Our everyday lives have been digitised and scattered through different spaces since the internet was created. In this exhibition, we explore the social exchanges, digital artefacts and politics that inform our current experiences of online life.
Between Worlds also includes a newly commissioned video game with Glasgow-based creative developers Benjamin Hall and Frances Lingard. In the World Imagining Game, you are invited to create new and alternative virtual worlds while exploring the power dynamics, aesthetic possibilities, and legacies at play. Imagine your own visuals, characters, modes of gameplay in your world, and think about who your world is for, how it is moderated, and how it operates economically.
Between Worlds suggests that answering questions about what our virtual futures may contain requires us to look to the past, and what lessons we have learnt from these experiences.
- Creative Review
Many virtual worlds – like Second Life and PlayStation Home – have been created and inhabited online, bringing close-knit user communities together. Second Life is a rarity to still be active – many virtual worlds appear and disappear within a few years. The end of many of these worlds, often linked to profits, have been marked by ‘end of the world’ parties – one last community get-together before the servers are switched off.
Between Worlds marks a new strand of programming and research through our digital programme into the structural and socio-political issues around online worlds, and precedes a new PhD collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University.
