In his Missive 3, Lichty asks: "could the remediation of historical works, from 7000 Oaks to sculptures of the David be prime examples of the appropriations of history in cultural milieus that do not possess them?" I don't think that the answer to this question would be "yes". Believing that Second Life is "a dumpster of the imaginary", the fruit of the collective dream of the amount of its residents, I can't believe that it suffers of a lack of memory. Quite the opposite, I think that Second Life in itself IS memory. Second Life IS remediation. Second Life IS re-enactment, not of our first life - as most people think - not of Snow Crash or The Matrix - as many other people think - but of a sort of mediated unconscious, that is nothing more that our visual culture, and that helps building up the frame through which we look at reality.
Patrick Lichty aka Man Michinaga, Go/diva of the Icommons, 2007
Virtual worlds are the places where pop culture, the cyberpunk imagery, cinema, television, postmodern architecture, pornography, contemporary art, literature, design and so on all collapse and mix together to create a new world. Making art, you can choose and recycle one of the bricks of the wall or add your own brick. So, when Eva and Franco Mattes remediate Warhol's portraits, or when Patrick Lichty himself remediates Cicciolina, they point out to a stereotype that is commonplace in Second Life - where most avatars want to be young, sexy, beautiful, photogenic - and they improve it by recalling its historical roots, namely the ideal of beauty imposed by media and pop culture, investigated by Warhol in his Screen Tests and in his tons of portraits, and embodied by Cicciolina in the Eighties. They are improving a memory, rather then creating it ex-novo. This is virtuous recycling. When Dancoyote Antonelli builds up a new installation, he is remediating the aesthetics and the ideals of Cyberart of the Early Nineties, or - better - he is emulating it on a new machine; this is all the new I can find in hyperformalism (and in fact, what is new and fascinating in the hands of Dancoyote Antonelli, appears pretty old-fashioned and overtaken in the hands of DC Spensley); but it's not that bad, because we forgot almost all about Cyberart, and a refresh can be useful...
Dancoyote Antonelli
About the relationship between re-enactments and the original piece, I think the question is really complex, and we can't come out with just one answer. In the press release of the show History will repeat itself. Strategies of Re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance (HMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, June 9 - September 23, 2007), curator Inke Arns writes: "Artistic re-enactments are not simply affirming what has happened in the past, but rather they are questioning the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory. Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory." The show is more about repetition of historical events than of Performance Art of the past, but this observation works also in SL: artists use reenactment as a way (1) to question the present and (2) the way media mediated memory. Besides that, they question (3) the medium they work in (Scott Kildall) and (4) the original work of art (Eva and Franco Mattes), raising questions such as: why is it significant / meaningless to me? why does it work / doesn't work in SL? What does REALLY change when I change the contest and the medium?
Brody Condon, Death Animations, 2007
This very last question introduces another interesting issue, and another interesting form of re-enactment: what will happen if we start re-mediating Second Life in the real world? This is a really compelling question. We usually think about the relationship between virtual worlds and real life as univocal, even if many events - from the Columbine massacre to cosplaying - showed us that it is definitely bi-univocal. Some artists already started to work on that, with interesting results: from Eddo Stern's SCA Arab Intervention (2004) to Brody Condon's Death Animations (2007), in which an actor performs the death animations of a videogame. Concerning SL, I know just a few examples, such as Goldin+Senneby's Objects of virtual desire (2006) and Aram Bartholl's Tree (2007), an unfinished “virtual” tree brought to the public space. But what will happen if, let's say, Second Front will start performing in real life, or Gazira Babeli will rebuild her provocative installations in the real space? Then we'll see that virtual worlds are not "just like the real world", as many people think, but something completely different.
Aram Bartholl, Tree, 2007
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