ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a creative-practical perspective on Second Life through a survey of the work as visual artists, set against a theoretical and philosophical backdrop that combines poststructuralism and semiotics. Since the early 1990s Paul Sermon’s work has explored the emergence of user-determined narrative by bringing remote participants together in shared telepresent environments. Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology, two public rooms or installations and their audiences are joined in a virtual duplicate that turns into a mutual space of activity. This work locates itself in a telematic arts discourse defined by Roy Ascott, who advocated collaborative cybernetic and telematic arts practice and networked consciousness on a global scale as early as the late1970s. Sermon’s first telepresence performance experiment, Liberate your Avatar, incorporating Second Life users in a real-life environment was located on All Saints Gardens, Oxford Road, Manchester, for the Urban Screens Festival in October 2007.
