The Visual Culture of the Virtual World Second Life Teems With

THE POSTNATIONAL SODALITIES OF SECOND LIFE: AN ICONOGRAPHIC APPROACH BY JONATHAN W. KINKLEY B.F.A., Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003 THESIS Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Art History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2009 Chicago, Illinois This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my thesis committee—Drs. Peter Hales, Patricia Kelly, and Jason Leigh— for your insights, time, and encouragement. I am in awe of your interdisciplinary talents and inspired by your leadership in the humanities and the sciences. Lastly, the critical eye of my brilliant wife, Melissa, has greatly strengthened my writing. JWK ii PREFACE My primary interest in Second Life and other virtual worlds is the myriad questions that their presence demands—particularly regarding the visual—and the breadth of possible answers to these questions. If you can look like anyone or anything, what do you look like? If there are no constraints of physics, like gravity or weather, and no limit on resources, what does the virtual built environment look like? Who are the pioneers and governors of virtual space? Who are its architects? What do these spaces tell us about our future? With these questions come the inevitable judgments of virtual space by technology evangelists, Luddites, and those in-between. To qualify my own opinion of virtual worlds and my general regard for them, I borrow the term critical utopian from MIT’s Dr. Henry Jenkins. Jenkins writes of his position to new cultural trends, many of which incorporate technology: “I think of myself as a critical utopian. As a utopian, I want to identify possibilities within our culture that might lead toward a better, more just society … This approach differs dramatically from what I call critical pessimism. Critical pessimists … focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more democratic society … The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest.”1 I share Jenkins’ foundational approach. There is no denying that all discourse is politically charged to a degree; its authors are not writing in a vacuum but rather in a dense societal network. Although I may desire to remain as objective as am able, and try my best to draw clear, rational speculations after close analysis of my subject, my writing is still vulnerable to my own optimistic biases. 1 Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. (New York: New York University Press, 2006) 247-248. iii In the case of Second Life, I see the potential for increased individual agency—the capacity to act in the world in regard to one’s physical, social, and political faculties. A command over physics; nearly infinite resources of marginal cost; facile social connections within small communities; the option of civic participation; and access to entire libraries of animations, objects, and scripts, are just a few examples of avatar agency in Second Life, the tools that users have access to. Many critics of this point argue instead that virtual worlds are in fact repositories of misguided agency. Their arguments suggest that participants in virtual worlds are driven to act within these spaces because of their lack of agency in the real world. My counterargument is that virtual worlds are every bit as much a part of reality as anything else in the physical world. A person physically walking down the street in Chicago or physically hunched over a computer screen controlling an avatar on a street in Second Life is performing an action that constitutes his or her lived experience. So if virtual worlds are actual navigable and interactive real spaces, then they are part of our reality, despite the fact that the type of experience radically differs from the types of experiences to be had in the physical world. So when a person builds a new city, becomes elected into a governing position, starts a business, has a romantic relationship, or codes a new program in Second Life, that person is performing a real action that has consequence for themselves and others in the physical world. Of course the case study of Second Life is merely an early prototype for future generations of virtual worlds that will one day become the metaverse imagined by science fiction writers. As a forerunner, it is has its share of flaws. Its parent, Linden Lab, administers a confusing, inconsistent record of governance, compounded by its dueling altruistic and economic motivations. Further, Second Life, like the internet, is hardly an egalitarian point of access. Broadband internet, a fast computer, a graphics card, and a complex user interface are only iv several of the hurdles users must overcome to experience Second Life. However, its criticism cannot trump the wonder of experiencing miles of contiguous user- created space; literally a patchwork quilt of human imagination. This is the matrix—except it wasn’t created by the evil machines for enslaved humans, but instead by willing advocates in pursuit of roleplay, fantasy, education, business, and simulation. I entered Second Life as an art historian and quickly realized that trying to study the art of this virtual world is akin to studying the art of the web—its simply too impossibly big of a project. What was needed was a foundational grounding from which further discourse could emerge. This foundation took the form of a several general questions: what types of spaces exist in Second Life? Who is creating them? And why? The only field broad enough to answer these questions is the field of visual studies, whose scope encompasses the entirety of visual culture. In approaching Second Life from a visual studies perspective, I tried to imagine it as newly discovered society. In order to write about this new art, architecture, and culture, I needed a method to interpret this space. For that reason I returned to the classic iconographic method of Erwin Panofsky. His timeless approach of looking, identifying, and locating subjects within a cultural and historical trajectory remains a practical means to consider the complex visual assemblages of Second Life as it was for reflecting on artworks from the Renaissance. I immediately discovered that Second Life isn’t an isolated culture with its own architectural styles and characteristics but an incredibly heterogeneous, interconnected one whose influences for art and architecture are pulled from everywhere. I feel historians, theorists, critics, and philosophers serve an important function within virtual worlds, namely to document and draw conclusions about the virtual artifacts of humanity. What do these artifacts tell us about ourselves? Especially within an internet-based, copy and v paste, simulation culture leveraging 3D models and images, we are seeing a heightened use and consideration of the visual by non-specialists. The purpose of this paper is to help build a foundation for future scholarship in the humanities on virtual worlds. As technology and science rapidly change society, it is the role of the humanities to monitor the human response to these changes. Virtual worlds are simultaneously a new media and new artifact for consideration. In this paper I have classified three types of spaces in Second Life, and attempted to aggregate the forces that helped shape these spaces. I am hopeful that virtual worlds will continue to be the subject of study and that this paper will help to inform this future scholarship. -Jonathan Kinkley (February 10, 2009) Chicago, IL vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTERS PAGE I. INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................IX a. Thesis....................................................................................................................................ix b. Significance of Second Life..................................................................................................ix c. Visual Studies........................................................................................................................xi d. Methodology.......................................................................................................................xiv II. BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF SECOND LIFE..............................................................XVIII e. Survey...............................................................................................................................xviii f. Interface of a New Medium...............................................................................................xxiv g. History..............................................................................................................................xxix h. Second Life Demographics and Motivations...............................................................xxxviii i. Second Life Culture(s)..........................................................................................................xli

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