Babelswarm is a real-time 3D and audio art project built in the virtual world of Second Life. It was the winner of the Australia Council’s first Second Life arts residency, and was launched simultaneously in-world and at the Lismore Regional Gallery in New South Wales, Australia. Overwhelmingly complex, extraordinarily diverse, Second Life is like a summation of all previous media technologies. Audio, video, programming, archiving, and so on and on, are all able to be deployed within it, in radically unprecedented ways.
Activated by the voices of visitors in the realworld gallery and chat messaging from virtual visitors in Second Life, a swarm of letter cubes – programmed to seek out their original word position—slowly builds a morphing, virtual Tower of Babel. This tower is constructed from the utterances of visitors to it, constantly reconfiguring itself according to the artificial intelligence of the individual letter forms.
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| Figure 1 BabelSwarm#1 | Figure 2 BabelSwarm#2 | Figure 3 BabelSwarm#3 | Figure 4 BabelSwarm#4 | Figure 5 BabelSwarm#5 |