(For those who don't know, I occasionally tool around within this strange little videogame called Second Life, which leaves gameplay and content itself up to the players of the game, through a series of ingenious open-source tools. As a result, you can find a surprisingly high amount of mindblowing artistic experiments within the persistent virtual universe there, known as the "Grid," created by a series of cutting-edge creatives from around the world; I've been filing reports about such projects since spring of 2006 at one website or another, under the collective title "Gridhopping," and thought it was time to finally bring the series of reports here to the CCLaP site. To see all the past reports, please visit the Second Life category page here at the site.)

(Images below can be clicked on to see a larger version.)

Okay, so I've got some news that will elate some of you and drive others mad; I have indeed started going back into Second Life on a highly irregular basis, and have in fact decided to start up my old irregular column "Gridhopping" again, which features the most interesting and experimental of these Second Life players and the interesting, experimental things they're doing. And that's because, false hype about Second Life aside (and there's a lot of false hype about Second Life seemingly everywhere these days, I don't disagree with anyone about that), there are also cutting-edge artistic projects going on there that are sometimes literally flabbergasting, at least worth checking out in photo and video form, if not becoming a full member of Second Life yourself. Despite the unending technical headaches, despite the press releases about virtual corporate playgrounds that make you want to roll your eyes, there actually are some very cool creative things going on there these days as well, using the same tools that are allowing corporations to set up shop there too.

One such artist, for example, is real-life architect Jon Brouchoud (known in Second Life as Keystone Bouchard), who originally entered the Grid as a supplement to his real-life career, letting him conduct virtual tours of planned constructions with clients. Once there, though, he realized the kinds of untapped potential there was in this virtual world for exploring architectural themes that could never happen in real life, which is what led him to transforming his persona Keystone there into more of a cutting-edge artist than a commercial builder. Specifically, Bouchard has been exploring recently the concept of "reflexive architecture," or buildings/gardens/sculptures that can actually physically react to the everyday stimulus of the people who visit and move around it. Inspired by a common complaint about Second Life, the tendency for most places to be devoid of other visitors when you're visiting them yourselves (something you don't think twice about when at a website, for example, but is glaringly obvious in the Grid which was designed specifically for real-time social interaction), Bouchard started thinking about the ways a place could actually mark visually who else had been there, as a way to make it feel less lonely; walls that grow or shrink based on total visitors that day, for example, giant paved plazas where the tiles disappear for a few hours whenever someone walks on them, leading to complex patterns on the ground throughout the day that others can see during their own visits.

Anyway, he's been playing around with some architectural pieces lately that address these issues, including steel balloons that play random notes from a C chord when you bump into them, walls that glow different colors based on how close or far away an avatar is standing from them, and all kinds of other freaky little experiments that will be making you say, "Cool, oh, cool!" when playing with them yourself. And best of all, he's made all the scripts that control the pieces open-source, so that other artists can play with them themselves and come up with their own unique implementations. It's an interesting thing to contemplate, the idea of opening this up for larger projects; Bouchard's work, after all, usually take on more of the size and tone of sculpture, or perhaps interactive gardens, and it would be interesting I think to see what someone might do with an entire house full of such elements.

Anyway, those in the Grid can visit the two-part show at [Info Island 31/105/33] and [Architecture 193/111/601]; and those who aren't members of Second Life can see these pieces in action via machinima over at YouTube. And for those interested in seeing more this second, there's actually seven more photos that go with this report; just click through here at the end if you're at the front page of the website, or simply look below if you're reading this through the RSS feed.

Front window of one of the spaces sponsoring this show, Library Gallery at Info Island.

Keystone Bouchard, the man of the hour, known as architect Jon Brouchoud out in real life.

Your humble reporter, standing in front of an interactive wall panel; it changes both color and transparency depending on how close or far away an avatar is from it.

The middle floor of the groovy Library Gallery.

The roof of Library Gallery, showing off yet another piece of reflexive architecture, a tunnel that inflates and deflates as you walk through it, by sensing where you are. Very cool.

And then here's the second part of the exhibition, in a skybox high above Architecture Island, where the lag is low and the animations work a lot better.

Here, a musical keyboard that works via avatar movement within it, with both a sound element and a visually animated one.

And here, an extremely trippy wall system that "disappears" and "regrows" based on where you're standing; it's difficult to describe, something that needs to be experienced to understand, which of course is the whole point that Brouchoud is trying to make in the first place.