A Galapagos for the future?
Mellifera is a virtual environment created in Second Life by artists Trish Adams and Andrew Burrell and a series of real world exhibitions. It is the dialogue between the real and the virtual which is a driving concern of the project.1
Mellifera is founded in Adams’s residency work at the Queensland Brain Institute, exploring the behaviour of honeybees, and Burrell’s virtual residency in Second Life as avatar Nonnatus Korhonen. Both artists share a deep interest in interactivity. In order to consider the significance of a project such as Mellifera and its relationship to contemporary art practice, it is necessary to consider the context of its platform Second Life, which is a complex question in itself.
Second Life is a ‘virtual world’, an on-line, three-dimensional, modeled graphic environment, developed and launched by United States company Linden Lab in 2003. Users of Second Life interact with each other through avatars, three-dimensional models. Users, through their avatars, can explore, socialise, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world.
In this sense, Second Life is essentially a communication platform for social interaction. People with shared interests will cluster together for shared purposes. Such activities range from highly interpersonal role-playing games to virtual shopping, from military skirmishes to wrestling. There are virtual classrooms, churches, shopping malls and, yes, even galleries. As a social platform, Second Life has more in common with Facebook than with other virtual gaming worlds, such as World of Warcraft, which are highly rule-bound, role-based environments. As a real world simulation there’s a frightening amount of ‘normal’ real world activity—people essentially buying land, building palatial... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline