The University of Western Australia (UWA) in Second Life: Artists Dominate SL9B

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Artists Dominate SL9B

By FreeWee (N.B.: This is a cross post of this article from my blog.)

I was planning to ignore SL9B (the Second Life birthday celebration) this year, but we were asked if UWA wanted a site, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to put one together. Not like I have anything else to do, right?

As with Burning Life, Linden Lab has decided to let the users make the festivals without their sponsorship. You can argue about whether this is a good or bad thing, but in my experience the post-LL fests have been every bit as good as the former ones, though with noticeable differences. The main one being that the exhibitors feel a lot freer without the Lab overseeing things. They make allowances for the volunteers who run and assist the events that they didn’t before, even though the official LL events were also largely volunteer run and the current events pretty much follow the same policies and procedures as ever. The difference is ownership. I think whatever the results, good or bad, the community feels like it’s our event and if it’s bad it’s our own fault.

I was in the middle of putting the UWA site together, and for grins I thought I’d take a tour of the installations so far. In case anyone needs reminding about the significance of art in SL, I just did a quick survey of sites at SL9B by people who I personally know to be artists (or at least are significantly art related). I did not include music venues or rl artists who are not presenting primarily virtual art (i.e., a painting-on-a-prim). There are likely several more who I’m not familiar with.The total number of art sites I counted is 35 and I've added a few already from others. I’m pretty sure there is no other segment at SL9B that is even close to that number and I think this has been typical in both the SLBs and Burning Life/Burn2 festivals.

I made a list and map of the artists I’ve found on the SL9B sims. If you know of any I missed, IM FreeWee Ling. (The list will be updated, but the map will not.)