Art commission in Second Life in partnership with ZKM Centre for Art and Media

What happens when real life interrupts your fantasy life? This must happen particularly often for the online community of Second Life (SL); a virtual 3D world inhabited by ‘avatars’ of millions of real individuals from around the world. Artist Dirk Fleischmann was an active user of the virtual world, so we commissioned him to make some work about ecology that would address the online community[1].

Then, in 2008 real life interrupted Fleischmann when he went to the Philippines and he stopped using SL for a year. Now, for the month of June 2009, his avatar Flex Dix is live in SL[2] and has a one-avatar campaign to share with the online community. He tells the tale of the reforestation work that Fleischmann and others have been carrying out in real life with a community living in the mountains near Antipolo City, about two hours from Manila.

Myforrestfarm centres on the idea of how activities in one place affect another. The premise of SL is that you create things in the virtual world, such as buildings, businesses, culture and relationships. And the more activity there is on SL the higher the energy use in real life. In SL there is simulated weather, but there is no climate or biosphere. The environmental impact of SL happens in real life through the energy consumed by the computer servers that power the website. For this project, Fleischmann is responding to the activities on SL’s by actively planting a forest farm in real life. This is intended to off-set the carbon consumption that the SL computer servers use, in particular ZKM Island. At first, Fleischmann trusted a UK carbon trading company, but concluded things were not as they claimed in the business of carbon-trading[3]. So he began his own plantation and the story of the activities are presented by his avatar Flex Dix on ZKM Island.

Flex Dix on ZKM Island, Second Life [you must be a registered SL user to follow this link]
www.myforestfarm.com
www.zkm.de
www.dirkfleischmann.net

[1] This project is commissioned by a partnership of RSA Arts and Ecology Centre, London and Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe www.zkm.de

[2] http://slurl.com/secondlife/ZKM/130/30/30/ [Teleport link only available to registered Second Life users]

[3] James Lovelock spoke briefly about of the problem of carbon-trading companies in a talk at the RSA http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/james-lovelock