San Diego, CA, Nov. 25, 2008 — In an age when biotechnology has made it possible to alter the fundamentals of our food supply, our energy sources and even our genetic makeup, one graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, is pushing the limits of what it means to be human by exploring the intersections of biotechnology, art and virtual-reality in an immersive, durational performance titled “Becoming Dragon.” UCSD graduate student Micha Cardenas will spend 365 consecutive hours immersed in Second Life — an online, 3-D virtual world — where she will exist as her avatar, a dragon named Azdel Slade. To fulfill the final project requirement for her MFA in visual arts, graduate student Micha Cardenas will spend 365 consecutive hours immersed in Second Life, an online, 3-D virtual world where users create avatars and interact with one another in a non-competitive way. Wearing a head-mounted device with a stereoscopic display that blocks all but the virtual world from her view, Cardenas will spend the entire duration of the performance in a laboratory at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA) at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
Second Life – Becoming Dragon – Micha Cardenas
September 9th, 2010 
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Saw you on Beck tonight. I wish you the worst, and am ashamed I graduated from UCSD. Thakns idiot
Oh how nice, Glenn Beck showed some clips of this commie spewing his Marxism crap the other day. :/
lol ive not seen this kind of thing done
looks like these ppl are takin a whole new approach to Virtual Reality life
I think Sen. Joe Lieberman and John McCain should try some technesex with each other. To help smooth bipartisan relations in this election year, with extra KY.
365 hours, not days lol
I wonder what exactly are the side effects to the eyes after wearing the headset for a year. Its got to be hard on the eyes for sure after a while.
anabell lowery is that you commenting on the video
Micha is very cool, what a great and original project!
Really interesting project. I’d like to know the extent to which extended perceptual/motor experience as the dragon made you feel like you *were* the dragon.
I had speculated about doing this in SL when I saw HUD headset from Toshiba and real gesture gloves and other tech back in 2006. At least visually, it’s fantastic. I remember Azdel (props for doing something off the wall, Micha
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