By Roxksie | SL Random Art Crew | May 2026
This last year has been one of the most intense and formative periods of my art life. Not just because of what I made, but because of what the practice became. It stopped being a collection of pieces and started being an ecosystem: physical, digital, written, performed, archived, and very much alive.
I want to walk through what that looked like because, honestly, even I did not fully see its shape until I stopped to look back.
The work between worlds
A lot of my practice this year has lived in the gap between physical and digital space. Painting, drawing, charcoal, oil pastel, canvas, photography, writing, video, sound design, Second Life environments, Blender builds, screen recordings. The tools keep multiplying, but the questions stay the same: what happens when digital Life becomes intimate? When a virtual space starts shaping how you understand yourself? When the screen is not a window but a room you have been living in for years?
Second Life has been central to that. It is not a hobby platform for me. It has not been for a long time. It is a studio, a gallery, a stage, an archive, and sometimes a strange little mirror held up to everything else. My exhibition history there goes back to 2020, through SLEA and independent builds: Moments of Reflection, Candyland, Glinka shows, immersive curation, region-building, and community work. This year, I developed The Gods Are Still Speaking, a mythology exhibit planned for World Building Hub: a poster trail through Greek and Roman mythology, featuring research panels on figures such as Arete and Aristarete. Second Life is where I think spatially, test ideas in real time, and build things that would cost thousands to fabricate in a physical gallery.
And increasingly, I want to drag that work off the screen and into the room. Projectors, mirrors, fabric, mannequins, plush textures, avatars made bodily, spaces that feel uncomfortably close but oddly comforting. I want viewers standing inside the residue of a digital culture, not observing it from a safe distance. Because we do not live neatly online or offline anymore. We move between platforms, personas, memories, feeds, rooms, and bodies, and my practice lives in that collision.
Self Being
The biggest project of the year has been Self Being, my Practice 5 work for my fine art degree. It started as a broad enquiry into selfhood and digital presence and gradually resolved around something very specific: personal tracking practice as artistic material.
The symbolic anchor is toast. Yes, toast. The most mundane, human, unglamorous ritual imaginable, turned into the focal point for a tension I have been circling for months: the gap between a clinical data-self (the version of you that exists in spreadsheets, step counts, calorie logs, screen time reports) and a felt-self (the version that burns the toast, forgets to eat, stares out the window, and feels inexplicably sad at 3 pm on a Tuesday).
The planned output is a Second Life build with two layers of text: one data, one felt-self. Ambient sound. A captioned screen-recorded walkthrough. It is carefully scoped across four two-hour sessions because energy is not infinite, and I have learned the hard way what happens when I pretend it is.
The theoretical spine runs through Jenny Odell, Tim Wu, Seneca, and Zhuangzi. The artists I have been thinking alongside include Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Olafur Eliasson, Agnes Martin, Joanna Holland, and Anahita Harding. I wrote a full academic essay on Holland’s work this year, connecting crip time and her piece Out of the Blue to what I am doing with Self Being. That essay mattered to me. It was the first time I articulated clearly how disability, temporality, and artistic practice are not separate concerns in my work. They are the same concern.
Writing as practice
One of the surprises of this year has been how much writing became part of the work. Not just academic writing, but literary fiction.
I wrote The Sound He Could Not Bear, a horror-inflected story about a court musician that ended up being brutally honest about fan culture and systemic rot. I co-wrote a short story about puppeteers and a caregiving machine. I wrote Five Minutes, a dark literary fiction piece about the Earth stopping its rotation, complete with a collaboratively written epilogue. I rebuilt The Exhibition at Blackfen House after identifying that the earlier version was structurally looping. These were not side projects. They were practising: narrative as material, storytelling as a way of thinking through the same questions my visual work asks.
I also ran a three-way intellectual exchange covering evolution, AI environmental impact, human extinction versus civilisation collapse, and arrived at a formulation I keep coming back to: “the verdict is unknowable; the exhibit is not.” That sentence sits at the centre of how I think about making work right now.
Disability, energy, and how the work gets made
I have MS. I am dyslexic. I am a registered disabled student. These are not footnotes to my practice; they shape it structurally. I work in roughly two-hour sessions. I plan around energy, not ambition. I scope projects not by what would be ideal but by what is actually achievable without wrecking myself for the week.
That constraint has made the work better, not worse. It forces clarity. It demands I know what matters before I start, because I cannot afford to waste a session finding out. Crip time is not a limitation I work around. It is a creative condition I work within, and increasingly, it is something the work itself is about.
What I have actually learned
Looking back, the real development this year is not any single piece or project. It is the shift from making art about digital Life to building situations where digital Life becomes material, spatial, and bodily. I am taking the screen seriously as a place where memory, intimacy, identity, and culture are formed, then dragging that screen into the room and making people stand with it.
