Artists Statement

LPDT2 alludes Roland Barthes’s book ‘Le Plaisir du Texte’, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s new media art work La Plissure du Texte (‘The Pleating of theText’), created in 1983. LPDT2 does not attain its textual input from discrete individuals but from generative text which is being harvested from the online Gutenberg Project. Thus the project brings together the voices of many authors and epochs, pleated into a poetic waterfall of distributed authorship that is mapped both onto a three dimensional metaverse architecture as well as its (robotic avatar) inhabitants.

• Roy Ascott is an artist and theorist whose research is invested in cybernetics, technoetics, telematics, and syncretism. He is the founder and director of the Planetary Collegium, and DeTao Master of Technoetic Arts at DTMA Shanghai. His exhibitions range from the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica and the Shanghai Biennale. His theoretical work is widely published, translated and referenced.
• Elif Ayiter is the chief editor of the academic journal Metaverse Creativity with Intellect publishers and is active as a virtual builder and fashion designer both in Second Life and the OpenSim.
• Max Moswitzer is a multiple Ars Electronica award recipient, who in recent years has collaborated extensively with Chris Marker for whom he also built Ouvroir, a virtual three dimensional museum in Second Life and the New Genres Grid.
• Selavy Oh has been created as an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life in February 2007. Since then, she showed her work in various exhibition both inside the virtual world and in mixed-reality shows.

Full text and images (PDF) p.  170-173