spaces for creative practice challenges and enhances our understanding of the phenomena of imagining. The experience of creating in technology-mediated spaces through an avatar form brings the phenomenological experience of the body into the act of creating itself. Ways of explaining this creative process and its relationship to imaginative experience highlights a phenomenology of practice of artists working in this realm. This article considers the implications of this methodological approach and presents the case for investigating artistic and imaginative experience through adapting phenomenological research methods.

Avatar Lives: Narratives of Transformation and Identity

Abstract A 2013 UK study forecasting how our identities will change in the following decade noted that until now, a kind of inner narrative has provided individuals with an ongoing subjective, internal commentary, but through the growth of online social media, identity is “no longer an internal, subjective experience, but is constructed externally and therefore is much less robust and more volatile” ( Foresight, 2013 ). Arguing from the fields of literature and feminist science studies, Susan Merrill Squier observes that “no longer stable, the boundaries of our human existence have become imprecise at best, contested at worst” ( Squier, 2004, p. 7 ). This chapter concerns itself with digital embodiment and the construction of the self as avatar, and the ways in which contemporary arts practices are emerging through the exploration of digitally constructed realities on new technological platforms. This chapter argues that access to the experience of digitally constructed realities enables us reflect upon how our own privately constructed realities are also created and allows us to shed light on the distinctions between fiction and reality.

Out of this world: exploring embodiment and space through artistic processes and practice

This article considers the artistic exploration of embodiment at the frontiers and edges of space. With a focus on both outer space and virtual space, the article explores the practices employed by artists who have taken on a virtual body as a vehicle to explore the virtual space of virtual worlds and those artists aiming to free their physical bodies of gravity and experience weightlessness in the artistic exploration of outer space. Perhaps the myths and realities of both astronauts (or those who have experienced their bodies in zero gravity) and avatars are one and the same – that of bodies travelling in unknown spaces and time. The article aims to reveal the common threads of experiences of embodiment and space drawing together issues of the weightless, the virtual and the immaterial body.

New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds

Second Life remains a virtual world that is not easily defined and understood. Whilst it no longer grabs the populist cultural headlines, as a platform, it has still to be fully understood in terms of its significance within a wider critical discourse of digital and new media art. Further to this the new languages of artistic practice that are being created that are particular to virtual and avatar-mediated worlds are still to be fully defined. This paper aims to outline the potential contribution and impact Second Life has had and aims to present a critical framework for the platform and future avatar-mediated virtual worlds through the work of key artists and writers in the field through an articulation of these languages and virtual aesthetics. The paper will further present an artist-led discourse on significant and groundbreaking Second Life art works such as Watch the World, the Presence Project, and more recently the immersive environments of SL artist Bryn Oh. In itself Second Life may stand the test of time as a continued interface to examine issues of the real and the virtual and may contribute to further theoretical and philosophical discussions of new technologies and artistic practice.

Meta-Dreaming: Entangling the Virtual and the Physical

This chapter explores virtual worlds, or the metaverse, as spaces of and for the artistic imagination, in which the entanglement of the physical with the virtual is being exploited for its creative and imaginative potential. In particular, there are opportunities to investigate, subvert, invert, and even question our current understanding of virtual space (and the concept of the metaverse itself) through an exploration and manipulation of time, space, and identity. Creative opportunities not ordinarily available in physical world spaces are enabling artists to create new spaces of the imagination that are almost tangible, almost physical, and most certainly a ‘real’ experience for the audience. For Patrick Lichty, it is the particular characteristics of virtual worlds that closely echo the logic of the physical world that are providing ‘an existential overlay’ to the experience of virtual world spaces, and he considers how the ‘invocation of this metaphor [raises] questions about the intent of the creation of such worlds and how (or if) artists will choose to engage with virtual environments in this manner’ (Lichty, 2009, pp. 2–3). However, it is this ‘play’ of the imagination between the virtual and physical that underpins many of the themes explored by artists in projects developed on one virtual world platform, Second Life, during its lifetime (Doyle, 2010).

Emergent Imagination: A Developing Framework for the Analysis of Artworks in Virtual Worlds

This paper proposes a framework for the analysis of artworks created in virtual worlds by extending Lichtys four modalities of art in virtual worlds, identified as transmediated, cybrid, client/browser, and ever gent. A selection of artworks from the Kritical Work in SL exhibitions undertaken in 2008 and 2009 are analysed for the qualities of imaginative experience and the articulation of a new set of movements of the imagination from (and between) physical and virtual world spaces indicates a potency of virtual worlds for the investigation and creation of artistic practice.

Phenomenologies of practice: the artist in virtual worlds

In the field of art and technology engagement with virtual worlds as spaces for creative practice challenges and enhances our understanding of the phenomena of imagining. The experience of creating in technology-mediated spaces (through an avatar form) brings the phenomenological experience of the body into the act of creating itself. Ways of explaining this creative process and its relationship to imaginative experience highlights a phenomenology of practice of artists working in this realm. This article considers the implications of the methodological approaches that have been chosen in an inter-disciplinary context and the case for investigating artistic and imaginative experience through adapting phenomenological research methods. It presents the results of the analysis and provides an account of the method of Imaginative Variation and its adaptation for use in new contexts.