Paul Sermon & Charlotte Gould

Paul Sermon – Oxford, 1966/ Charlotte Gould – Salford, 1967

Period of residence: March – May 2010

The aim of Sermon and Gould’s current collaborative practice is to critically investigate how online participants in three-dimensional worlds, Second Life in particular, socially interact within innovative creative environments and appropriate these cultural experiences as part of their everyday lives, whilst questioning what is ‘real’ in this relationship. This collaborative practice brings together ethnographic and creative practice-based methods that identify and develop original innovative interactive applications, interface designs and necessary cultural and sociological knowledge. So as to explore this emerging relationship between first and second life, Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould have developed interfaces that focus on the interaction and exchange between online and offline identities through social practices, such as performance, narrative, embodiment, activism, place and identity construction in the public environment as a platform for potential social and cultural change. Due to the urban setting of the installations, these augmented Second Life interfaces are designed for large format public video screens.

p.sermon(at)salford.ac.uk

www.creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/gould/ –    www.paulsermon.org/