Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Because I Am Not Here, Selected Second Life-Based Art Case Studies. Subjectivity, Autoempathy And Virtual World Aesthetics, Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez

Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez

Second Life is a virtual world accessible through the Internet in which users create objects and spaces, and interact socially through 3D avatars. Certain artists use the platform as a medium for art creation, using the aesthetic, spatial, temporal and technological features of SL as raw material. Code and scripts applied to animate and manipulate objects, avatars and spaces are important in this sense. These artists, their avatars and artwork in SL are at the centre of my research questions: what does virtual existence mean and what is its purpose when stemming from aesthetic exchange in SL?

Through a qualitative …

Because I Am Not Here: Second Life Based Artists, Four Selected Case Studies, Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez

Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez

Second Life (SL) is an on-line virtual world ‘inhabited’ by avatars that are designed by actual life users (SL residents). In SL identity, sociability and subjectivity are important and permanent aspects of the goal of having a second (virtual) existence. My doctoral thesis (in progress) is centred on the work of 4 artists in SL and how they play with autoempathy, identity an subjectivity in the liminal shifting of aesthetic regimes (that rely upon temporalities rather than spatialities) present in their SL artwork. This is what Anna Munster calls the distribute aesthetics1 of virtual worlds. Lacan Galicia, my avatar in …