Metaverse Artist AM Radio on Second Life as the First "Giga-Artwork"

Image via AM Radio's Flickr

Jeff "AM Radio" Berg was watching my recent interview with Philip Rosedale, and AM Radio being AM Radio, sent me this pretty profound thought:

I wonder if what he created, when considered as a whole, is the first giga-artwork. An artwork so large it has an economy. An artwork as a grand experiment on the nature of our existence, as evolving typologies of identity and taxonomies of spaces, and communication. As if it was an innate instinct in each of us to reject randomness, a clamoring for order when we recognize something like Second Life as a well structured lattice designed to catch up with the unfolding entropy of the universe, find new ways of being, classify each discovery, expand our perceptions, and add it to our phylum of ways of being alive.

He's saying "giga-artwork" as a play on "Gigafactory", a facility which manufactures electric engines. (Or more broadly, a factory which makes other factories.) Adding:

Why couldn’t a whole meta world be a unique artwork, the artist as world builder. Maybe there is a specific set of qualifiers to define something as a giga-artwork? But qualifiers might get lost in semantics. So maybe a giga-artwork needs just one, and Second Life is the first one I’ve seen capable of it. Think of it as a sort of analog to Turing completeness, call it meta-complete, when a world is capable of spawning child worlds capable of emulating other worlds.

Here's what he means, in terms of Second Life's architecture:

SL [spawns worlds] with islands unconnected to mainland, worlds with their own limits, social rules, and possibly their own economies, even a skybox could be considered a world.

I think about the Greenies’ play of scale [above]...

And Bryn Oh’s work successfully allowing you to forget you’re in SL and explore Bryn’s world as a separate experience more virtual than the virtual world that hosts it. And of course being both meta-complete and Turing complete, the ability to code new behaviors and interactions with each layer. The whole turtles all the way down to a vision of the universe. A giga-artwork takes this concept and builds a world designed to explore itself and unfold as many permutations of itself as possible guided by the intentions and goals of the artist.

I imagine you could say the same about highly open metaverse platforms like VRChat. In any case, I love the idea of art that makes other art.

As for the underlying structure of Second Life itself, you could say it's art in the sense that it collectively simulates and comments upon the entire human experience -- all of it that exists or can be imagined -- in a way that can be contemplated from a distance. (I.E., via a live stream.) 

Or to put it a more positivistic way: Since Cao Fei's RMB City project in Second Life is featured in the Museum of Modern Art, doesn't that mean all of Second Life could also be presented as a work of collective art?

Comments

[John]

First? No, Active Worlds was first, in 1995. Why does no one remember that? And who created Active Worlds?

[Kitty Revolver]

I think that dovetails nicely with the idea that Philip had at the beginning of creating sl as a burning man experience, which I think we could arguably say that Burning Man is giga-art in a lot of ways too. But I don’t think we need a new term rather, honestly the metaverse is still relevant here AND arguably the metaverse is inherently “versed” in collective community building and art making like Burning Man or SL, but also things like political tribalism and fandom culture often unironically delve into the cultural touchpoints and art like protest art and meming. The idea that the metaverse is inherently “digital-only” is deeply limiting, which also shines the light on those in the tech industry trying to create sci-fi technology only to miss the entire point of what the book is trying to get across.