I am interested in landscape and new media and spent some time exploring and researching Second Life for this paper, written for a graduate seminar class at NSCAD University.

I am falling. It's my second time in, and I ended my last session somewhere in the sky above Sandbox Newcomb, attempting to see how high I could fly. Thin clouds drift around my avatar, or virtual self, and the ground below grows gradually more visible through a haze of grey fog. It isn't so much a fall as a slow drift downward, and eventually I come to a gentle stop still some distance above the ground. My avatar hovers patiently in place, floating in midair. I press the Page Down key to land.

I am standing in what purports to be a desert, a mottled brown and green plane that looked a little more convincing from a distance. Up close it is blurry, as if the texture map that contains its colour data has been stretched to its limits. In the distances between splotches of colour, I can almost discern a pixel grid. It is perfectly flat more often than not, more floor than earth, though I see a small drop in elevation to the south. This area looks largely uninhabited, and it takes a few minutes of wandering on foot before I come across any buildings. Even when I find one — a large, empty cube with one open wall and a pink checkered floor — there is no one around.

Second Life feels like a game at first, but less so the longer I wander around. The three-dimensional landscape looks familiar, its generic green and brown colour scheme a video game cliché. But it is too wide open — there are no obstacles, no bottomless pits or brick walls, no enemies hurling deadly projectiles with devious precision. The user interface, too, feels tacked on from some first-person shooter, a mess of layered menu bars and windows, a small radar map in the top right corner. But there's nothing on my radar but more green and brown, and far from being charged with some desperate quest, I find myself alone in a landscape as empty as a sheet of paper.

Land in Second Life is divided into large areas called simulators, or sims. Within each sim, land is often subdivided into small lots, which like almost everything else in Second Life can be bought and sold, typically in parcels of 512 square meters. The currency of the virtual world is the Linden Dollar, named after Second Life's developers, San Francisco-based Linden Research Inc. — commonly known in-world as Linden Lab, or The Lindens. Users are called residents, and are encouraged to not only create virtual identities and form relationships with other residents, but to establish a semipermanent presence in the virtual world through the purchase of land.

Like so many others, my avatar takes its first steps on Orientation Island, a small training area scattered with featureless grey avatars — a sign that a resident is new, or perhaps that its avatar is still loading, or rezzing. We are clumsy together, walking at first in straight lines or in circles, sitting down and standing repeatedly, littering the conversation window with interjections aimed at no one in particular. These are our virtual bodies at their most primitive: though born fully grown, capable of full control of our considerable motor skills (flying, it turns out, is as easy as pressing Page Up), our movements are laboured and graceless. The small cluttered island, neatly quartered into four training areas, is like a crib to contain our floundering bodies and the simple objects we quickly learn to interact with, and to build. When we are ready, we move on.

As I later learn, most land in Second Life does not remain empty for long. The area I first find myself in, upon teleporting from Orientation Island to the larger continent, turns out to be a small unused corner of a vast sim called Sandbox Newcomb. Sandboxes in Second Life are testing areas, large open-air workshops where users can build and test objects without worrying about disrupting other residents. Different sandboxes tolerate different degrees of experimentation, as becomes obvious when I come across a large billboard:

Warning! Sandbox parcel will be cleaned regularly. NO selling / advertising / shooting or gambling allowed. Simple scripts only! NO WEAPONS.

The Sandbox itself is a junkyard of playthings, prototypes, and half-built structures, all constructed using prims or primitive objects, with the user interface's built-in 3D modeller. In my immediate vicinity, having found my way out of my vacant corner, I count three cars, a spaceship, two large buildings suspended in space, a Coke machine, an upside-down armchair, a small army of large immobile penguins, and a unicorn. Attempting to interact with several objects proves fruitless; a car refuses to drive, I can't climb inside the spaceship, and the Coke machine seems to be out of order. Right-clicking the unicorn reveals that it has a scripted action called Cuddle, but despite my advances it stares at me blankly, mane and tail sparkling in a digital wind. Perhaps the objects are unfinished, or perhaps I don't have permission to use them. Everything built in Second Life comes with built-in copy protection; an object's creator decides whether to allow other users to copy or interact with it. With this system, Linden Lab's virtual world has developed its own sizeable market economy, sustained by artists and virtual entrepreneurs who design, sell, and rent everything from waterfront resorts to functioning replicas of the Millennium Falcon to custom avatar costumes, tattoos, and animated gestures. Linden Dollars, which users can purchase in-world using any major credit card, are also exchangeable for real world cash, and the currency currently floats at about 250 Linden Dollars to the U.S. Dollar. A basic membership in Second Life requires only an e-mail address, but to own land requires a premium membership with a monthly payment; users without land are essentially homeless, perpetual tourists.

