Emergent Imagination: A Developing Framework for the Analysis of Artworks in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for the analysis of artworks created in virtual worlds by extending Lichty's four modalities of art in virtual worlds, identified as transmediated, cybrid, client/browser, and ever gent. A selection of artworks from the Kritical Work in SL exhibitions undertaken in 2008 and 2009 are analysed for the qualities of imaginative experience and the articulation of a new set of movements of the imagination from (and between) physical and virtual world spaces indicates a potency of virtual worlds for the investigation and creation of artistic practice.