Sara Ludy had grown up in Virginia where she became inspired by painting the surrounding nature. Her painting skills eventually gained her a scholarship to SAIC. It was here that she learned about new media art and left painting behind. Her style and practice took shape as she began to explore the realms between digital and natural spaces. Much of her work now focuses on the documentation and creation of digital architecture and nature. One of her notable pieces is called Projection Monitor and can be followed on Tumblr.

This piece is a series of photographs taken in Second Life. What is fascinating about this piece is the comparison that is being made between physical real estate and digital real estate. While it is common for people to photograph their physical surroundings and have a desire to document their physical space, it is very rare to see people documenting their digital space. You don’t go on Facebook and see pictures of people’s interactions on Facebook. That is not something, at least anyone that I know, posts about. Yet you see pictures of many other physical life events.

Sara Ludy has decided to document Second Life, a digital world modeled after our own. It makes perfect sense to document it, to take pictures and share them, just like you would anything else from your life. I believe a powerful statement is made in this action. It almost becomes a declaration for the onset of virtual reality. It asks the question, are these virtual spaces worth documenting? And in Sara Ludy’s actions, I believe, she thinks yes. I don’t think much of our mass recognizes the fact that with the creation of our digital world we have created an alternate reality that has become so familiar we don’t even realize we now live between two worlds. Second Life is only an example of one of the many virtual experiences that our digital technology provides, and with Sara Ludy’s decision to document its rooms and landscapes she brings this reality more to light.

The other interesting feature to her exploration of the digital world is that this documentation never includes people. She is very fascinated with home structures and plants, but there are no people to be seen. It creates a very ghostly and lonely feel to her photos and videos. In some of her more recent pieces, she has been fascinated with building her own 3D Models of homes. She has one piece called Dream House in which she is continually expanding on building a house. It has many different rooms and is decorated with plant life but there are no animals or people that exist within this space. She also made a music video for the band … called House On Fire. This video takes you on an exploration of a virtual house again empty and devoid of animals or people. By not including virtual people within especially a virtual home, a place where you would expect to see people, the stark reality of virtual reality stares you in the face. Life doesn’t exist here. Only an emulation of something that is similar to it.

In her interview with Intelligentsia Gallery Sara Ludy states, “When I’m not working, I spend time visiting abandoned and haunted places, attempting to access history through clair senses. I’m interested in how information from past events resides in space; where land and architecture becomes a memory bank.” Her fascination with what could be considered the “aura” of space, and the ways that footprints of those before her decorate the halls with a residue of history and purpose reveals a different interpretation to the lack of people within her documentation. While abandoned and haunted buildings hold that same feeling of loneliness that empty virtual homes do, they also hold memories of the past. The question that was brought up earlier by Walter Benjamin about artistic reproductions losing aura is now brought heavily to the surface. Do virtual spaces have an “aura”? Do they also contain a memory bank? A sense that someone was once here, but no longer is? Are those footsteps of the people that Trod through Second Life still ringing through the digital corners of virtual hallways?

In that same interview Sara Ludy explains, “My practice explores the nature of immateriality and space as a medium. Digital tools allow me to give form to the intangible without the form becoming physical. I like that I can represent a presence with digital dust. I find that to be beautiful. I’m interested in the fluidity of spaces such as digital, dream, intuitive, psychological, emotional, psychic and spiritual; how their formal qualities, stories and ghosts move between each other and leave imprints.”

In this statement it seems clear that Sara Ludy believes that we do leave imprints within digital space. That presence can be found in “digital dust”. Our relationship to our digital world has definitely left an imprint on us. Have we left an imprint on it? Our entire culture is changing at a rampant pace. The digital technology that existed twenty years ago is archaic and historical. It represents a time when the breath of change was on the horizon. Now change is all we know. What happens when we lose these virtual spaces? When Second Life is long forgotten. Will we look to Sara Ludy’s photos and state, there was once life here, but now this place has been abandoned and forgotten. All we have now are footsteps left to decorate the digital dust of what once was a thriving place.