Babelswarm: Australia Arts Council funds Second Life Artist Residency
Victoria Hughes
Perhaps SFX could look at similar projects.
Proticipation
The Australia Council and Social Media Arts in Virtual Worlds
In 2007 the Australia Council for the Arts became the first national arts funding body in the world to fund an artist residency in the virtual domain of Second Life.
The successful recipients - writer Justin Clemens, visual artist Christopher Dodds and sound artist Adam Nash - proposed a mixed reality, networked project linking people in real life with avatars in a virtual world. Their residency project titled Babelswarm was a realtime, 3D sound sculpture grown from the conversion of words spoken and letters typed by people both in a physical gallery and as avatars in Second Life.
This residency generated one of the most successful media responses for any initiative the Australia Council has run to date. The project included several other highlights for the Australia Council, including the first in-world media campaign, the first in-world client meetings, the first in-world artists match-makers RSS feed, the first in-world international artist talk and the first in-world grants assessment meeting.
'Babelswarm' was a huge critical success, with a nationally profiled launch in regional Australia and Second Life. In part as a result of this success, several subsequent virtual world and social media arts initiatives were developed by the Australia Council to engage with a broader range of audiences, platforms, interfaces and curatorial practices, including the Massive Multi-user Virtual Environment initiative (MMUVE IT!); the Frontline Media initiative (involving Muslim and Indigenous Youth in Darwin); the Literature Board’ Story of the Future projects Virtual Macbeth and Thursday’s Fictions; and the Australian Centre of Virtual Art Laboratory (ACVA Lab), an interdisciplinary arts space for virtual collaboration.
Built into the core of these initiatives’ funding criteria were requirements for artists and curators to experiment with new curatorial practices, mixed reality participation and transnational audience development.
Much of the social media art that has emerged as a result, requires what I have termed proticipation. Proticipation describes the production of a social media artwork through the participation of users, either as avatars and/or in physical form. I use the term proticipation, as opposed to produsage (another term often deployed for this type of work) as proticipation implies a more active, performative engagement with the act of co-creation.
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