Babelswarm is a real-time 3-D and audio art project built in the virtual world of Second Life. It was the winner of the Australia Council's first Second Life arts residency, and was launched simultaneously in-world and at the Lismore Regional Gallery in New South Wales, Australia.
New technologies never simply supplant, but supplement those that already exist. People don’t just stop writing letters because they can now email. Yet this supplementation is always also a transformation: a new technology overturns and reconfigures existing relationships between media. And because such technologies are genuinely new, there are as yet no established ways to enable people to go about using them. Not only do new technologies shatter what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘narcissus-narcosis’ of daily routine, but they demand a creative response: what can we do with this that could never have been done before? The question is especially pressing when it comes to such real-time, electronic, global interactive platforms as Second Life. Overwhelmingly complex, extraordinarily diverse, Second Life is like a summation of all previous media technologies. Audio, video, programming, archiving, and so on and on, are all able to be deployed within it, in radically unprecedented ways.
Activated by the voices of visitors in the realworld gallery and chat messaging from virtual visitors in Second Life, a swarm of letter cubes - programmed to seek out their original word position - slowly builds a morphing, virtual Tower of Babel. This tower is constructed from the utterances of visitors to it, constantly reconfiguring itself according to the artificial studpidity of the individual letter forms.
What sorts of conceptual figures are available to think such a thing? The very old: the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis, which melds the frightening possibilities of technology, language, and power in a single startling image. And the very new: swarm intelligence as an ideal that expresses how innumerable different individuals can nonetheless come to produce radical innovations in excess of the powers of any one of them — and in the midst of apparent disorder. Babelswarm is a project that draws on the most traditional elements of religion, art, and literature, as it engages with the challenges of a scientific and technological age.
