our conscious minds.” How much of our daily lives is spend remembering events of the past, or perhaps remembering a dream from the night before, or fantasizing about a future we hope will come to pass? How much of our waking hours do we spend absorbed in a novel or lost in the cinematic realities of the digital effects so pervasive in film today? We obviously live in a mixed reality of the “real” and “imaginary”. We transition between our inner and outer lives multiple times during the course of a single day. And our virtual life is just a continuation on these switches between different realities. Vichan smiles: “So, to me, this amazing reality of flying avatars, that have the strength of Hercules and the magical abilities of Merlin, is not qualitatively different then my experience of the artistic realities I have experienced in the plays of Shakespeare or so many other great works of art. It is simply one of many different realities I experience every day.” And this causes the passion with his artistic work in Second Life: “To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of this virtual world is how it facilitates the creative process and enables the mind to manifest its abstract constructs into an experience that can be shared by an amazingly large and diverse community of unique and talented people. SL, like anything else in my experience, is an extension of my complex reality. It enables me to explore my creative energies
and concepts in a way that is quite unique. It was this potential that brought me to SL and it is an adventure that has only just begun.” So, let us follow him into his latest adventure, the world of William Shakespeare. He thought long and hard about this project: “In my life, the theater has and always had a strong influence. If I think of my most memorable experiences in the theater it is probably going to involve the work of Shakespeare. The stories he wove and the characters he created live in my mind with such clarity and color. They are always there just below the surface. I have been involved in creating works based on Shakespeare’s plays for quite some time here in SL. I began creating small versions of these Shakespeare installations…and I began to expand on the work I was doing with Shakespeare’s plays.” “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is a drama about the raise, turn to tyrant and fall of a king. Vichan’s installation is entitled “Cries and Whispers” (a reference to Ingmar Bergman’s film): “It is situated in a post apocalyptic world where only the cries and whispers of Shakespeare’s characters float through the ether of a crumbling dystopia. This can be taken literally in a temporal sense but it can also be understood metaphorically as the aftermath of the assault on the arts that is taking place by reactionary forces in society that seek to cut funding to the arts and censor artistic expression based
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