Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Environmental Portraits in Second Life



This is an assignment that I did in Second Life for a new media class. For class, our assignment was to create an environmental portrait using Second Life. An environmental portrait is a portrait in which an environment of a person is portrayed. The environment says a lot about the person. By looking at a person’s surroundings, one can discover what is important to a person and what his of her life is like.

In my first environmental portrait I chose to portray a housewife. This woman is dressed as a stereotypical housewife and is surrounded by her kitchen. There are prescription bottles all over the floor and bottles of alcohol scattered to show her secret escape and loneliness. She is holding a baby, which is leaching onto her and a gun, which shows her security and vulnerability. There is a blow up doll in the scene to show the woman’s desire for love.

The second environmental portrait I did was of Britney Spears. She is shown in her living room that is scattered with alcohol, a wig, a camera, and her faceless children. The camera is meant to represent paparazzi and her faceless children are represented as objects rather than people. Britney is bald and wearing a school girl outfit with no underwear. She is performing on her living room stage because she cannot separate reality from fantasy.

Using Second Life can be very frustrating. I spent so long wondering different lands looking for objects for my characters. It is also very interesting to see all of the different characters that use Second Life. Building objects in Second Life can also be very frustrating but I found it got much easier the more that I practiced. I think Second Life is not something that I will continue to use but it was overall very interesting to discover this other world.

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