Last week, an excited Nicole Steen announced that the Tart Gallery finally has a home.

Steen's alternative pop-art gallery, which she launched with fellow artist Vicki M. in 2000, had been homeless since 2002, when Zulu Records, where it was housed, moved into a new West 4th Avenue space. Since losing its physical site, Steen has continued curating shows across the city under the Tart Gallery name, but it's taken until now for it to have a single place to call home.

There's something very different about Steen's new space, however. Although visitors can drop in, admire the work, and even purchase a painting or two, it doesn't exist in the tangible world: it's located in the virtual on-line realm of Second Life, a three-dimensional reality populated by avatars–or characters–created and controlled by real people with high-speed Internet.

What makes Second Life different from virtual-reality games such as The Sims is its fully functioning economy. Avatars in Second Life engage in commerce using Linden dollars (named after Linden Lab, the San Francisco–based software company that created the 3-D realm), a currency that can be exchanged for real money, at a rate of around $265 Linden dollars to one U.S. dollar. "Residents" of Second Life can buy or lease land inside the game world, and sell virtual goods such as clothing and vehicles.

"People were doing a lot of business and there actually were galleries there as well," says Steen, whose Second Life avatar is named ByrneDarkly Cazalet, describing her first impressions of the computer-generated world. "There weren't any lowbrow galleries or pop or alternative galleries. So I decided 'Wow, I really should just open a gallery here on Second Life.'" By controlling their avatars, visitors to Steen's virtual gallery will be able to enter the space and walk–or even fly–around to check out the work on display.

Steen has plenty of potential customers. Launched in 2003, Second Life has grown to over eight million residents, with just under two million having logged in within the last 60 days, according to numbers from Linden Lab. Entrepreneurs, corporations, and even educational institutions have entered Second Life. Reuters now has a full-time journalist dedicated to reporting on happenings in the virtual world, Coldwell Banker is selling virtual land within the game, and numerous galleries have emerged. These include a virtual arm of Toronto's Art Metropole as well as Ars Virtua, an in-world gallery created by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University. Even Vancouver's own Great Northern Way Campus–a collaboration of UBC, SFU, BCIT, and Emily Carr Institute–has a Second Life presence, used to recruit students into the new master's of digital media program, who will go on to attend seminars at the Second Life campus.

Vancouver new-media artist Jeremy Owen Turner points out that Second Life is the first virtual world to have hit the mainstream. "A lot more people that you would not normally see are there," explains Turner, whose avatar in Second Life, Wirxli FlimFlam, is a muckraking performance artist who has earned a fair amount of prestige among Second Lifers for his antics. "There are actual curators, actual artists from all over the world crossing over." The art scene in Second Life, says Turner, is massive. "It's bigger than Vancouver.”¦It's international and it's huge." And it's meant Turner's been able to bring his avatar performance art back across the virtual barrier.

"We do a performance in Second Life, and it gets broadcast in a gallery space so people in the real world can see it projected," Turner explains. Turner's Second Life performance-art group, Second Front, has been invited to participate in this year's Performa festival in New York and the InterAccess festival put on by Toronto's Electronic Media Arts Centre. Turner hasn't made any money off his avatar performance art yet, but Steen says she's already made a few Linden dollars with her virtual Tart Gallery (which is located in the Slustleria region of Second Life). The current exhibit, filling the Tart, is images of her paintings, which she painstakingly uploaded into the game. For those who prefer concrete reality, some of the original artwork that was scanned into Second Life is currently on show at the Jem Gallery, at 225 East Broadway.

Steen says she plans to showcase a new artist every month in the Second Life Tart Gallery.

"I'm planning on taking what a regular commission would be in a gallery," Steen says. "We do usually 40/60, where the artist gets 60 percent." Sell one painting four times at 200 Linden dollars, and you might just be able to cover a latte.

Steen–that is, her avatar–plans to be in her virtual gallery as much as possible in the coming weeks. "It's really fun," she insists. "It's like playing with dolls or something."