I am a tourist, and an ill-equipped one at that. Besides having a basic account and no Linden Dollars, my Dell's graphics card barely meets the minimum requirements to run the Second Life software, and to reduce lag and loading time I've adjusted the graphics options to as low as they can go. Even so, the world loads painfully slowly, particularly when I am near numerous large objects, and my PC buzzes like a single-engine plane in protest. Flying over a seemingly empty field, I spot a small table with a chessboard; I land nearby for a closer look, only to have an entire gazebo rez around me: tiled marble floor, glass roof, potted plants and all. It turns out to be one end of a much larger garden, and at the other end I discover more than a dozen people standing in a group, speaking Spanish. I wonder now how much of the seemingly vacant landscape I've flown over is actually developed. Large structures show up on the map, but smaller objects are easy to miss due to my digital nearsightedness.

Sight in Second Life is a strange thing. I view the world not from my avatar's eyes, but from a floating virtual camera that tags along a few metres behind its head. This too is a convention adopted from other 3D worlds. As opposed to the first-person perspective of some 3D games, it gives the player a wider view of their immediate surroundings, as well as a greater familiarity with their avatar's physical appearance. Left to its own devices the virtual camera follows doggedly behind my avatar, but I'm also able to take control, swinging around to close in on my avatar's face, zooming out to view more of my surroundings, or peering around as if through my avatar's eyes. This is called a dynamic camera system, and is particularly noticeable when, for example, I somehow end up with an obstacle between my floating 'eye' and my avatar, as inevitably happens in close quarters. One of the earliest examples of this kind of camera system is in Nintendo's Mario 64 (1996), where the player's floating viewpoint is personified as a small flying character holding a camera and following Mario around. No such explanation is necessary in Second Life, as the dynamic camera system has become common in certain types of 3D games over the past ten years. It is useful, but adds a certain distance to the roleplay; am I intended to imagine myself as my avatar, or is the character a kind of puppet who responds to my commands? The first scenario is implied by the title, Second Life, and has been reinforced for years in games such as Mario 64 (the player is thought of as Mario, not the character filming Mario). There is a particularly acute sense of disconnection, though, when my avatar slips out of sight, or for some reason won't do what I want to do. Or what I want it to do.

Being able to view one's avatar at all times suits Second Life particularly well; there is great enthusiasm in the virtual world for avatar customization, and much of the satisfaction of becoming a giant dragon or wearing a custom-designed animated outfit would be lost if it wasn't on view at all times. The four initial areas of tutorial on Orientation Island are labelled Movement, Search, Communicate, and Appearance, which indicates the primary importance placed on customizing one's avatar. The Second Life engine allows an incredible variety of possible avatars, and users take great pride in designing (or purchasing) bodies, clothes, and accessories for themselves. As usual, Shakespeare said it first: all the world's a stage, and all the men and women are, quite literally, players. The experience of spending time in Second Life is not unlike directing and acting out a television show starring yourself. I am encouraged to be whatever I imagine, to find or create desirable surroundings, and to make friends and form relationships (and increasingly do business) on whatever terms I desire. All along, the camera follows attentively. The emphasis on appearance and creating visually convincing virtual environments is a fundamental part of the Second Life world. I came across one block of run-down brick buildings complete with graffiti, rusted metal fences, and even a dumpster object in a back alley, filled with virtual trash. In another area, a large billboard advertising "Land For Sale" had been designed complete with an elaborate wooden structure propping it up; it could just as easily have been a two-dimensional rectangle floating in midair. At the same time, it is not uncommon to find buildings suspended in space or on floating platforms (which is not so odd when you consider that residents can fly). Most objects sold and traded in Second Life have no functional value; virtual shoes don't protect your virtual feet, and even working vehicles are basically useless when everyone can teleport. Indeed, Second Life's economy seems to consist largely of the creation and sale of stage props.

