The unexamined Second Life isn't worth living: virtual worlds and interactive art.

Recent issues of the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Wired, Business Week, and even Southwest Airlines' in-flight publication have run feature stories on "Second Life," the increasingly popular multiuser virtual environment (MUVE) that joins other so-called Web 2.0 entities in mobilizing user-generated content--in this case toward the creation of a rich, immersive social world. Founded by the San Francisco-based company Linden Lab in 1999 and made available to users in 2003, Second Life as a concept is certainly not new: it is among a broad array of depictions of metaverses, or virtual worlds--imagine a virtual realm separate from the physical world we know. From Plato's cave in The Republic (c. 360BC) to Ray Bradbury's gripping "The Veldt" (1951) to Vernor Vinge's True Names (1980) to Neal Stephenson's 1992 Snow Crash (where the term "metaverse" was reputedly coined), textual articulations of virtual worlds are numerous and varied, frequently expressing the desire to be free of a troublesome physical body that hinders unfettered, bodiless intelligence.

Virtual worlds moved beyond fiction with the first multiuser dungeon (MUD) made in 1978 by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, who designed the space for playing Dungeons and Dragons. In 1985, Lucasfilm's Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar created Habitat, a two-dimensional graphics-based world more similar to contemporary virtual environments with regard to the ways in which social organization and rule-building took place among inhabitants. Contemporary examples of MUVEs include There and Kaneva, which, like Second Life, offer users a three-dimensional graphics-based environment. Worlds designed for youths such as Habbo Hotel or Coke Studios, which are immersive branded environments, and adult MUVEs such as Naughty America and Red Light Center, enable users to enact role-playing and sexual fantasies through avatars.

One of Second Life's main assets is its economy. Users are able to create objects and own the copyright, allowing them to sell those objects to others. This ability is significantly aided by land ownership, which in turn requires a paid subscription membership. Landowners acquire the space needed to build and create, thereby establishing at least two tiers of Second Life participants: landowners, who are able to build, and the homeless, who do not pay to use Second Life and cannot build but remain free to explore most parts of the world.

While Second Life is hardly alone among MUVEs, it has managed to capture a large amount of attention due its stated promise of limitless potential: the marketing of Second Life includes the tagline, "Where anything is possible." This plays a significant role in sustaining a discursive division between "real" and "virtual," the solidly physical and the flimsy realm of appearance. To be sure, it is an old division; and the trepidation experienced by the worried parents watching their children frolic in the digital world conjured in their playroom in Bradbury's "The Veldt" is a common reality now. However, the parental angst in Bradbury's story has been far overshadowed by Second Life's ability to tap into the fantasy desires, not of children, but of adults, capturing a user demographic with a mean age of thirty.

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Surprisingly, though, the place where "anything is possible" bears a striking resemblance to the physical world where what is possible is determined by cultural, legal, temporal, and physical constraints, among others. Second Life visitors will find recognizable replicas of Yankee Stadium, Capitol Hill, and many college and university campuses, which often dutifully recreate classrooms and dorms, making virtual copies of their real-world counterparts. There are also virtual stores such as Sears, Circuit City, American Apparel, and Adidas.

While many of these entities are surprising in their stasis and inability to conceptualize interactive structures or spaces that move beyond replicating the physical world, there are instances where Second Life does mobilize the affordances of a virtual world toward useful ends: virtual conferences, for example, allow participants dispersed across the world to engage in discussion. Film screenings and musical performances similarly bring together otherwise far-flung audience members, and the space generally functions as a productive meeting ground for people from all over the world. (1)

But how else might Second Life's unusual properties be creatively reconsidered? Several companies have tried to reimagine branding in Second Life, not only in crafting immersive branded spaces but in considering ways to engage users. Scion, for example, created virtual cars that are fully customizable. Pontiac pushed the idea of user-generated content further by inviting proposals for the creation of spaces on the company's Motorati Island. The results include a game that lets participants drive Pontiacs through a racecourse populated by raging zombies. In this way, brands function less as a means to convince buyers that a product is useful or necessary and instead create experiences that align the brand with a sensibility that recognizes the importance of participatory culture.

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While these examples are interesting, they still do not radically deploy the possibilities of a virtual environment. Instead, to borrow from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, they remediate existing forms; and while the results offer some sense of the possibilities, they are for the most part limited. (2) That said, there are a few practices that expand beyond remediation to consider and deploy Second Life's more interesting properties. Many of these are art-based practices, and indeed, artists enjoy a strong presence in Second Life. (3) In the most compelling instances, artists use the affordances of Second Life to question ideas regarding the distinction between so-called real or physical space and virtual space; presence and the relationship between users and their avatars; notions of space and place as they are reconfigured virtually; and the role of code in our increasingly code-inflected lives.

If the remediation of the physical in the virtual can be uninspiring, it can also be conducted critically, actually calling attention to the desire to replicate the real within the virtual, and perhaps blur the boundary between the two in the process. Self-described net-art pranksters and hacktivists Eva and Franco Mattes (who go by the names Pei Twang and Pei May in Second Life) have used this world as a space for playing with ideas of identity, celebrity, and the role of conceptual art. (4) Starting in 2006, they began collecting images of avatars, printing them on canvas and displaying them in physical galleries. The "13 Most Beautiful Avatars" exhibit is one example of the larger portrait series; hosted simultaneously in Second Life and at Postmasters Gallery in New York City in early 2007, the show featured close-up depictions of the faces of avatars in all their cartoony glamour. The portraits often exaggerate real-world notions of beauty, and the striking repetition of these characteristics in Second Life generally underscores the power of these tropes. Again, the place where anything is possible is actually the place where repetitions of the same are possible. Furthermore, in proposing a set of differences (in this case between avatar and the user who constructed it--or perhaps in the overt construction of a stand-in being and the sometimes less overt performance of the self), the Mattes' elide the discrepancies, and the gulf dividing the real as authentic "first life" and the virtual as inauthentic "Second Life" becomes a very blurry boundary.

The pair's current project is a series of reenactments of seminal performance pieces from the 1970s, including Joseph Beuys's "7,000 Oaks," a project that began in 1982 with the artist planting trees with accompanying basalt markers throughout Kassel, Germany, over the course of several years; Valie Export's "Tapp und Tast-kino (Touch Cinema)" (1968-71), where the artist stood on busy streets and allowed passersby to reach inside a cardboard box and touch her body; Vito Acconci's 1972 performance piece "Seedbed," in which the artist secluded himself below the floor of the Sonnabend Gallery, and masturbated while describing his fantasies aloud for gallery visitors to hear; and Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971), where the artist allowed himself to be shot in the arm. In each case, the reenactment highlights disparities between the physical and virtual worlds--what does it mean to be shot with a gun or to feel breasts in a virtual environment? What meaning do these acts, and by extension these projects, have in Second Life? Eva and Franco Mattes answer with a degree of flippant humor, but in the back-and-forth between realms, they underscore the implicit polarity and ensuing hierarchy that dictates the primacy of "real," physical existence over and above the virtual. Each of the performances chosen for recreation is emphatically physical, and each gains its power to the degree in which the artist deployed his or her own body in the performance.