Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters (2008), a collaborative work by artists Kate Richards, Kareen Ely-Harper and Angela Thomas, is a performance and in-world Second-Life installation that explores the potential for Second Life to operate as a ‘discursive design space’ where visitors experience the motivations and emotional journey of a character while exploring and ‘making personal sense’ of a narrative’s ‘universal’ themes. Here the object is Shakespeare’s Macbeth explored in seven scenes that Second Life users can interact with and within following their introduction via the installations entry point. Visitors can actively remake and co-create the scenes in question providing a means to creatively workshop the actions and potential interactions of the subjects and objects of the narrative. The work explores the potential for online media to breath ‘new life into old texts, taking classical narratives to new realms of possibility with diverse, unexpected, and educational outcomes…’
Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters marks the denial of authorial sense making in the age of networked and participatory media, begging questions as to the function of universality in the realisation of shared spaces of generative interaction. The work might also be read as challenging/exploring the perceived continuities, between new and legacy media systems, and exploring the celebration of the multiple at the preference to the ‘universal’.