Advertisements, of course, are one type of virtual object which is perfectly functional, and Second Life is naturally full of billboards, flashing signs, and interactive exhibits advertising both real-world and virtual businesses. Of course, any sign can also act as a virtual vending machine. As there are no natural resources, land seems to be valued primarily as a salable commodity and increasingly as advertising space. Second Life has relatively few roads (since everyone can teleport and fly), and so without a clear direction to point at many ads take the form of large rotating blocks, or aim themselves in odd directions such as straight up, to attract the attention of avatars flying overhead (not that this is unheard of in real life).

Virtual reality remains a thin curtain, and it is easy to find places where even the surface illusion is transparent. Wandering to the edge of any continent reveals a perfectly vertical cliff, and at its edges the landscape reveals itself to be thinner than paper, two-dimensional. Here the fragile underbelly of the world can be seen, and it is as flat as a fallen house of cards. Trees, scattered illogically around otherwise empty landscapes, often consist of two sprites that intersect like a cardboard model, producing the barest illusion of three-dimensionality. It is possible to walk straight through most of them, as if they were merely projections. I had an interesting conversation with one of the first residents I spoke to in Second Life, a certain C. Helvetic. We were standing on the shore of Sandbox Newcomb, which doesn't usually have a shore; a large sim-sized lake stretched before us, perfectly square and as empty as an abandoned storefront window. "It's sad," he mused, "there's supposed to be another sim here, but it crashed." I mention I like the water, which beneath this stunning sky (I've just discovered the menu option World → Force Sun → Sunset) is admittedly scenic even to my low-res virtual eyes. "It's just what the software renders when there's nothing there," he explains. "But yes, it's pretty." I ask Helvetic if the map wraps around its edges, and he explains that the world is flat: "They'll keep building on the X and Y indefinitely." I ask about cities.

"You were born yesterday," he says suddenly. I've only been in Second Life for an hour, long enough to find my way off Orientation Island and to the edge of the sandbox. But I suppose the clock must have passed midnight as I wandered Sandbox Newcomb, and my profile indicates that I started yesterday.

"How does it feel to be born yesterday?"

I don't reply. I hold Page Up and my avatar sails straight up, until I can't see the sand or the water anymore. I zoom the camera out and my avatar grows smaller, a tiny dot, the only object on the screen. There are clouds between it and the camera. I click Quit. I pour a glass of water from the jug in the fridge.

these diaphanous continents, cumulus humilis,
are precisely the colour of canada according
to a national geographic map i once owned:
luncheon meat, an anonymous pink
frayed red around the edges,
freezer-burnt.

from the back door of the lower deck
bluster a cover band's clumsy standards,
as sunburnt bystanders
sway canadian flags to the words
of sweet home alabama, hotel california,
clink bottles and thank
god the shadows are getting longer.

from the steps of the marriott
i watch the crowd accumulate:
bare shoulders wash past
like larval barnacles, attaching themselves
to banisters, lampposts, motorcycles, boats.
couples clamp hands; parents fasten
stroller seatbelts, folding chairs, four-year-olds;
tourists circle and reluctantly settle,
secreting calciferous shells
of shopping bags, t-shirts, saltwater taffy,
slippers and oven mitts
shaped like lobsters.

sails as sharp,
as cautious as scalpels
obliviously vivisect
the harbour sky, which coldly fades
into an amputated blue
reminiscent of veins and
underwater mountain ranges

in the weakening light, in a restaurant window
candles glow on all the tables. a single waiter
replaces a tablecloth, folding the old one
like a flag, while outside
a woman folds her sunglasses
and puts them in her purse, as her companion
presses a paper cup against his cheek,
smudging a maple leaf

brings back the memories doesn't it
says someone behind me as the band breaks into
sweet caroline and a camera
can't help but flash

there is a flare of colour over dartmouth, too far off
to be the fireworks we are waiting for, but enough
to cause boats to slow, suture themselves
to a dock or a particular patch of water,
switch off deck lights

and for the next ten minutes
an anticipation is tangible
in the tightening of grips
on cigarettes, cups, stroller-handles, cameras,
as the crowd stands tight-lipped

heightening with the first brief puff
like an intake of breath
of a cannon in dartmouth

expending expanding
dandelion galaxies
and daisy-chain vapours

and we cheer and stare,
entranced by the chance
to stand on guard for something
grander than ourselves,

we ogle and augur,
intend to remember.

