Buzzed by media reports between 2006 and 2008 as the internet's next big thing and then largely forgotten afterward, Second Life is actually a bit more popular now than it was during that time — it had about 500,000 regular users then, and now it has around 600,000. After the excessive media coverage waned, and the initial hyperbolic predictions failed to cash out, many forgot about it, but more kept playing.
Created by a San Francisco startup called Linden Lab, Second Life was inspired in great part by the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash — a 3-D alternate reality with its own rules, values, and hierarchies. Like Minecraft, Second Life also comes with construction and scripting tools so users can create 3-D content in the virtual world with multi-shaped building blocks, then animate them with interactive scripts.
Launched in 2003, Second Life combined the Metaverse aspiration with those proto-Minecraft aspects and bolted them atop social MMO game mechanics, like user-to-user ratings, friending, leaderboards, and so on. In its first five years, the creative energy that gamers put into Second Life was fierce and unpredictable. For its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me as the virtual world's official "embedded journalist" — it was a lot like trying to report on a collective hallucination. One of the very first users I interviewed, a tall brunette dressed like a prototypical hacker, had built a glass-domed mansion in Second Life. In real life, she was homeless. Someone who used to work for Peter Molyneux built an island with its own ecosystem. Someone else created a four-dimensional tesseract house with no front or back.
The outside media began noticing the virtual world. In 2005, MTV showed up at Second Life's first user convention. In 2006, Businessweek put Second Life on its cover, because by then, businesses earning millions from creating and managing content in Second Life were emerging. (Linden Lab allows users to buy and sell Second Life's virtual land and exchange the in-world currency, the Linden Dollar, for real money.) More media appearances followed: A cameo on The Office; a segment on The Daily Show. Major companies began investing to have a Second Life presence: IBM, Reuters, CBS, Dell, Armani, American Apparel and countless more. But most Second Life activity (then and now) actually happens in its diverse sub-communities of users: fashionistas with their own magazines, runway models, participants in catty social dramas, roleplayers acting out endless narratives in vampire castles or Gorean empires or post-apocalyptic wastelands and sexual subcultures, some with kinks so strange and violent they’d shock even the most jaded liberal.
At the height of Second Life's hype wave, the world resembled a libertarian fever dream with garish sci-fi cities and fantasy sex palaces strewn right alongside official corporate headquarters and high-toned shopping malls, and everywhere above you, it seemed, were blinking billboards. (Not to mention intermittent storms of giant, flying dildos.) It was crass, endlessly chaotic and mostly ugly.
And then amid all that, often by accident or via word of a friend, players come across a work by AM Radio. And the light itself seems to change — the outside cacophony is forgotten.
The first work in Second Life to bear AM Radio's name was "The Far Away," a Midwestern wheat field players could walk around in, often making them feel wistful for a time and place they likely never knew. It felt like being immersed in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, like walking through a golden expanse near a rusty train with tracks seemingly lost beneath the windblown grain and a magic hour sky.
Second Life players, learning about the place, would teleport or fly there in an endless stream of avatars whose incongruous appearance made these settings seem even more surreal — sex vampires and robot furries and supermodels and space commandos and cyberpunk cowboys all milling about in God’s country. In an anonymous interview, AM Radio suggested he was creating these rustic places to puncture the virtual, to offer a glimpse of the real:
"Sunlight, for our generation, is something seen through Plexiglass windows, and my art is a reaction against that ... an attempt to tear down the fakery, all that plastic in impossible colors and awful rugs and terrible media, like television ... And now, here I am in a virtual world, trying to create the organic."
And AM Radio kept building. He made "The Quiet," a sad and desolate cabin surrounded by magic and wind, bereft amid drifts of silent snow. He recreated Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Marat" as a 3-D interactive experience, so any avatar could be the one to die like Marat. He built a strip of highway with a red doorway that opened into dreams. He made a place called "Superdyne," which was an infinite desert expanse with a sewing machine and a long sheet of blue fabric held aloft, caught in a windstorm that lasted forever. These settings often include old radios and transistor tubes or ancient cars and planes, or they're pierced by unexpected, mystic elements. They were 3-D sculptures that were mostly not animated, but their textures had a vivid lucidity that made them seem vibrant and alive. AM Radio made all this and much more. And as each new creation appeared in Second Life, word of mouth spread and thousands of avatars endlessly teleported there for weeks, months, years after.
And sometimes, if players were lucky, they'd also meet AM Radio himself, an avatar as evocative as his creations: a tall man with a scarf and top hat, a quiver of sticks at his back and a sensitive, wistful face. Often he’d stand there and amicably chat with the people who came to see his works. He didn't publicly share much about his life beyond the virtual world, except the broadest details — he was American, he worked for a major corporation. I met him many times in Second Life — usually, a coterie of admirers (mostly women) was there as well, attentive to his every chat message.
AM Radio was not the only artist in Second Life; others have also experimented with the virtual world as a medium. French filmmaker Chris Marker (creator of the classic La Jetée), created Second Life machinima. Acclaimed Chinese conceptual artist Cao Fei sold an entire virtual city in Second Life to a collector for $100,000. Then there were the virtual artists creating, not for a pre-existing audience in galleries and museums, but for the community of Second Life players who’d attend openings of new installations with the kind of avidness you see at a SoHo premiere. Among them: Bryn Oh, creator of fragile steampunk scenes, like "Stay with me"; Gryph Glaves, who wired a Kinect Up to Second Life, so he could literally turn his face into a dynamic sculpture poking its way into the virtual world; Cutea Benelli and Blotto Epsilon, who built an eerily strange, self-assembling, self-destructing city. These artists, for a time, even had a leading patron and maven — an elegant woman named Beverly Millson, a longtime lover of virtual reality who spent her days handling PR for a bionics startup, then worked nights and weekends promoting a community of artists through her avatar, sometimes greeting her admirers in a ballgown made from a school of fish.
In retrospect, the virtual world was in too much havoc for AM Radio’s sudden departure to register. In the summer of 2010, a year after AM Radio’s admiring profile in the New York Times, Linden Lab laid off a third of its staff. With the media hype long over, the world was not adding users, so existing members felt the pain. In October of that year, in an apparent bid to shore up its revenue further, Linden Lab ended its discount on virtual land owned by non-profit and educational organizations. Tumult ensued: Countless educators pulled up stakes. Harvard and Princeton owned virtual islands in Second Life, as did hundreds of other organizations. Amid the user outrage at Linden Lab, relatively few seemed to notice AM Radio's quiet announcement that his installations, which were being hosted on Ball State University's Second Life island, would also leave when the island underneath it went away. Amid this bitter unraveling, even Beverly Millson grew disenchanted about the future of virtual world art.
But Beverly hadn't forgotten about AM Radio. And after finding him, she asked me if I wanted to meet him too.
