In 2007, I started working in Second Life, due mainly to the consistent lack of uptake of VRML/X3D, both commerically and in the art and design communities. Second Life's chief advantage was that it had a large community of users. This afforded me the opportunity to work within the RT3D MUVE medium with an audience who were already, at least to a point, familiar with the medium. I present here two works that are representative of this period of my work: Trace Aureity and One, Another.

Trace Aureity was a commission from the Networked Music Review. The commission was specifically for a Second Life work, and so I was able to apply the results of Seventeen Unsung Songs in a single experiment. Trace Aureity, the resulting work, suggested a way forward for the practice of this art by establishing a kind of network of relationships between the user and the environment not only by investing the virtual space itself with interactive audiovisual properties, but also by spawning moving digital agents in order that different traces are inscribed within the environment by the users’ interaction with it. These agents are spawned in response to user proximity, but once spawned, begin to describe automatically determined paths through the work. These agents have the same interactive effect on the work as the user, i.e., moving through any particular element of the work will cause that element to react in the same way it would were the user to move through it. In this way, the trace that the user inscribes within the space of the work is branching and somewhat aleatoric. This branching trace always maintains a relationship with the user’s path through the work, because agents will only be spawned from the user’s position. This relationship between the user’s and the agent’s paths becomes weaker over time as the agent gains independence from its provenance. At the same time, since the agents always spawn in response to the user’s movements, a non-linear network of relationships is established where the semi-autonomous behaviour of the agents can never be completely independent of the user. In other words, it is always the user that is playing the work. In this way, Trace Aureity can be seen as an example of a multi-sited, or non-linear, avatar that transcends the linear mapping between human user and the user’s humanoid avatar. This was the major progression that Trace Aureity presented, the first steps towards transcending the human avatar metaphor. Because of this, the user is invited to navigate the work in a reflective manner, to experience as many sites of interactive relationship as possible, to play the space in a virtuosic sense as a result of removing all tendencies toward a forward or linear navigation or interaction model. An expectation is implicit within the manifestation of the work of a virtuosic ability on the user’s part to use the telescoping nature of the camera or viewpoint of the avatar within the RT3D MUVE, in order to be able to perceive different aspects of this multi-sited avatar. It is not a necessary requirement for enjoyment of the work, but the work rewards a conscious teasing-out on the part of the user, encouraging the user to experiment with multiple levels of camera work and navigation. Similarly with the sounds, an expectation is on the user to listen and become familiar with sonic patterns encoded in the nested virtual colour spaces constituting the work, and experiment accordingly, thereby entering into a new relationship with the work, one closer to a performer of the work. Trace Aureity points the way to an investigation of non-linear data flow in virtuosic artist/user interactive relationships, along the lines of Deleuze’s “composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence” (Deleuze, Spinoza 123).