Concordia University / How to SL

The purpose of this unique workshop was to train staff, partners, and any other contact within the Indigenous New Media Arts community how to create an account, navigate and visit our virtual Gallery in Second Life. The team was led by the artist, Skawennati (also co-director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace), Shirley Ceravolo (the Transmediation Coordinator of AbTeC Gallery, as well as a Second Life-using artist in her own right) and Nancy Townsend (the Associate Director of the Skins workshop).

This workshop took place exceptionally over Zoom so that participants could follow along via screen-share while creating their own accounts. Some computers with less processing power have been known to struggle with Second Life, so we created this workshop specifically so that people could either watch and learn or receive live assistance as they went through the process of creating an avatar for themselves.

The first hour covered the basics of the history of Second Life and the birth of our cyberspace headquarters: AbTeC Island. AbTeC Island was originally the set space for Skawennati’s many machinima projects but has since expanded into a gathering space (especially during Covid), a virtual art gallery, a “museum” of machinima sets and costumes as well as site for tours and workshops.

Once those who were able to run the software created their basic avatars, we brought them all in-world and taught them how to navigate our island, explore the vast other worlds of Second Life and apply basic customizations to their avatar’s appearance. With this workshop, participants were not only introduced to this fascinating cyberspace tool, but they were prepared to participate in our future AbTeC Gallery events.