[spectre] Second Life Architecture Awards

[ANAT Communications]

Media Release

Second Life Architecture Awards

The constructed architectural spaces of Second Life share a commonality
with the exotic invisible cities of Italo Calvino. They are at once
familiar yet completely otherworldly: inverted, fantastical, corrupted,
baroque and barren, unexpected, startling and compellingly seductive.
They are both our present and our future.

In September this year Dr Melinda Rackham, ANAT's Director and 3D world
author and theorist, was invited to join a 6 member international Jury
assessing the Annual Second Life Architecture & Design Competition, a
first of its kind, held at the 2007 Ars Electronica Festival in
Austria.

The jury deliberated over the 126 submissions before a live audience at
the Architekturforum Linz, while being simultaneously streamed into
Second Life. Four outstanding projects, that took advantage of both the
artistic and technical possibilities afforded by Second Life were
selected as finalists:

· Berliner Tanja Meyle's "Living Cloud", is a semitransparent cloud
that travels with her and provides privacy and sanctuary, a consistent
need for an avatar in Second Life. The cloud surrounding her avatar
Creatina Ferraris is not only a transportable house; its variability
brings in an association with the idea that the house is just an
extension of the body of the person who inhabits it.

· From San Francisco, DC Spensley creates "Full Immersion
Hyperformalism" an usual and innovative user interface, constructed to
allow an avatar to view a fine art exhibition. This structure is
defined as "less a building than a spatial interface containing
numerous abstracted and interactive possibilities".

· Adam Nash's "17 Unsung Songs" allows avatars to be physically
immersed in interactive sound scapes, constructions that create a
tension within their Australian parkland environment. Here audiovisual
elements undergo spatial modification via avatar interaction giving
rise to a new aesthetic and sensory spatial construct.

· Conceptually and technically innovative is "White Noise", a work from
Vienna based Max Moswitzer. This experiment in non-human architecture
utilises the detritus of Second Life, freebie objects such as teddy
bears and discarded skateboards, to construct a dazzling white
snow-palace. This mishmashed building enfolds on multiple levels of
detail and evokes the perfect domicile for the realm of Second Life.

The selected projects are presented online (www.sl-award.com) where the
public are invited to vote for their favourite project. The winner
receives a 1,000-euro grand prize, which will be awarded on 25 October
2007 at the prize ceremony, which includes discussions and a party at
Zollverein, Essen, the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.

Dr Melinda Rackham comments, "ANAT is committed to enabling artists to
work critically with emerging forms of practice, and the virtual
terrains of Second Life are indicative of trends that will become
important in future virtual 3D platforms".

For more information visit www.anat.org.au.

<Ends>