I’m involved, via Haydn Shaugnessy (my Irish gallery) in a funky new project, where he’s hired a ‘Real World’ architect to build an astonishingly beautiful gallery out at sea in Second Life: Ten Cubed (pictured). Via some of Haydn’s blogging on the subject:
About a year ago I decided to set up a real life gallery. The reason was simply that I love media art but couldn’t find galleries that specialise in it. Now I have a media-art gallery and on a day-to-day basis experience the fact that the audience for this is global rather than local. Media-art is beginning to find an audience in Ireland but its real audience is urban anywhere.
I can connect to some of that audience through a website . But what I can’t do through a website is join people in appreciating the art; not when they could be anywhere from New York to Naples. Nor could many of the audience really appreciate the artwork: they’d simply be viewing a 2D image.
With Ten Cubed I can do these things. I can stand with you and admire the work and together we can analyse and crit.
What I can also do is make room to showcase art that my physical gallery could not exhibit – because of its size and because of the sheer impracticality of giving over all my space to one large work. In Ten Cubed I can show any amount of art and at any scale. I can also help promote and encourage artists working in a virtual medium.
I have to say that Ten Cubed really is a visceral space – “walking” around and viewing my work, it’s the most free and embodied I’ve ever felt in a Virtual World. And one of the more exciting aspects of the exhibition – which I’ll blog about later in the week – is a project I’m working on with Scott Kildall, where we are making unique SL print editions: virtual, limited edition art, signed and numbered individually and by hand!
More on Haydn’s SL artists.
