‘Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them.’ — Plato, Meno

Welcome
Welcome to Babelswarm. Babelswarm is a collaborative art project in Second Life. It is the work of writer Justin Clemens, artist/designer Christopher Dodds, and musician/3-D real-time artist Adam Nash. It has been funded by an Australia Council arts grant, and staged in April 2008 with the assistance of the Lismore Regional Gallery in New South Wales, Australia.

MUVES & MMOS
Second Life is an online, interactive, real-time virtual world, commonly known as a MUVE (a ‘multi-user virtual environment’) in the acronym- and neologism-heavy jargon of contemporary technological life. It developed out of the possibilities created by an ever-increasing number of ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing games’ (MMORPGs or, more briefly, MMOs) that have been spawned in the global digital frenzy of the past decade. Second Life is itself a commercial enterprise, run by Linden Research Inc., aka Linden Lab, based in California USA. Entry to Second Life is free; anybody with the requisite technology is able to sign up, enter and to some extent move around its ever-morphing ‘metaverse.’ If entry is free, however, movement and growth are economically and socially restricted. You can’t go everywhere; permissions and payment are often necessary, just as in your First Life. Simulated money in ‘Linden Dollars’ is involved in buying and building property in Second Life, or if you want to do further business with others, these virtual tokens can be exchanged for ‘real’ money, in the ‘real world’ via virtual currency exchanges.1

Grants & Demands
In 2007, the Australia Council, the arts funding body for the Australian Government, offered $20,000, the largest grant to date anywhere in the world for a project on Second Life. As the OzCo publicity had it: ‘The Australia Council residency will enable a team of up to three artists, including a writer, musician/sound artist and digital visual media practitioner to collaborate on the development of inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life. The project, which will take place online, will require the artists to explore the possibilities of literary, music/sound art and real time 3D arts practices within the virtual realm. The successful team will ultimately develop new, experimental artistic practices and observations on the social and cultural layers that have evolved in Second Life.’ Note the emphasis on collaboration, on multi-media, on immediacy, on diversity, on anthropological novelty, on experiment: exemplary values of avant-garde modernism, now the declared values of our corporate multinational ‘second modernity.’ …

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