Archival Aesthetics: Second Life

Imagine creating nearly all of the content within a world. What would you include? How would you organize the material to not only fit your needs but appeal to the likes of others (assuming you’re considerate of others’ opinions)? Thankfully, we don’t have to imagine this capability; it’s real…well, “real.”  Developed by Linden Lab and launched in June of 2003, Second Life is a virtual world where users not only create the “stuff” of their world(s), but are also responsible for the social, political, and economic activities that could potentially transpire, an online infrastructure where identities, space, time, relationships etc. are all redefined. “Islands” throughout this virtual Paradise create endless possibilities, especially for our current topic within the class: the archive.

Only within the past few months have I had any experience with Second Life (admittedly, my avatar is a jerky, not-so-cute werewolf whose screen name is Paaatches), and with every login, I can’t tell if my comfort grows or if I become increasingly aware of how uncomfortable I am participating in a derivative existence, a parallel world whose formal, exchangeable currency is the Linden Dollar.

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Regardless of the anxiety and technological frustration though that accompanies each log in, Second Life represents a site/a world/a possibility for the storage of relationships and ideas. And it’s exactly this intrinsic quality of possibility that Second Life offers that makes it interesting to discuss when presented with the topic of archival aesthetics. Honestly, I had no idea what I was thinking when I volunteered for this particular week because I don’t consider myself to be an artist or an art critic or even a frenzied art consumer. However, after completing the readings and reflecting on this concept of “archival aesthetics,” I became excited now seeing the layers of “archive-y” things Second Life offers and how they intersect with this particular topic.

For example, when reading the interview with Ann Hamilton, I was most struck by her consideration of the senses as part of an archival aesthetic, as a way of communicating without the use of words:

I think it’s really interesting that as a culture we spend so much time in language—in reading, writing, speaking, and in print culture—whether it’s on the screen or paper. We are communicating all the time with words, trying to find the words in which we can recognize our experience. Can we think of something if there is no language for it? How do we understand experiences we can’t name?

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“You can see the paper as empty of words or full of space … for the blank paper, like the open mouth, is the possibility of speaking or writing.”

Hamilton’s question of understanding the unnamed works well with Second Life and other virtual experiences that present users with a set of unsettling feelings as they’re forced to straddle two (or more) identities from the safety of their chair.  Sure, there’s a cornucopia of technical terms and jargon that surround virtual experiences, but is it really all that easy to express in words that “feeling” of living two lives, of layering your identity? How do we live a mixed reality?

Second Life currently serves as the home for Life Squared (L2), a Stanford University project that integrated selected elements from their preexisting Lynn Hershman Leeson archive in a re-created virtual site based on the artist’s work set in the Dante Hotel in San Francisco in 1972.

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However, this is not the only archive living within Second Life; Stanford also houses its restricted special collections in “there.”  Additionally an island dedicated to manuscripts, letters, and diaries from the First World War provides an interactive insight into trench warfare from the comfort (or discomfort) of a computer chair. When presenting something as traumatic as war literature through a medium as pixelated as Second Life, one experiences a disruption of symbolic order, an uneasy feeling of representation. As stated in “An Archival Impulse:”

Perhaps the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition—its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia.

Archiving performance art is also another possibility within Second Life. In 2007, artists Eva and Franco Mattes began creating reenactments of historical performances where people could participate connecting within Second Life.

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1. Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s: Imponderabilia

2. Gilbert & George: The Singing Sculpture

3. Chris Burden: Shoot

Not only does Second Life itself house archives, but is also a target of a preservation effort funded by the Library of Congress, an archivable archive. However, as stated in the “Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report,” published by the National Digital Information Infrastructure for Preservation Program in August of 2010, there are many difficulties associated with preserving a virtual world including intellectual property and contract law that prevents archivists from collecting user generated objects. Who wants to archive an empty “island?” However, archiving an empty world may serve as a larger metaphor for the uncollectable, the non-preserved, the necessary boundary between creator and collector. When archiving worlds within Second Life, the issue of “flow” should also be a consideration.

Within virtual archives, barriers are broken and created among the archivist, the artist, the participant, and the observer. However, why create these sites anyway, aware of how quickly technology become out of date? As is the case with Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Projects, you have to see spaces as worth constructing, exploring, and critiquing. Second Life, however outdated, fits these criteria; it virtually breathes life into our bodies, the site of yet another archive.