On the 23rd of September, the theatre at the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz will inaugurate the birth of a new community and a new architecture in Second Life. The event branches over four cities in the world and four islands in Second Life. To the sounds of clappering keyboards, bells and yaps the fragmented spaces will be neatly folded together into an elated countdown in the Graz theatre.

Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined and created by its residents. The bitmapped 2D surfaces become set-design for meetings between users from all over the world. Through using the gathering of virtual bodies in a new configuration, the “Graz Theatre Extension” proposes a new way of coming together in virtual space; a way for Second Life to become more than just a chat room or a mere reproduction of reality. The project will be spreading virtual appearances that are preprogrammed to react and interact on each other’s presence forming architecture of bodies.

A series of one to one meetings will take place between real life performers and Second Life avatars and the meetings will result in the spreading of the preprogrammed appearances. An avatar will unaccompanied enter a virtual space and be met by a live video stream of a real life person, where a chat between the two will take place. Every meeting will ceremonially end with the handing over of the preprogrammed appearance. There will be a constant stream of meetings leading to multiplying and spreading of these identical virtual characters that will start to invade Second Life.

In the theatre in Graz, the virtual and the real will intersect. From within the theatre space, the performed meetings can be passively experienced. Whilst the theatre foyer becomes a performed market place recording the birth of each new “avatar” through analogue documentations, cowbells, shrills and whoops.
When 50 new avatar appearances have been handed out, the auction will transduce to a mingle in the remains of the event. The clatter and clacks will morph into music, mingle and after discussions.