EdTrack: Immersive Art on the Web 2.0 Platform

Nettrice Beattie will be presenting the workshop “Immersive Art on the Web 2.0 Platform” on Friday, August 14th from 11:30am – 1pm.

Immersion is a state of awareness that diminishes the physical and creates a virtual existence. An immersive space is a synthetic, interactive, digital world within which users can immerse themselves. In real-time and online Second Life artists, embodied as avatars, are creating work that challenges the observer’s perception of reality and forces them to become more aware of their environment. This hands-on, interactive session explores the creation of art in Second Life where observers/participants/learners freely move within the temporal shifts of narrative development. Contemporary artists use narrative structures to organize their worlds in ways never imagined previously. A semiotic structure is projected onto Second Life sims to construct a possible world, which plays with traditional literary motifs and structures of time and space. Depending upon the participant’s response the installation presents more space, more images, more text, more digital media to explore.

The story continues to expand as participants read the content that is dependent upon their decisions and interactions within the space. The creation of this work requires a new visual language and discourse. We will explore this emerging vernacular through exploration, creation, and revision of art objects in Second Life. This includes basic to intermediate building and scripting of objects in response to an evolving story.