Mixed Realities Video by Emma Puente :: Documentation for Mixed Realities, an international networked art exhibition and symposium curated by Jo-Anne Green, February 7 – April 15, 2008, Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston, Massachusetts), Ars Virtua (Second Life) and Turbulence.org :: Music and Narration by Helen Thorington.

Mixed Reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects can co-exist and interact in real-time.

Mixed Realities was an exhibition and symposium that explored the convergence — through cyberspace — of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks. Mixed Realities linked and overlayed the Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life). Second Life is a shared, synthetic, 3-D environment through which people can interact in real-time by means of a virtual self or avatar. Although it’s an imaginary place, it is often able to “masquerade as real” (Richard Bartle) because it approximates reality persuasively enough to facilitate player immersion. Audience members – who were embodied as avatars in Second Life, browsing the works at Turbulence.org, and/or physically present in the gallery – interacted with the works and with one another. Thus, Mixed Realities enabled people who were distributed across multiple physical and virtual spaces to communicate with one another and share experiences in real time.

Five works were commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. specifically for the Mixed Realities exhibition. Collectively, they combined sensor, video, sound, streaming, webcam, projection, processing, world wide web, and 3-D technologies to produce immersive, interactive and participatory performances and installations. They allowed audiences to experience real and fictional places simultaneously in Imaging Beijing and The Vitruvian World; debate the value of virtual labor and currency in No Matter; communicate physical data from multiple sources through Remote; and question mediated communication itself in Caterwaul.

The competition was juried by Yasmine Abbas, Founder, Neo-Nomad; Michael Frumin, Technical Director Emeritus, Eyebeam; James Morgan, Director, Ars Virtua; Trebor Scholz, Founder, Institute for Distributed Creativity; and Helen Thorington, Co-Director, Turbulence.