Middle Life

Middle Life is a film shot entirely in Second Life, a virtual world that is now mostly a derelict abandoned virtual ruin. In the early to mid 2000's Second Life positioned itself as an open free space to do and express whatever you wanted in a 3D simulated environment and was first conceived by the entrepreneur Philip Rosedale after a trip to Burning Man. In 2008, when the artist entered Second Life and created this film, the space was thriving. The film is essentially a personal documentation of the artist's journey while traversing through Second Life, as she both marvels at the space like a tourist, is critical of its limitations and overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of pornographic imagery. Watching Middle Life ten years later in 2018, raises critical questions about digital utopias, the limits of virtual reality, the ubiquitous and covert presence of camera technology, beauty, capitalism, the relevance of physicality and representations of reality.