While traditional art museums discourage public interference with their collections, the Open Source Museum of Open Source Art, a Brown student project, invites viewers to not only tinker with the art, but the architecture of the museum itself.
The museum is located in Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world that is becoming increasingly relevant to radical media artists as well as mainstream society.
OSMOSA was created by Brown students Deborah Abramson GS, Kiera Feldman '08 and Davis Jung '09 as part of a modern culture and media class - MCM 1700P: "Radical Media" - taught by Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies Mark Tribe '90. Tribe said he has found his students increasingly fascinated by the much-hyped online environment.
In Second Life, users - referred to as residents - interact with each other as motional avatars that are essentially three-dimensional representations of themselves. Started in 2003, Second Life now has 9.5 million users worldwide, according to its Web site.
Second Life is not only its own social network but has its own economy as well. Residents can buy virtual land and other goods with Linden dollars, the Second Life currency that can be legally traded with any other.
This is no play money: users wanting their own virtual island may be paying in Linden dollars, but the expense is still coming out of their pockets.
For Tribe and his students, Second Life is an intriguing new forum for media art. This virtual world is "the most dynamic manifestation of cyberspace as a kind of consensual hallucination," he said. "Behind the hype, there is some interesting stuff."
With OSMOSA, Tribe's students engage with the issues of open source and intellectual property. Anyone can modify the virtual museum's construction or content, and Tribe notes how his students have invited others to remix their work. Two other student projects that challenge conceptions of art, performance and space are a virtual dance performance and a representation of the Windows XP desktop as a liveable building.
Businesses and universities alike have already tapped into the potential of Second Life with virtual conference rooms and classrooms that transcend notions of communal space.