on a pale blue wall with thirty-two windows,
in capitals faintly painted over, a contingent of characters
clings to brick: a. m. bell & co. limited.
long since sold to another co., the ancient concrete
accepts its title like an epitaph, though the handpainted name
retains a certain resilient charm - one abdominous ampersand
brandishes a cherished serif, pipe-shaped,
in its open mouth; a stands smartly at attention,
moustache thin and trim in its philtrum, and b's bilious ass
suggests it is still digesting breakfast. on one end
of where signpainters' scaffolding must once have been,
c and o carry on a conversation
with the little letters in limited, while the sistered ls in bell
sit still beneath a windowsill, ankles hanging stiffly
over hollis below. only m seems uneasy, leaning clumsily
on its one strong leg, an ailment unfelt by the rest of the font
except for an equally wonky w
in another word wedged in the wall's widest column:
hardware.

in a similarly pale blue sky, awkwardly wallpapered
with altocumulus, a wanderlustrous sun has found
another w, a prong of weathervane, two blocks west.
shadowed below is the roof of the bell, with its single brick chimney
outnumbered long ago by a throng
of mushroomed ventilators, themselves numbered 39, 40, 41
in cracked black paint, in the kind of handwriting anyone would have
while shaking a spraycan on a slanted roof,
with only an eavestrough to underline
whatever would slip from your mouth if you slipped
or dropped the aerosol,
to plummet quiet as an exclamation point
past rows of windows like luminous tombstones, through the very same air
signpainters must have stood in, one imagines
on scaffolding, or ladders, there isn't really
any way to say.

seaweed dries
in crumpled fistfuls
strewn across shorelines,

a scribbled calligraphy
filled with tongue-tied letters,
tangled ligatures.

i amass a small pile,
ply a dry patch of grass
with stilted lowercase,
slowly unsnarling
one letter at a time -

each gnarl snaps easily,
with the same brief pressure
as the tip of a pencil
or a camera's shutter,
gentle enough
to be accidental -

afterwards, forgetting the words
for the wind to find.

Strange that the more that is happening, the less I tend to write about what is happening. Here is a small update.

Earlier this year I took part in the MFA group exhibition Interrobang, at Anna Leonowens Gallery. I suggested the title and designed the invitation (right), and contributed a large inkjet print called index of first lines (32 months). The print consists of the first line of pixels from every photo taken with my previous digital camera (read more here).

I'm currently working on a blog version of index of first lines, as well as another blog project called queries. In the fall I'll be teaching a studio course called Blog Art: Artists' Blogs that will explore blogging as an art practice.

Also recently designed consumptuous.com for artist Shelley Miller.

index of first lines (32 months) at Anna Leonowens. On either side are artworks by Catherine Allen and Smriti Mehra. There are more photos of the show here.

I walk to downtown Halifax from my apartment on Summit Street nearly every day. On Cogswell just up from Gottingen, there is a window that catches my eye whenever I walk by - it's been curtained off from the inside of the house, and made into a kind of display case. Its contents have changed several times since I've lived here, and usually involve a kind of diorama assembled from various objects, sometimes with text. This week I noticed a new display: a faded globe and the words another world is possible spelled out with scrabble tiles. The idea that someone is regularly changing the window display intrigues me. I'm interested in self-publishing, particularly via the web, and this strikes me as a kind of real-world equivalent to blogging.

On another street I've often noticed a child's artwork taped up in a living-room window - crayon drawings on coloured paper, or awkwardly scissored snowflakes. Both window displays are arguably not very different than holiday decorations, lawn gnomes, garage-door murals, or other forms of domestic ornamentation. What makes the Cogswell window unusual is its serial content, and the intent behind the work - to project a message into a public space. I interpret the contents of the window as a personal response to the outside world. There is a similar intent behind graffiti, which often changes and can be decidedly political. But the Cogswell window is more subtle, quieter, less intrusive. If you don't know it's there, it's easy to walk by without noticing it. It seems less concerned with asserting possession of a space than with low-key broadcasting. Yet it is different than a promotional poster stapled to a telephone pole because its purpose is less obvious. It leaves itself open to interpretation.

There are also parallels with advertising, and this kind of temporary window display also reminds me of storefront windows with mannequins that change weekly, or soup-of-the-day chalkboards propped outside downtown cafes. There is a church near my apartment that maintains a billboard with motivational messages (my favourite so far has been "worry is a waste of the imagination"). But the Cogswell window inhabits a different space, somewhere between public and private. By closing it off from the room inside, the window's curators seem to distance themselves from the window display. Yet it remains intimately connected with whoever inhabits the house, and is essentially a vehicle for personal expression. The diorama is one-of-a-kind, and operates as an artwork in many ways.

