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Looking at: AM Radio, Second Life Artist

After a very long day in the studio, I thought I’d take a break from writing about myself. My weird little “looking at” series has proven surprising popular and so I thought I’d give it another try. And so, here’s another entry onto the list of artists who I love and adore and I think should get wider recognition for their work.

Meet AM Radio. Yes, that’s the (only) name I know him by. AM Radio is an avatar in the game Second Life, which is to say he is the adopted persona of some actual live human being who I have never met. Here is a picture of our avatars talking:

Weird enough for you? Friends reading this know that I covet the strange and seek it out as much as possible, and Second Life has no shortage on strangeness. It is in short a 3-d “virtual” environment where you can interact with other people’s avatars. But what makes SL actually interesting is its creative potential. Anyone can potentially build anything; if you have an avatar (and anyone can create one for free), you have the ability to “rez” an item out of absolutely nothing – with a click of your mouse, your avatar can make a cube appear out of the clear blue. With some tweaking and practice, chances are you can change this cube around (add to it, change the texture, alter the size) so that it resembles… something else. People have built all sorts of things in SL – buildings, clothing, animals, food, whatever. And they have achieved various levels of competence in creating these things: For the most part, the tree that is growing in the corner of your SL yard doesn’t actually look like a real tree (it’s cartoony and clunky, the colors are a bit off) , but it is readable enough that you instantly know what it’s supposed to be. And, you know, reality is what you make of it – in SL, you agree to suspend a certain amount of your disbelief so that you can accept that the person standing next to you has wings or whatever.

What AM does is he uses the SL to build interactive installations. Eschewing a gallery space (yes, there are art galleries in SL), he takes over plots of land and turns them into mysterious, cinematic sets. With often no direction and no prompting, your avatar stumbles across this collection of various, curious objects in a desert or a field, and is left to try and piece together a narrative. What you’re presented with is a very strange mix; think of David Lynch meets Hudson River School and you’re in the right territory. As you move around the space, your avatar can interact with “poseballs” which animate it into various actions, generally ones that evoke longing, sadness, or contemplation.

So, the objects: As I said earlier, things in SL don’t usually look like they would in reality, and this is just a convention of the game. But AM has found a way to create incredibly detailed objects out of dozens or sometimes hundreds of components. The effect is not an object that is 100% “realistic” (to do so would be impossible at this point) but as close to real as, say, a very finely crafted oil painting. All of his objects and environments share the same sepia palette, creating a really tightly controlled vocabulary between works.

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