My Australian colleagues have always been pretty much on the forefront of digital media and I know that at least at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), they have had practising in-house digital artists affiliated. Now the Australian Council for the Arts is offering a collaborative artist residency in Second Life! (as seen on the DIGRA mailinglist). I think it is the first strictly artist-in-residency-in-a-virtual-world I have come across: SECOND LIFE ARTIST RESIDENCY.

There is one precedent I know of though, thinking back: digital artist and writer Judy Malloy many years back (1993-1994!) as part of her artist-in-residency at Xerox PARC did three story-telling projects in Lambda-MOO [the first MOO - Mud Object-Oriented], and you can still read about them in her article: Narrative Structures in LambdaMOO. In the conclusion of the article, she writes:
The record of my tenure in this virtual space is not so different as the record of an out of town artist placing a work in a community, that to the community involved seems alien because either the artist has not adequately familiarized herself with the community that will endure this work for ever, or she has, but does not share the values of the community involved..
To her, then, it was difficult to integrate her work in the community and space of the world - which had much less inhabitants than SL. Will it be easier in SL? Or will the artist's work drown amidst professional art galleries in-world and a lot of other "hot" activities? I'll definitely be looking forward to reading about the Australian artists' experiences.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:59