Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona)
Selected Second Life Works 2007-2009
Introduction 2009
These works are a selection of the solo work I was producing in Second Life from 2007 to 2009. None of the SL collaborations I worked on (Cantata Park, BabelSwarm, Ways To Wave, Autoscopia) during that time – all of which are far more important than the trifles presented here – are presented, and of course nor is any of the work I was producing in other realtime 3D environments.
The works range in “interactivity” and “immersion” from fairly passive to fairly active. Some require the user to simply float listen and watch, others require a more active role, clicking (or “touching” to use the Lindens’ teasing euphemism), moving, flying, camera-ing. All the works use a rational scale of my own devising, based on a fundamental of 77 and proceedings in whole number ratios of 7, to compose both the audio and visual forms.
Hopefully the works, in some small part, invite the user to question the analogies and assumptions that form the foundation of the Second Life experience which, like all contemporary capitalist production, relies on the users’ unquestioning acceptance of the ideology informing its fundamental architecture. A realtime 3D Virtual Environment (of which Second Life is but one specific example) is not a visual medium. Virtual art can not be easily read from the surface, it is a post-convergent medium in which many disparate elements work together in a symbiotic relationship to achieve a complex dynamic, of which the visual is only one aspect.
My thanks to White Lebed for curating this selection.
Adam Nash (Adam Ramona), Melbourne, 2009.
Bell Garden (2007)
A gentle introduction. This is a simple proximity activated audiovisual sculpture with the sound of bells and gentle undulations triggered by the avatar entering the sculpture. This is only one of two works work of mine that use a regular twelve-tone harmonic scale rather than my own rational scale.