I was in Curia, a small village in northern Portugal.  It thrived as a spa town in the early twentieth century and people still went there in the 1990s to be blessed and to take the water. When I strolled back into the foyer of the grand hotel that dominated the main street I accidentally chose the wrong door and entered an old Salon that had been turned into a conference room. A group of villagers were watching a PowerPoint presentation.

At that moment I began to despair about the impact of computing technology. Despite its power and versatility, computer software involved denaturing people, corralling them into dark rooms and forcing them to observe lists — usually made up of commands on how to present and sell. It denied basic physical movement and propagandized a specific aspiration that we have come to question less and less: financial success.

People could have been looking at works of art or working the fields but instead they were becoming alien to their bodies and desires. At the same time art practice was becoming increasingly theoretical, conceptual and irrelevant to those people staring at what were essentially empty walls filled by a succession of lists that were the marketing consultant's dos and dont's for success in the mdoern world.

I see a corollary between lessons in marketing to peasant Portuguese and the financial success of conceptual artists. Apparently radical, the conceptual artists who have dominated the headlines for the past twenty years have enjoyed fame and fortune despite an apparent  desire to shock and thereby presumably to change the worldview of observers. But change was happening elsewhere. The strictures of the highly successful computing industry had taken over the visual world. Alongside this, an aesthetic that encouraged huge financial success in art was only mildly, if at all, ironic.

We have been using our eyes and inquisitiveness to pursue money and make an artistic virtue of it. That alone should provoke us into looking again at the relationship between conceptual art and what used to be called the human condition. Art is too often mocking of people who live with poorly constructed aspirations.

But leaving commercialism, or art as design, to one side, there is in the arrival of information technology a new form of abstraction that makes little sense to the millions of people it affects.

The software industry is both reductionistic and culturally sophisticated; simultaneously it operates with mechanical precision and encourages new moral aspirations.

Code reduces human behaviour using abstract languages that only the experts comprehend, much like conceptual art. 

IT strategists dominate our lives by seeking “windows of opportunity” to change our behaviour. They approach life and society as I would have done earlier in my own life, with the idea that I have influence and can effect change. They have adopted the roles that I used to believe belonged to politically motivated writers and artists. Information technology is all about change.

Yet people’s minds, attitudes and outlook on life have been changed by the software industry in ways we don’t really understand. And also in ways we have chosen not to explore. At the same time, art in its many guises has drifted into overt commercialism, theoretical doubt, the culture of differentiation for its own sake, or, as is the case with modern screen drama, into the manipulation of emotion into bite-sized denouements and resolutions that are too evidently opportunistic.  

Conceptual art, as it hits the headlines, and IT now share this same character of opportunism. We see in artistic practice an internal conversation that excludes the public and fails to engage with the major trends in modern culture. Principal among the effects of IT is the reduction of culture to code, of behaviour to rigid patterns, of interaction to discipline and the giving over of memory to the machine.

I'm happy to see now that a younger generation of conceptual artists is tackling issues that are pertinent to basic human nature and doing so in a way that attracts the eye and the mind together. That's why I jumped at the chance of working with Scott Kildall.

Scott Kildall's work constantly invites us into a greater awareness of our relationship with the technologies around us and their impact on our consciousness. This relates not just to the physical presence of technology but also its impact on how we think, communicate and feel. He does so through the refined aesthetics that bring us pleasure as viewers. We ’re drawn into the work as inquisitors trying to work out a puzzle that is engaging because its initial impact is pleasurable.

The effect of the computer on how we think, and the impact of massive artificial sources of computing memory augmenting human memory, are neglected areas of inquiry. So too is the larg- scale transition of our societies to a culture that systematically reduces human behaviour to its code-replicable elements (and constantly celebrates that process).  We don't investigate what it means to replace our memorial needs with the machine or to reproduce behaviour in code.

On the plus side we can be better organized and more efficient and the disconnectedness of like minds around the world is finally being overcome by broadband communications.

On the negative side we no longer feel a collective impulse to memorialize life — to make selective aspects of life larger so that they are indelible in our memories.   Nor have we investigated how and why computer-speak has won an undeclared war on the imagination.

When I first starting talking to Scott it was evident that some of these were his concerns too and he was addressing them through a series of projects that explored the production of memory. At the same time he was seeking ways to reposition the idea of the memorial.  It’s vitally important, in an age when machines memorise for us, that we re-conceptualise memory and its uses. We need to go back into all forms of art practice and explore how people have made the detail of life memorable and ask what’s different now.

