Sarah Higley | Dancing With Art
Statement
Hypatia Pickens is the Second Life avatar of Sarah Higley, a medievalist and Professor of English at the University of Rochester where she teaches Old English, Middle English, Middle Welsh, creative writing and film studies. She is a fiction writer, poet and artist by avocation, and she reads her work at various venues in Second Life where she also has a small gallery of paintings. Lately she has turned her attention to the making of "machinima" in Second Life. “Dancing with Art” is a pun: it takes artifice to turn a virtual dance into a believable one; but also to dance inside the art one has made. Here, Hypatia has taken advantage of Second Life's ability to attach any object to an avatar's body, and this film demonstrates her immersion in a technology that literally surrounds her, frames her, and follows her. Machinima (and Second Life in general) has liberated her by providing her with an affordable means to build, act, and film. The island is her own, textured with a medieval manuscript page she bought at a conference on medieval studies, and each painting she “wears” depicts a creature from medieval legend. The story of “Melusine,” a fairy who is fated to become half-snake and who must hide in her bath was recorded by Jean d'Arras in the 14th century. The Green Man is an age-old nature figure that overlaps with the medieval “wild man.” And the wolf, Hypatia's favorite, is both admired and abhorred in medieval Germanic legend as a creature that is both warlike and deathly. Both medieval and Second Life artists have helped Hypatia dance with art: Alpha.Tribe provided her with her outlandish look and clothing; Dysfunctional Dolly Designs with the haunting drum beat coming from the vase, and the Ministry of Motion has brought her to second self to life. This virtual world not only provides people with an "embodied" universe, in ways the two-dimensional Internet cannot, it brings artifacts to life and creative minds from all over the world together.