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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Sherwood Forest
Bruce Damer
Original: PR_1997_sherwood_001_o.jpg | 1569 * 1176px | 823.0 KB
"Sherwood Forest" Community was an experiment in virtual community building and culture in a constructivist Cyberspace environment called AlphaWorld, one of the cityscapes in the Active Worlds environment. "Sherwood Forest" was built and populated by members of the Contact Consortium, an organization dedicated to studying, promoting and enriching the Internet-hosted virtual worlds as a new space for human contact and culture. Consortium members have years of experience in designing and running MUDs, MOOs and in computer graphics world building exercises and applied this to the "Sherwood Forest" Community Project.
The purpose of "Sherwood Forest" was to design a very natural, attractive setting with woodlands, flowers and flowing water and then attract a community of users to build a village community in that space. A unique feature of Active Worlds is that it allows users all over the Internet with nothing more than a Windows PC and a modem connection to navigate and build in a large virtual space while interacting with others through "avatars" (virtual representations of other users). AlphaWorld represented a large scale extension of the early work of Farmer and Morningstar on Habitat (1986-92). Using this capability, "Sherwood" community planners recruited builders from some of the 100,000 registered citizens of AlphaWorld.
Why did we pick the theme of "Sherwood Forest"? Apart from the attractive fable of Robin Hood (which supplied some creative roles), it turns out that the Luddite movement against technology began in the "Sherwood Forest" region of Britain. We felt that if there was a rebellion against life in this new virtual worlds technology, it might as well happen inside a virtual "Sherwood Forest"!
The purpose of "Sherwood Forest" was to design a very natural, attractive setting with woodlands, flowers and flowing water and then attract a community of users to build a village community in that space. A unique feature of Active Worlds is that it allows users all over the Internet with nothing more than a Windows PC and a modem connection to navigate and build in a large virtual space while interacting with others through "avatars" (virtual representations of other users). AlphaWorld represented a large scale extension of the early work of Farmer and Morningstar on Habitat (1986-92). Using this capability, "Sherwood" community planners recruited builders from some of the 100,000 registered citizens of AlphaWorld.
Why did we pick the theme of "Sherwood Forest"? Apart from the attractive fable of Robin Hood (which supplied some creative roles), it turns out that the Luddite movement against technology began in the "Sherwood Forest" region of Britain. We felt that if there was a rebellion against life in this new virtual worlds technology, it might as well happen inside a virtual "Sherwood Forest"!
Bruce Damer (USA) holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, Canada and an MSEE from the University of Southern California. Currently he is a member of the faculty at San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies Program. He formed DigitalSpace Corporation to serve as a catalyst for applications of virtual worlds in business and education and he cofounded the Biota.org SIG to seed digital biota in virtual worlds.