Scott's Second Life series is multi-layered in its intentions and effect but it is certainly an important contribution to this process.   It is intended as a snapshot of virtual worlds as they exist today, demonstrating the range of their capabilities and their limitations, and documenting them, creating the historical record or the memory of today's virtual capabilities.

The series also echoes iconic moments in the history of art, film and photography. It is therefore memory and it is also emotion as Scott evokes in avatars the feelings we experience as humans, asking us whether in the blurred ground between “real” and “virtual” we can reawaken and admit our vulnerability.

In the way Scott approaches these issues and with the current state of virtual worlds, these questions are posed often in extremely naïve or primitive images. That naivety and primitiveness ought to remind us that the information technology revolution is still young, we are hardly at the top of our game, and we are beginners rather than experts.

Void is a detailed work that reprises Yves Klein's concept of Void, a nirvana-like state "devoid of material influences". It simulates in Second Life the photograph "Leap into the Void" staged by Klein to express his belief in and desire for unaided human flight. The image is based on a Second Life reenactment and it resonates with potential as well as beauty, the two integral to each other in this detailed virtual tapestry. It's as if the avatar is leaping into a rich dream and if the dream fails to live up to his expectations he has the capacity, like Peter Pan, to fly away. In passing it perhaps mocks the exaggerated claims being made for virtual worlds.

Shoot is an evocation of the moment on November 19 1971 when performance artist Chris Burden had a friend shoot him. As in Void, Second Life allows Scott to virtually perform the anticipation of this moment, create tension around that anticipation, and simultaneously reflect the primitive grasp we currently have of virtual worlds, as well as raise the question: what does this new application of computing power mean to the permanence or ephemerality of memory? Are we actually reliving this moment virtually and what does this contradiction between reality and unreality mean? What does it suggest, for example, about future constructions of memory?

Scott's mission to re-enact key moments in the history of ideas as expressed in art is an important statement that we can choose to reposition memory at the centre of our collective activities.

Whether we create or simply enter quasi-worlds we must also confront the moral issues that tomorrow’s computing environment will force upon us – at least with a little more vigor than we have done in the past. A good deal of the morality that we constantly reinforce among ourselves by our everyday interactions in the real world seems to disappear when we enter virtual worlds.

Of course the virtual is every bit as real as our everyday lives. We tease ourselves with the suggestion that it is not and that the same rules do not apply. In Second Life people in the shape of their avatars really do fly, teleport and change bodies. Everything seems possible.  It is important though to bear in mind that the rules of virtual existence are dynamic and that behaviour in those worlds is not cordoned off with the morality we bring to this other physical economic and social life we are so familiar with.

The idea that morality is a work-in-progress should be obvious to us all. One lesson of Second Life might be that we’ve stopped talking about everyday morality. We don’t question the rights and wrongs of economic behaviour in the way we might have done twenty years ago. It is fascinating to be presented with an amoral world because it will make us re-moralise just as we have to remember. The two are closely connected.

 In Claim Scott is carving out psychological space, presenting unreal characters experiencing fear and anticipation.

In real life the overwhelming majority of people live with fear, anticipation, and anxiety, senses that are accompanied by that of loss, regret, and of course pleasure. We’ve slipped into the arrogant belief that we understand these senses and their interaction. One of the conceits of the past hundred years is that we are knowable in that way. To hear of an artist carving out psychological space speaks to me of the possibility of psychological renewal as well as a reappraisal of what we know about ourselves.

The beauty of Second Life is that it is a designed world and one where the skills of artists are instrumental in shaping the look and feel. Artists are undeniably central to its development. But everybody who goes into Second Life travels with a return ticket and it is to Scott's credit that , apart from his efforts to layer historical significance, memory and emotion into his images, he has spent the past six months working out how to bring his virtual performances back into this part of the real world.

The result is this collection, a collection that is both beautiful and resonant. I could go into the detail of more of these images but I'll leave it to Scott to say what he set out to achieve and for you to ponder their success. I hope from what I’ve said so far that you’ll at least agree important issues are on his agenda.

When you look at Scott's images, either here on this website or in a physical gallery space you might ask yourself where are you spending your days? Is it like me sat behind a terminal or staring at another of those PowerPoint presentations. Or is it in a way that feels unnatural or in some sense as vaguely alien to your nature as the avatars in Scott’s images?

Here is an opportunity to engage with the debate about the impact of computing power on your life.  I don't know where Scott stands on this but my sense is artists like him are elevating the computer processor, or rather the lives around it, into a more complex and significant cultural icon — not a second too soon