Day two of Secondfest, the world's first virtual festival, turned out to be a much more complicated and - dare I say it - festival-like affair. It was impossible not to miss something, as headliners rocked all four of the music stages at once, forcing the faithful to make difficult decisions: Hot Chip or the Cinematic Orchestra? Organic juice or the spit roast? Clayton or Guilty Pleasures?
The newness of the technology caught up with the event when Gilles Peterson's Live from Brownswood set was punctuated by a few loose server issues in the Dance tent, fortunately though the music was back on track by the time Hot Chip did their phenomenal hour. They stole the afternoon, making the house thump, the walls throb and the hundreds of festival goers freak out.
The best surprise of the evening was The Cinematic Orchestra, whose blinding- albeit short - set, soared over the main stage arena and across the Dance Tent.
By 5:30 pm, over 5,000 unique visitors had come to see what the fuss was about at a rate of 200 per hour. Some of the stages burst at the seams, forcing fans to wander around the site listening to the tunes rather than watching the avatar animations on the stages. Guilty Pleasures accompanied me to the lakeside cinema, catching a surreal animated short from BBC Film Network. The main event in The Treehouse cinema stage, the original Transformers movie, was sadly out of commission so I watched a couple of machinima films made by Second Life Residents instead.
The involvement of residents in the festival perhaps made it less of a surprise that the most popular stage of all was Chill Island, which is devoted to bands who were formed in Second Life. was consistently chokka with big hitters Virtual Live Band and Slimmie (Slim Warrior) gathering the biggest single-stage crowds of the day.
The crowds reached capacity at headline time. 7500 people had made it to the festival site and the only free space was in the VIP tent area behind the main stage. The best many could do was to stream the performances via Virtual.tv, the support site, which did have some effect on the atmosphere.
Those who managed to get ringside seats for New Young Pony Club, The Aliens, Hexstatic and Coldcut were not disappointed, although the sets, exclusive recordings for Secondfest, did undermine some of the live interaction many of the attendees had hoped for. The raucous Aliens set grabbed the virtual crowd by the gut and proved that their music transcends their visual performance.
Day 2 of Secondfest pushed the virtual world's technology to its limits, exposing the platform's current limitations as a venue for an event as large-scale as this. But pushing the boundaries is good. And now foundations have been laid for even bigger events in the future.
