During a series of interviews undertaken in Identifying Successful STARTS Methodologies (2019–2021), a research project that analyzed strategies utilized by recent STARTS Prize winners and nominees, a number of the artists and scientists described having needed to build a “third space,” or to meet on “another plane,” in order to communicate and find a common language for art-science collaborations. The project team, from University of Wolverhampton (U.K.), collaborated with Ars Electronica and STARTS on the research and found ways to explore the third space concept in three collaborative art-science projects.

ABSTRACT This paper presents a framework for the emergent imagination that arises out of the transitional spaces created in avatar-mediated online space. Through four categories of transitional space identified in artworks created in virtual worlds, the paper argues that, as the virtual remains connected to time, the imagination becomes connected to space. The author’s analysis of the imaginative effects of artworks presented in the two virtual (and physical) gallery exhibitions of the Kritical Works in SL project demonstrates a mode of artistic exploitation of the particular combination of user-generated and avatar-mediated space.