The Babelswarm Group were awarded the inaugural Australia Council Second Life Artists Residency in September 2007. It is the biggest grant to be awarded for a Second Life work, worth AUD $20,000 over six months.
The group is collaborating to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life, which converges possibilities of literary, music/sound art and real-time 3D arts practices within the virtual world. There will be a simultaneous installation in Second Life and a real world gallery, where visitors (both real and virtual) can be directly involved in its creation via a voice-driven interface.
The installation, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, will use voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3D letter-form images in an evolving tower of words. The behaviour of the individual letter-forms and the meta-tower will be informed by swarm theory.
Babelswarm consists of Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman).
