Welcome!

all around you is construct—
cybernetic animals wearing fashionable genes, and birds
that fly with the gravity and grace of a computer simulation
are turning to flesh that tastes like museli.

—excerpts paraphrased from John Kinsella's poem "The Savagery of Birds"

The Second Life 2.0 blog is for exchanging artistic ideas about Second Life. You are welcome to contribute ideas, critiques, feedback to the blog — just email me for a blog invite.

One of the most exciting potential of Second Life is to imagine how to do things differently or better than First Life, and to set up models or scenarios to try it out. Small experiments rather than a top-down totalistic vision of utopia... Currently most of the worlds created are claustrophobically predictable, and imitate a flattened version of First Life in an unimaginative way.

Think of the possibilities... in Second Life you can: be anything, do anything, create any world, create any type of society. A different type of economy or money-form... non-binary gender types... cities in the sky or underwater. Fiction writers, filmmakers and animators have done much more.

Let's come up with some ideas for what can be done with Second Life. Second Life is a remarkable creation and currently it has not lived up to its potential. Since everything is a social construction why not construct social conventions and structures in Second Life that will result in effects and consequences that we like? By immersing participants in a society and culture in Second Life where we have to figure out what is going on and how things work, we can come up with new ways of seeing, relating, and getting things done that will poeticize and improve First Life.

Philip Rosedale gave a talk at SFAI on 11.07.08 which inspired this blog.