Biography

Juria Yoshikawa (SL)
After two decades of creative pursuits - ranging from conceptual art, installation, poetry, performance, computer art, animation, photography and digital design - Juria Yoshikawa (a.k.a. Lance Shields) arrived in Second Life in the winter of 2007 looking for a new artistic spark. Rather than bringing in rl artwork, Juria is compelled to use mainly the elements that make up sl itself. A typical Juria Yoshikawa virtual artwork mixes kinetic objects, animated texture, ambient noise and av animations. She inevitably chooses scales larger than conventional gallery work because she is interested in people experiencing the work in a physical way - flying through them, riding on them and socializing within the art. To Juria virtual art is about freeing oneself up to create in ways she finds impossible in real life.

Lance Shields (RL)
In real life, Lance is a Tokyo based multimedia artist and designer. He has spent many years making digital art, installation art and performance. Sculpture and installation are where I started my creative career but I became progressively more involved in the digital and interactive. More than ten years before, his net art was featured in Boston Cyber Arts. The artist sees Second Life as a return back to his artistic roots yet at the same time combines newer interests in the phenomenology in the virtual world. Phenomology is defined as “the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view”. In his commercial life, Lance is a social media strategist at a global company and currently in the middle of an MBA.