Spotted on a sidewalk in Montreal last spring.

In a culture where we are bombarded constantly by advertising - it can be difficult to find a public place without a blaring radio or television, or a manufactured object without a logo of some kind - the Cogswell window is a refreshing attempt to broadcast back. I appreciate its capriciousness, its assertion of hope against newspaper and television reports that usually insist otherwise. Despite its global avowal, it is inherently local in scope and character. I see this kind of personal publication as an extension of web culture, which is increasingly participatory and user-driven. At a time when it seems every second person has started a blog, why not use a bedroom window as a kind of broadcasting medium?

Elsewhere in Halifax's north end, cultural enthusiasts have taken this concept to a whole other level. Gallery Deluxe Gallery is a miniature art gallery run in the attic of two Willow St. residents; it's open to the public and has hosted almost twenty exhibitions in its two years of existence. A few blocks away, the Anchor Archive serves as a public library for self-published material such as zines, as well as the livingroom of a little red house on Roberts Street. The ambitious archivists have even started an artist-in-residence program in their backyard shed. Like the Cogswell window, these steadfastly grassroots operations inhabit a curious space between public and private, embracing self-sufficiency and DIY culture, and demonstrating a sense of whimsy, confidence, and optimism that flies in the face of mainstream media.

At Port aux Basques we are caught in bureaucracy. A man in an orange vest and matching moustache isn't sure he can let us board the ferry because one of our passengers doesn't have a reservation. He mumbles something about a waiting list. The parking lot is vast and vacant, and this seems ridiculous. Looking at the massive ferry looming in the windshield and thinking, waiting list. There is no one here and it must hold a thousand. The man in the safety vest goes to make a call and we watch the half-dozen vehicles ahead of us disappear into the gullet of the ship, incredulous. The next crossing is not for twelve hours.

Later I find out: The Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act stipulates the number of passengers that may be carried on restricted sailings based up on the type and quantity of the commodity to be transported on the vessel. Paint, turpentine, batteries, propane, toilet bowl cleaner, adhesives, fire extinguishers, oxygen for hospitals. "They're only taking fifty-nine passengers today." But they wave us on anyway.

MV Joseph and Clara Smallwood, along with her sister ship MV Caribou, is the largest icebreaking ferry in the world. Her capacity includes 1200 passengers and 370 automobiles or 77 tractor trailers. The vehicle deck is packed with eighteen-wheelers, but the passenger decks are empty. My travelling companions are napping and I have an entire section of empty seats to myself. On my right there are two model ships encased in plexiglass, on my left two vending machines. I have a notebook and a novel, Michael Crummey's The Wreckage.

This ship is a museum in many ways. Though commissioned in 1990 her decor is haunted by various decades, none of them later than the eighties. Overly-ornate carpets, a garish cafeteria, dimly-lit hallways lined with faded photos, outdated advertising. A black and white photo of Joey Smallwood lends a kind of saintly eccentricity to the man; a halo of smokestack hair, glasses as thick as ferry windows, spine leaning into sky. A small chalkboard near the steward's office announces our estimated time of arrival at North Sydney: 18:00. Eighteen hundred hours.

Travel is riddled with small delays, limbos, loopholes. The half-hour in the parking lot. Another half-hour or so after they let us board but before the ferry goes anywhere. And then there is the half-hour the ferry finds herself perpetually lost in, somewhere between Newfoundland and Atlantic Standard Time. She borrowed a half-hour when I crossed before Christmas and now on my way home to Halifax she is reluctant to give it back.

As I am writing the boat has started moving, so gradually I hadn't noticed, but rapidly now - I look up to find houses, streetlamps, long fences drifting past the windows, distorted eerily in the doubled glass. A few smaller outbuildings, a wiry guardrail, modestly mossy hills giving way to balding rock, then eventually a muted white which is just as much nothing as it is a sky. Cotton batting.

On the outside deck I watch the sun set behind clouds, as if from a window with the curtains closed. After dark the ferry's wide trail of wake slips quickly into oblivion, a darkness deeper than the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I want to photograph the ferry at night, the glow of light on the smokestacks. I haven't brought a tripod but laying my camera on a guardrail works almost as well. Somewhere below me in the gut of the ship I can feel a constant shaking, as if every nut and bolt is nervous. I can see my breath. I shiver, and step back inside.