http://www.dk-city.net

DK City is an online urban community created by artist Lindsay Perth.
The work was created during the artist's residency in Glasgow, a
collaboration between New Media Scotland and Street Level.

The design, events and people that inhabit DK City developed from
collaborative discussion and workshops between the artist and 4 young
people from a truancy unit based within the Douglas Inch Centre,
Glasgow.

Online virtual reality and 3D environments have come to be associated
with their potential for escape, the hiding of identities and utopian
ideals. The constructs which have evolved around this form of media
reflect these aims: avatars, fantasy roleplay and idealised futurist
landscapes.

The young people who worked on this project have quite a different
agenda in mind. They have chosen to depict scenes from their own
existence, or at least semi-fictional versions of the same. The
portrayal of scenes of alienation and urban dereliction (the "decay
city" of the title) reveal much about the young people's attitude to the
utopian planning concepts which shaped Glasgow's architecture during the
late 20th Century. By choosing to make this explicit through vrml
technologies, they deliver a critique of the way we view and use such
techniques, implying a failure of the dream of a 'perfect' networked
society. At the same time there is much humour to be found, and an
intelligent grasp of influences from other genres of 3D computer
graphics, from games to cinema and television. The end result is a
multi-layered portrait of a city as they see it, with the quirks and
foibles of everyday life intact, rather than antialiased out of the
picture.

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Lindsay Perth has been working as a digital artist with arts
organisations in Scotland for three years in the form of residencies,
tutor and workshop co-ordination. Commissioners have included New Media
Scotland, Street Level, Stills, and Project Ability. She is one of the
founder members of artists' group Elevator and continues to explore the
creative uses of new technologies.

Douglas Inch Centre School was founded by a doctor of psychology who was
researching the different causes of perpetual truancy. The School is
located within the Out-Patients Department of Forensic Psychiatry. It is
a truancy unit for 14-16 year old adolescents who have been referred to
the school via the Social Work Department.