Druids in the Crash Zone: a campfire story of time zones and frame rates

At Halloween the veil between worlds becomes thin. Hauntings are played out. Level violations may occur. Objects get beached.

Digital capture and deposition move objects across borders. There is a permeability between virtual worlds and what is named prehistory: obdurate lithic cultures and the disappearance of a firm place. I am going to look at two residual spaces, the undrained swamp of Secondlife and the islands of Orkney. This is work done in collaboration with artists Ian Dawson and Francis Summers and archaeologists Marta Diaz Guardamino and Andrew Jones. Our relation is skeuomorphic; the transdisciplianry application of methodologies moves objects too.

As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualisation technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record [Reilly 2015] we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois. We applied visualisation technology learned from archaeology to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life. We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalisation of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and -uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponised by our virtual friends.