Losing the Plot – An Exploration of Narrative Collaboration and Control in Second Life

Traditions of authoring and reception have been challenged by the advent of digital interactivity, which has put into process a major re-envisioning of the paradigms surrounding artistic production and reception. This article explores how the culture of Virtual Worlds like Second Life is changing the way in which audiences relate to narrative. It suggests that different modes of collaborative interaction, familiar from experiential performance and other radical art practices, can elucidate the interactive interplay between controlling agents that characterise digital environments. The focus of the article is a project being developed in Second Life by architect, Peter Ireland and writer/theatre director, Elizabeth Swift, who, working as ‘Void’, have a twenty year history of creating installation and performance projects which engage with digital media. The Void Library (2009) uses Second Life to create an immersive experiential narrative work based