The Imagination Age is set up to foster maximum collaborative creativity from groups exploring cultural and economic development. Max Burns (AKA Gatsby Crumb in SL) recently caused a stir when he posted "Why Do Government Islands Frequently Fail?"on his Pixels and Policy blog. We recently took a tour together of the NASA and NOAA spaces within Second Life and we're currently collaborating on a piece of machinima to document the experience. Pixels and Policy's mission is: Uncovering the ways virtual worlds change our politics, policy and culture.
Gatsby Crumb, left, Eureka Dejavu and Hackshaven Harford aboard a virtual trawler in Second Life. I also took Max on a tour of the Dancing Ink Productions sim in Second Life, The Imagination Age, and put him on assignment to document the experience, which did not include any of our clients' spaces but just the sections of the sim devoted entirely to exploring the role of the imagination in unlocking cultural and economic development. The only mandate was that he write about whatever moved him as an introduction to readers about the content he experienced. His essay is posted below:
Creativity as a Business Model at The Imagination Age
by Max Burns (images by Rita J. King)
Second Life is an environment of unusual creativity and self expression. This is partly because Linden Lab provides content creation tools that allow virtually any object, house, or landscape to flow from the hands of capable designers. As a tool for unlocking the imaginations of potential artists, the prim system is unique in its field.
But the ability for limitless content creation alone is not the reason for the boom in Second Life’s creative class. A trip to The Imagination Age revealed that, for many Second Life residents, the true beauty of art comes when it merges with purpose in engaging and often unexpected ways. I found myself taken aback by the skillful blending of work and art at The Imagination Age, and opted to explore the trend further.
The Imagination Age constitutes not only the Second Life presence of Dancing Ink Productions, but a bold new idea on how to do business in the Metaverse. Meetings with and presentations to real-world groups are often conducted only a few steps from soaring mountain peaks and hundred-food statues of Buddha.
The sound of running water emanates from a grotto designed both as a space for quiet contemplation and as a housing for Dancing Ink’s philosophical model, the Johari window. The Imagination Age isolates nothing. It is a realm where conference areas sit next to glistening time machines, and avant-garde art installations serve to explain the philosophy of the organization.
Using Art to Explain Business
The first thing one perceives when visiting The Imagination Age is the sheer amount of truly beautiful art installations spread across the island. It would be a mistake to regard The Imagination Age as merely an upscale virtual art gallery, though, as each piece was commissioned by outside parties and serves as a unique way of looking at the evolution of human consciousness, creativity, and collaboration.
Most of the installations are interactive. They ask users to reflect on how their interaction is changing the artistic experience with each piece, to consider how the user’s perception of the art changes as the installation responds to their presence.
One piece in particular displays the collaborative potential of human creativity. The “Flickr Gettr II” is a tower of light surrounded by pulsing purple squares, beautiful enough in itself, but when the user enters a word into the Flickr Gettr, its purple squares transform into a collage of photographs related to the submitted word.
The piece, created by Mencius Watts and Taggert Alsop, is a beautiful way to display photos from Flickr, and the Flickr Gettr invites one to think about how these photos are floating about in an open space, placed in the ether of the virtual world by millions of collaborative minds unknown to each other. As art alone, the Flickr Gettr deserves accolades, but its true charm comes from showing through user participation the kind of thinking Dancing Ink Productions tries to promote.
There are other examples. The U.K.-based group PROBOSCIS commissioned the creation of 27 “STORYCUBES,” interactive blocks that allow everyone who interacts with them to add parts to a community story. The cubes span the physical and virtual worlds, in addition to an “augmented reality cube” that implements webcam technology to straddle the line between the physical and virtual spheres.
Eureka Dejavu prepares to create a virtual version of the PROBOSCIS commission on "Transformation: How We Become Who We Are," in Second Life after Rita J. King created the physical version, shown above. Click here to activate the augmented reality cube, which is part of the installation in the physical world and in Second Life.Why the Culture of Collaboration Works
What’s so thought-provoking about the interactive art installations at The Imagination Age is how effortlessly they prove – without words or PowerPoint slides – how important and engaging large-scale creative collaboration can be.
The STORYCUBES project moves beyond the content creation capabilities of Second Life by bringing interactive art into the real world. Without a drawn-out lecture on the subject, Dancing Ink Productions succeeds in acknowledging the creative roles of both the real and the virtual, and carves out a space for each to receive equal attention.
As companies move online in ever greater numbers and employees find their workspace shifting to the virtual landscape, both companies and employees will be forced to look at the old models of “doing business” in a new way. Consumers will expect engagement in addition to marketing, and the interactive art projects at The Imagination Age invite the user to think and create while receiving the message of the piece.
As a study of the evolution of understanding and collaboration in a shared space, these installations provide priceless points of reference. Dancing Ink can watch users interact with art to fine-tune future installations and contracted pieces, continually refining and improving their ability to respond to evolving ideas of what virtual culture means.From the perspective of an individual still adjusting to the many ways business is transforming in the Metaverse, The Imagination Age appears to represent what is best about the possibility of working and creating in virtual space. Rita J. King’s philosophical paradise represents a merging of art and work in a way that redefines both without cheapening either. It aims to build an entirely new paradigm for collaborative creativity.
The Imagination Age succeeds.
