Art appreciators from around the world are being offered a second life by Canberra's National Portrait Gallery.
Anyone with access to the internet can download Second Life, a 3D environment, create their own 'avatar' and fly, walk or teleport from one virtual island to another. Portrait Island is one island dedicated to portraiture, and Doppelganger is the second in a series of virtual art exhibitions by the Gallery, comprising work by artists from Australia, Italy, the USA and China.
Greg More, director of OOM Creative, lecturer at RMIT University and designer of Portrait Island believes that the exhibition, which is made up entirely of digital artworks, offers a new way for people to appreciate art.
"The whole concept of this exhibition," More told Architecture and Design, "is about asking how do we represent ourselves in a digital space?"
"It's about you having another representation of yourself through a virtual environment."
Doppelganger is based around the ideas of twinning, cloning, identity and the other self and More hopes that people will see the artwork as being just as valid and creative as other art forms.
"Some people can say it's not as meaningful as the traditional art forms but anyone who's been to the exhibition and who's engaged in it will inherently have a sense of being engaged to as high a level as you would with one of the traditional art forms," he said.
"I think with all this work it's very important for people to not try and compare it with what they know in the physical world, because it's quite a different way of representing space and art."
More said that as an architect, the hardest thing about working in a completely digital environment is understanding and taking advantage of how users will be viewing the space.
"You have to really focus on the temporality and the movement through the spaces. You have to be aware of how people navigate in Second Life - which is by walking and flying and teleporting. So people can fly and see your design from all angles ... things are far more three-dimensional in how people can interact with your work," he said.
The exhibition will run until 23 March, 2010. To download Second Life, click here.
