A magical scene blending seasons and a woman in floral attire.

Welcome to Virtual Reality

Some art hangs upon a wall.

Some art asks you to step inside.

Immersive art is art experienced from within.

Rather than standing outside the finished work and looking at it, the visitor enters the artwork as their avatar. They may wander through it, listen, discover hidden details, follow a story, encounter symbolic figures, or simply remain still and experience the atmosphere surrounding them.

For many years, I have created places that could not exist in the physical world—gardens built from tarot, temples rising around enormous archetypal figures, landscapes that change with the seasons, and pathways where story, music, movement, and meaning unfold around the visitor in avatar form.

These are not simply images to be viewed from a distance. They are worlds made to be entered.

In these worlds, I appear as JulietteSurrealDreaming—Juliette, for short—my virtual artist-self. She is not merely a character I play. She is the form through which I enter the work, build within it, and experience it alongside others.

Over the years, these creations have included intimate personal environments, large public installations, collaborative exhibitions, commissioned and grant-supported projects, virtual performances, art adventures, and films made inside the worlds themselves.

The technology has changed. The impulse has not.

I have always created thresholds. Here, they are made of light, landscape, sound, story, and possibility.

What Is a Virtual World?

A 3D WORLD

A virtual world is a three-dimensional online environment that we enter through a computer.

Each visitor creates an avatar—a visible digital form of themselves—and logs in to move through the world as that avatar.

We can walk, fly, explore, meet other people, attend events, and interact with the places and objects around us.

I AM AN AVATAR

My immersive art has been created within Second Life and the OpenSim worlds of Craft-Worlds and Wolf Territories.

These platforms provide the virtual land, but what appears upon that land is built and shaped by the people who inhabit it.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF STUDIO

Much as a painter begins with a canvas, a virtual artist may begin with an empty region of digital space.

From there, we can create terrain, architecture, sculpture, gardens, pathways, lighting, atmosphere, sound, movement, and entire experiences through which others can travel.

Preserving What Was Never Meant to Last

Virtual reality is an impermanent art form.

Worlds change.

Regions disappear.

Servers close.

An installation that took months to imagine and build may one day simply cease to exist.

Because of that, I have always felt it important to document the more substantial worlds and installations I create. Sometimes that means photographs. Sometimes it means film—what we call machinima—created either by me or by filmmakers who were drawn to the work and wanted to capture the experience of moving through it.

A film can never quite reproduce what it feels like to enter one of these spaces as an avatar, to wander through it, hear its music, discover its pathways, and encounter it from within. We call this immersive—to immerse yourself in a 3D artistic landscape is awe-inspiring, to say the least.

But it leaves a trace.

The two films below preserve two of those traces: The Temple of the Divine Feminine and The Tarot Garden.

Temple of the Divine Feminine

In 2022, I received a six-month SLEA grant for a project titled Temple of the Divine Feminine. Although the grant was awarded to me, I broadened the project and transformed it into a women artists’ collective.

Within virtual reality, I have created under several avatar names: JulietteSurrealDreaming, SecondHandTutti, Banba Muircastle, Space Cadet, and, of course, KismaKSR.

ADDITIONAL VIDEOS FROM THE INSTALLATION

SLEA R2 Temple of the Divine Feminine 6-mos grant

East ~ Welcome

The South Temple

#2 South Temple vid

West Temple

North Temple

The Tarot Garden

The Tarot Garden was a six-month immersive installation created by my avatar SecondHandTutti after receiving a Linden Endowment for the Arts award (LEA17). Open from August 11 through December 30, 2018, it was inspired by the extraordinary Tarot Garden created by the late Niki de Saint Phalle in Capalbio, Italy, between 1979 and 1996.

This machinima takes the viewer on a journey through the installation’s 22 Major Arcana. At approximately six minutes into the film, artist Venus Adored performs her particle creation, The Tarot Carousel. Wizardoz Chrome journeys through the garden wearing The Fool, an outfit created for her by SecondHandTutti.

Music: “Don’t Look Back” by Bliss and “Indigo” by Shinnobu.

ADDITIONAL VIDEOS ABOUT THE INSTALLATION

LEA17 Tarot Garden Phase 1

LEA17 Tarot Garden Phase 2

The SH Tutti Blog

SH Tutti flicker

Perhaps You’d Like to Step Inside

I am always delighted to meet artists who are curious about creating in virtual reality.

You do not need to know how to build a world or even where to begin. Curiosity is enough.

If something you have seen here makes you wonder what your own art might become in a three-dimensional, immersive landscape, send me an email. I would be glad to help you take those first steps and introduce you to the wonderful world of virtual reality.

After all, every virtual artist begins the same way—

by stepping through the door.

Welcome to Virtual Reality

Immersive art is art experienced from within.