"You'll Fly Too": The Unseen Second Life Installation of the Acclaimed Artist Known as AM Radio

AM Radio, one of the most beloved and acclaimed artists to use Second Life as a medium, just shared with me some stunning prototype images for an SL installation he missed the chance to bring into the virtual world, after his real life duties as designer and developer Jeff Berg called him away.

"One of the more successful interactions I had experimented within Second Life was creating landscapes that included animation of avatars and static poses which made the avatar integral to he build itself, as a compositional element," he tells me by way of background. "Unexpectedly the interaction included the users compositional contribution. Seeing a Kool-Aid man avatar take a pose designed to evoke the sublime was not something I had expected. But these types of juxtapositions were surprisingly evocative. Something else was happening that hinted about our selves and the ways we interact with spaces. The unplanned collaboration and input from users allowed the works to explore themselves, to take on lives of their own with their own relationships with visitors."

AM Radio being AM Radio (or Jeff Berg being Jeff Berg), he not only shared a couple Photoshop sketches for a work he called "You'll Fly Too", but some beautiful insights on our experience in the digital realm, and the real world experiences we bring to it, which inspired this work.

If you want to see what might have been, click on:

"I think by this time in history social media had concluded its evolutionary focus on likes, comments and shares. But I realized this is what we do when we go on vacation in the real world, when we come back and share our experience, we judge it, we share it, and want people to know about our experience. Even if we're just looking out our front door with an iPhone camera we still look for experiences and moments that others haven't had, the less beaten path, the potentially viral and unique, supposedly, in our over saturated, well-beaten planet.

"The digital is a continuous state of our everyday lives of judging one another, the uniqueness of our own experiences, where we traveled to, the sunsets we see, who we know, and the never-ending interesting things around us that goes even into the minutia of what we eat and the cats we own. It was all shared, liked, disliked, filtered, formed and reformed our content, our profile pictures, and banner images. Our lives had become tourism, we visited and judged our own neighborhoods as tasteful travelers and posted incessantly how we spent the minutes of our lives in a way that others would confirm as like-able, want-able, share-able.

"We are in a constant state of tourism.

"We were all little beacons, little lighthouses on a digital sea, saying, Hey this is how I see the world, do you see it too? Now we've become the huge blooms of glowing plankton on the coasts, millions of people online everyday asking the same things: Will you confirm that my experience is worthwhile for the short time I'm on this seemingly dreary little planet? Am I unique and interesting in all this unending noise?

"'You'll Fly Too' was designed to put two people on the same side of these questions, and to experience the interaction together, that the bleak and common vocabulary of the landscape and times is only provided meaning by the living punctuation of the people who inhabit it and ultimately define its meaning."

The only off note to any of this is that Jeff Berg's own itinerary on the digital sea has become so busy, there's no time to make this vision real. But maybe a helpful patron may step in. Until then, you can follow him on Instagram for tantalizing hints of what could have been, and what is.

Comments

[DanCoyote]

Hi AM! Miss you!
-DanCoyote