Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Andrew Sempere, IBM Watson Research
The Work of Art in the Age of Virtual Production
Shared online content creation is nothing new – Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORGs) which support user created content have been around at least since the founding of LambdaMOO in the 1970s. However, the ability to create and share artefacts which are primarily visual is both a recent phenomena and one of particular and obvious interest to visual artists.
In the case of at least one of the most popular shared content systems, Second Life, a curious problem arises when the needs of the artist intersect with the design of the system.
Second Life has distinguished itself in part because it has a ‘vibrant marketplace for virtual goods and services’ which by Linden Labs own estimate, worth about $35US million/month. In order to achieve this, the creators of the system have implemented a permissions model which the content creator is obliged to participate in. As a result, Second Life strongly encourages a commodity style-market, where artificial scarcity must be enforced by restrictive permissions, but attribution is only lightly acknowledged.Reality is quite a bit more complicated. Although it is true that in terms of data, any given virtual object is indistinguishable from its copy, there are human beings behind the avatars, and humans care quite a bit about provenance. To make things more complicated, in the particular case of Second Life there are elements of presentation which are inherently scarce (for example, individual objects can be copied, but juxtaposition of a collection of objects cannot be easily copied and in fact often comprises the whole of a work).
This paper will explore a limited set of the issues which arise through the enforcement of a commodity system onto an art community, and also will propose an alternate system which could be implemented in order to encourage something closer to the way artists actually work.
Andrew Sempere holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Science in Media Arts and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.
Andrew is currently a Research Designer for the IBM Watson Research Collaborative User Experience Group / Center for Social Software. In addition, Andrew is a practicing artists and has exhibited interactive artworks across the United States and Canada, most recently at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival and the 7th Champ Libre Manifestation Internationale Video et Art Electronique.
As an artist Andrew is interested in rendering familiar environments unfamiliar, and is particularly interested in the problematic dichotomy of ‘natural’ and ‘technological’. As a designer and researcher, Andrew is interested in the ways in which humans navigate new technologies, in particular the ways in which they relate to sense of self and identity. For more information on Andrew and his work, visit andrewsempere.org.