Radio, Remembered: Father Who Lost His Beloved Virtual Art in Second Life Finds Them Again -- Recreated in Fortnite By His Son

Here’s a story for the holidays about how online worlds keep families connected, even across generations. It starts a decade or so ago with an artist named Jeff Berg, who discovered a burgeoning new virtual world called Second Life. So he made an avatar named “AM Radio”, and began to create a legend.

The Second Life works of AM Radio have been known and loved by millions, once even featured in the New York Times. Using SL’s rudimentary creation tools, AM Radio made immersive spaces in Second Life that poignantly evoked an era lost to time, as if remembered in dreams.

As I once wrote in Polygon:

The first work in Second Life to bear AM Radio's name was "The Far Away," [above] a Midwestern wheat field players could walk around in, often making them feel wistful for a time and place they likely never knew... In an anonymous interview, AM Radio suggested he was creating these rustic places to puncture the virtual, to offer a glimpse of the real:

"Sunlight, for our generation, is something seen through Plexiglass windows, and my art is a reaction against that ... an attempt to tear down the fakery, all that plastic in impossible colors and awful rugs and terrible media, like television ... And now, here I am in a virtual world, trying to create the organic."

… They were 3-D sculptures that were mostly not animated, but their textures had a vivid lucidity that made them seem vibrant and alive. AM Radio made all this and much more. And as each new creation appeared in Second Life, word of mouth spread and thousands of avatars endlessly teleported there for weeks, months, years after.

In recent years, however, nearly all of AM Radio’s works have gone away from Second Life, largely dematerialized in the face of the high cost of virtual land. (That is to say, monthly server payments to Linden Lab.) So for most everyone, including Jeff Berg himself, his Second Life installations were only memories of the digital.

More recently, he lost another essential part of himself: His marriage. 

And as he and his wife moved in different directions, they also moved apart. Their teen son Cary went to live with her on the East Coast, while he remained in the Midwest. 

To keep connected with Cary, Berg bought an XBox. “All the boys where he lived are on it,” he remembers. “We probably have had some of our best fun together virtually.”

And to better reconnect with his father, Cary went much farther than that. One night he messaged Berg and said “Hey check this out.” And so he did:

Cary had recreated some of AM Radio’s most beloved Second Life works in Fortnite, including the iconic rusty train from “The Faraway”.

“I used creative mode,” Cary explains. “So the actual shape of the train is made of different props that have the right shapes.” He painstakingly put some couple dozen props together to form the locomotive. “You just put them in the world wherever, floating, so you just make the shape of the train.”

Since most of AM Radio’s works no longer exist in Second Life, Cary had to delve through ancient YouTube videos, to find reference points -- including this one, uploaded by his dad in 2009.

“I knew they were deleted [in SL] and I thought that was a shame so I wanted to have them in Fortnite,” Cary tells me now.

Berg’s reaction, Cary remembers, is as you might expect: “He was happy! He wanted to learn how to build in Fortnite.”

“He stayed up all night and surprised me with this Fortnite island build,” Berg tells me, amazed. “It turned out to be a sort of mashup of all my builds from the desert location to The Far Away…

"I can't believe it's been more than a decade since creating these spaces in Second Life.”

He’s so impressed with Fortnite’s building tools, he may begin to build new works there. 

But not yet. Because as it happens, Cary just moved to the Midwest to live with his father, and go to school there. Online worlds continue keeping them connected, even when they share the same couch.

“He and I are gaming together right now,” Berg told me last evening. “GTA and Fortnite.”

AM Radio laughs.

“It’s good to have him here. But here we are, playing games tonight.”

Images courtesy AM Radio and Cary

Comments

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

How wonderful! (Sorry... the monitor has gotten all blurry.) What a lovely thing for Cary to do.

[Pulsar]

Beautiful :)

[irihapeti]

likes this