I’ve just had a chance to read and juxtapose two recently done articles: Remnants of the Biosphere (from BLDGBLOG) and Whatever Happened to Second Life? (from PC Pro).

The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.

I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.

Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.

This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?

A friend sent me to a great design/film tech site the other day: Whitevoid. I like their aesthetic and mission – very much trying to figure out the best interactions between people and their digital accoutrements.

Here are a couple of their videos on the ol’ youtube (though the Whitevoid site is probably the best way to view their work – I just need visuals in my posts, for neurotic reasons, I guess):

And another, more along the lines of a special category of digital media we call “the courtyard of gizmos” – things related to the hypothetical atrium of the Cube:

These ten were distinguished as the best from the three most recent TED conferences. There are two that are intriguing to me: the Seadragon/Photosynth demo by Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the touchscreen demo from Jeff Han (blogged here).

What I like so much about the Photosynth idea is its involvement of the personal contributor in a meaningful grand project (utilizing the Web 2.0 user value-added dynamic which is becoming more typical as the web ages away from anarchy and toward connectivity). I also saw this Photosynth stuff mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article (08.21.08, by Walter Mossberg) when I was waiting around in my bank the other day. The online version of Photosynth is there to be played with, but there is still some foibles to be shaken out, such as not having completely “synthy” photos – ones that for whatever reason don’t entirely work with the 3D walk-through system.