Dimitri - Article Review Four

Art, Virtual Worlds and the Emergent Imagination

Denise Doyle

Doyle's exploration to uncover the essence and meaning of the artist's experience as a creative practitioner in virtual space offers an interesting insight into art from an artist's point of view. Doyle exists in Second Life as a part of a team of artists who work in a sim within Second Life called Kriti Island, where they collaborate on artwork and bring in other artists to help explore the capabilities of Second Life as an artistic platform.

First, Doyle looks briefly into avatars and the connections between the user and their avatar. A particularly interesting comment to note is reference to research done in neuroscience areas that found a greater emotional involvement with one's avatar can be registered in areas of the brain noted for self-identification, a result from a study of long-term World of Warcraft players versus a non-gaming control group (World of Warcraft being a MMORPG which is played entirely through a player avatar through which the player explores the narrative of the world).

Doyle also explores the work of Lichty and his four modalities of online art: transmediated, client/browser, cybrid and evergent.

The two that particularly interested me from this exploration were transmediated modes and client-browser experience modes. Both of these are given examples by Doyle in this paper.

Transmediated modality is described as a piece that was originally created tangibly, that is, in the real world, and then recreated in a virtual world. While the piece is essentially the same, the different abilities of interaction within the virtual space of Second Life, such as being able to walk through an installation and physically interact with it and making it a spatial story, transform the artwork into something greater and more in-depth than the original, tangible form.

Client-browser experiences are a virtual world phenomena of art. One artist's work in Kriti Island, known as Gestalt Cloud, is designed around the need of having multiple people present. If only one or two people are present, the avatar's presence triggers a cloud to form around them and follow them. If four or more people are present, however, and they are in close proximity, then the clouds will begin to precipitate. 'Very little actually happens unless multiple avatars are present,' and, if no avatar is present, then the installation is only an empty box.

Unfortunately, due to the actual discussion of Emergent Imagination being deeply linked to neuroscience, I was unable to comprehend much of the final discussion within this paper. Regardless, the introduction to Lichty, and to these two modalities in particular, was an important insight into art in virtual worlds.

Doyle, D. (2015). Art, virtual worlds and emergent imagination. Leonardo, 48(3), 244-250.