What is ART in virtual worlds...

I've not posted to this blog in a very very long time - but I have had a thought that fits this blog better than any of the others...

I am active in the virtual world of Second Life (SL) in the arts sphere - I co-host SL's current largest art competition in conjunction with the University of Western Australia's estate owner JayJay Zifanwe - and recently have found myself thinking about what constitutes art or rather Art (with the capital A) in SL and other virtual worlds.

Now in SL you can recreate parts of the real world (RL) quite faithfully and the majority of SL residents (users) do just this - they dress their realistic human avatar in realistic clothes and buy themselves "land" on which to "build" a realistic dream mansion, furnished with realistic dream "furniture" and art works.

To cater for the last requirement there are hundreds, if not thousands, of "art galleries" in SL. I've visited my fair share of these places during my travels and the majority are showing various forms of 2d art on a panel in SL - and frankly I have seen more interesting and stunning images on Flickr's Interesting slideshow(many of which are creative commons copyrighted in such a way that any resident could easily import them into SL and slap them on a prim for their virtual lounge room wall) or of you prefer virtual photography there are sites such as koinup which cater for virtual world imagery.

But what do we see on the majority of SL gallery walls?

Photos that, in most cases, would not get many views on Flickr and definitely would be unlikely to make the interesting page, pictures of mediocre paintings done by weekend painters and in some cases straight rip offs of RL artist's images found on the web (the latter being a situation that is likely to continue as the only way to get these things taken down is to get the original copyright owner (in most cases the estate or copyright holder of the long dead master's works) to lodge a DMCA with Linden Labs (the company that runs Second Life.)

This stuff on walls I do not class as SL art and most definitely not " SL Art" - at it's best it is advertising for a RL artist's commercial webpage.

There are stunning artworks in SL

Immersive, interactive experiences that are possible only in a 3d Virtual environment. These I class as Second Life Art, they are engaging and often thought provoking - in that wake you up at 3am manner - where the true meaning or portent of what you experienced only becomes obvious hours or days later.