In Conclusion

In the years since we ceased 3d virtual world development, Second Life has emerged as the dominant virtual world platform. Having stepped out of the virtual realm, I have no desire to return. For me, the Internet with social networking exploding around us has become just another everyday media channel. The space for radical artistic interaction has migrated out of the screen and into the physical world. Embedded and mobile technologies allow us to mix physical and networked interaction. They allow us to use all our physical senses in social interaction with other human beings. The physical space, whether in the gallery, city, or deep in the forest, can become a multi-layered interactive networked space.

We live in a time when the artist’s role is no longer confined to a lonely existence in a studio with occasional exhibitions in galleries and museums. The media artist as activist can and does promote and provoke change in society at large through working at the leading edge of technological development. We live at the dawn of the rich media era, where the boundaries between television and cinema, broadcast and narrowcast are blurred and destroyed altogether.

It is vital for artists to have access to new technologies. There needs to be an ongoing critical debate surroun-ding all technological developments. It is far too easy for many dystopian systems to be implemented in society if development is left in the hands of engin-eers, scientists and business people. Despite Marshall McLuhan's well known thesis "The content of any medium is the other (old) medium" it is clear that new media demand from both the content producer and the end user a radical re-thinking of their approach to narrative and the dramaturgical construction of a story within the work, as well as a re-contextualisation of how the “work” is experienced. The lessons we learn as we make our stumbling baby steps into the technologically mediated physical world will lay the foun-dations for the future, so it’s vital that real social and environmental issues are not abandoned in the search for a technological utopia, rather we use the opportunity to make the whole Earth a better, cleaner, and more peaceful place for all living creatures to co-exist.

Andy Best is a media artist and sculptor. He is Principal Lecturer in Digital Arts at Turku University of Applied Sciences, and is researching for his Doctor of Arts degree at Aalto University School of Art and Design, Helsinki. He lives in Espoo, Finland together with his wife and partner Merja Puustinen and their three children Lara, Storm and Rudy.