My practice is becoming a world, not just a set of works. It is abstractionist, digitally led, narrative-driven, physically grounded when it needs to be, and shaped at every level by the reality of how I actually live: the energy I have, the tools I use, the platforms I have built on for years, the questions I cannot stop asking.
The next stage is more physical installations. More Second Life environments are being brought into offline contexts. More writing. More risk. More confidence in the fact that the virtual, the personal, and the handmade do not cancel each other out. They collide, and that collision is where the work lives.
Thought for a couple of seconds
Yes. This one is “A Year of Building the Work Into a World”, and it needs an influences / references source section rather than a heavy factual bibliography. The article is mainly personal practice reflection, but it names theorists, artists, Second Life, SLEA, disability/crip time, digital culture, installation, sound, video, and virtual worlds, so a clean reference list is worth adding.
Clean source section to paste
Sources and further reading
Second Life Official Site
https://secondlife.com/
Second Life Destination Guide, Art Galleries
https://secondlife.com/destinations/art/galleries
Second Life Endowment for the Arts
https://slendowmentforthearts.wordpress.com/
Second Life Wiki, Machinima
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Machinima
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/
Jenny Odell, official website
https://jennyodell.com/
Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317706/the-attention-merchants-by-tim-wu/
Tim Wu, official website
https://timwu.org/
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, Internet Classics Archive
https://classics.mit.edu/Seneca/shortness.html
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zhuangzi
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/
Bill Viola, official website
https://www.billviola.com/
Tate, Bill Viola
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bill-viola-2333
Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2786-pipilotti-rist/
MoMA, Pipilotti Rist
https://www.moma.org/artists/7926
Olafur Eliasson, official website
https://olafureliasson.net/
Tate, Olafur Eliasson
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/olafur-eliasson-5258
Agnes Martin, Guggenheim
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/agnes-martin
Tate, Agnes Martin
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/agnes-martin-1595
Joanna Holland, artist website
https://www.joannaholland.com/
Anahita Harding, artist website
https://www.anahitaharding.com/
Tate, Installation Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/i/installation-art
Tate, Video Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/v/video-art
Tate, Sound Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/sound-art
Tate, Performance Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art
Tate, Digital Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/digital-art
Tate, Virtual Reality
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/v/virtual-reality
Tate, Preserving Immersive Media
https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/preserving-immersive-media
V&A, Digital Art
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/digital-art
MoMA, Media and Performance
https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/media-and-performance
MoMA, Installation
https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/installation
Art21 Magazine, Art & the Avatar: Ambiguity of Identity in Virtual 3D Worlds
https://magazine.art21.org/2010/04/21/art-the-avatar-ambiguity-of-identity-in-virtual-3d-worlds/
Digicult, Second Life Art
https://digicult.it/digimag/issue-012/second-life-art/
Disability Arts Online, Crip Time
https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/crip-time/
Disability Arts Online
https://disabilityarts.online/
The Sociological Review, Crip Time and the Disabled Body
https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/june-2021/crip-time/crip-time-and-the-disabled-body/
Sins Invalid, 10 Principles of Disability Justice
https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice
International Journal of Communication, Virtual Worlds, Disability, and Digital Capital
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/5099/1639
The Ability of Place: Digital Topographies of the Virtual Human on Ethnographia Island, Second Life
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/704924
Joan Mitchell Foundation, Career Documentation for the Visual Artist
https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/career-documentation-for-the-visual-artist
Tate Papers, Documentation and the Information of Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/29/documentation-and-the-information-of-art
Best short version
Sources and further reading
Second Life Official Site
https://secondlife.com/
Second Life Destination Guide, Art Galleries
https://secondlife.com/destinations/art/galleries
Second Life Endowment for the Arts
https://slendowmentforthearts.wordpress.com/
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/
Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317706/the-attention-merchants-by-tim-wu/
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
https://classics.mit.edu/Seneca/shortness.html
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zhuangzi
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/
Bill Viola, official website
https://www.billviola.com/
Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2786-pipilotti-rist/
Olafur Eliasson, official website
https://olafureliasson.net/
Agnes Martin, Guggenheim
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/agnes-martin
Joanna Holland, artist website
https://www.joannaholland.com/
Anahita Harding, artist website
https://www.anahitaharding.com/
Tate, Installation Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/i/installation-art
Tate, Video Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/v/video-art
Tate, Sound Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/sound-art
Tate, Digital Art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/digital-art
Tate, Preserving Immersive Media
https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/preserving-immersive-media
V&A, Digital Art
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/digital-art
Disability Arts Online, Crip Time
https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/crip-time/
The Sociological Review, Crip Time and the Disabled Body
https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/june-2021/crip-time/crip-time-and-the-disabled-body/
International Journal of Communication, Virtual Worlds, Disability, and Digital Capital
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/5099/1639
The Ability of Place: Digital Topographies of the Virtual Human on Ethnographia Island, Second Life
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/704924
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