Local Art In Cyberspace
The Age
Thursday May 15, 2008
Want to see what a few artists can do with a $4 million grant?
You don't need to go to one of the world's great art galleries to see it, as Babelswarm is waiting for you online. It's the result of the Australia Council's Second Life artist in residents grant of $20,000 - or 4 million Linden dollars in the currency of this virtual world.The recipients are Melbourne trio Justin Clemens, a senior lecturer at Melbourne University's school of culture and communications; Adam Nash, an artist, composer and lecturer in computer games and digital art at RMIT; and Christopher Dodds, a designer and new-media artist.They are just a few of the thousands of people creating virtual art in Second Life. "A lot of the content in Second Life is very derivative of the real world," Mr Dodds says. "What we're trying to do is create stuff that is impossible to show in the real world, so the experience of Babelswarm, it's something that could never exist in a real gallery."This interactive 3-D art work is an inspired evocation of the biblical Tower of Babel using the contemporary concept of swarm theory. Generally applied to robotics, swarm intelligence is set in motion by "giving a number of objects or people small, discrete instructions and then together as a group they negotiate what it is they're going to do", according to Mr Dodds.Babelswarm uses letters from visitors' typed messages to create a swirling tower of lettered blocks suspended in virtual space. Through their avatars, visitors can interact with the blocks, which "swarm" according to simple rules.So while Dodds, Nash and Clemens are the artists responsible for Babelswarm in the conventional sense, those who interact with it are also creators of the work. Oddly, being creative can mean being destructive, because while the tower is built by the visiting avatars, they can also destroy the lettered blocks."We had a group of people who sat there for an hour and clicked on 8000 blocks and completely destroyed the entire installation," Mr Dodds says. But far from being irate at the (albeit temporary) obliteration of his art work, he was pleased with the response. For a "traditional art installation, the hanging of the art is really the end process: the art work's been completed, it's been hung, and people come to critique it", he says. "With Babelswarm, the launch of the art work was really just its beginning - it will just keep on evolving."While Babelswarm will be archived when visitor numbers taper off, its creators have more plans for its home, the Australian Centre of Virtual Art. "ACVA will be curating other artists, informing audiences and archiving digital art work", Mr Dodds says, "so Babelswarm is really the launch." -- PATRICIA MAUNDERLINKbabelswarm.blogspot.com
© 2008 The Age