Me and Sugar during Burning Life
DQ. What's the relationship between art and business in SL? Do you think that artistic experimentation - even the most radical, conceptual and self-referential - can be inspiring and useful for business?
SS. I don't think you should mix art and business any more than you should mix religion and politics - but they still have to coexist and provide the vital roles that they do. As soon as you have business interfering in the creative work of artists, art is being compromised, and that can not be allowed to happen.
Again, corporate sponsorship of the arts goes way back, and before there were corporations, there was the Medici family, and so on. I think if there are artists creating meaningful works in SL, they will be well served by patronage of some form, and those that support have much to gain in contributing to the opening of this new territory to art. If you think about it, commerce is easy - just set up a business selling whatever. Creating culture is something else. I don't think you could buy culture if you wanted to. So naturally the smart business people that have the means, support the arts. The benefits are more than monetary.
DQ. What kind of art are you most interested in? Multimedia installation? Performance? Aesthetic research or conceptual pieces?
SS. It's hard to say that I like one form of art over another, and while my human has a wide range of interests in real world arts; being an avatar, the virtual is my focus. SL at the moment is the networked environment that is presenting the most possibilities to artists. Not only does one have an open platform upon which to create, but most importantly, the work can be seen by potentially many more viewers than an artist might normally expect in the real world. The most recent show on Odyssey of Gazira Babeli drew over 1200 unique visitors and over 1800 total visits in 3 months. I am drawn to works that really use the SL medium in a new way, this early stage is ripe for explorations - so I look for artists that are really working in the medium of SL and making paths for future exploration.
From the perspective of an avatar, I find performance to be the most interesting art form in SL. SL is a lot of things, but everything comes back to the avatar and has to relate to the avatar in order to really be successful in SL.
A moment of the Mattes's Ars Electronica performance
The other area that I am interested in is what I term "mixed reality" works. The use of video streaming can be an effective device for mixing real life and second life - but it can also be disastrously ineffective. Presenting a projection of SL in a real life space is essentially just showing one face of a world that is inherently immersive; rendering it bland and dullish. When using streaming video to mix realities, it is important to take into consideration the interactive nature of SL and to build in to a project, ways to convey this experience. A good example of this would be the recent installation of The Gate. Until the real life audience saw a re-projection of themselves in the SL space, they did not make a connection. Over all I think The Gate was a successful integration of real and virtual space. Much still needs to be explored of course, but these early experiments are important as foundations for future works.
There are many galleries, perhaps the majority, that are importing works to SL from the real world. I think it's fine to use SL like a 3D web page, and it can be a great experience to walk through a virtual gallery and see images displayed in a certain way. This type of exhibition is more about the architecture and the context that it creates than it is about the content of the reproductions of paintings and photographs that are being displayed. I've seen many beautiful exhibits of this type in SL, but it's not the direction that I am most interested in.
Beavis Palowaski at the Gate
DQ. Are you interested in bringing art developed in SL out of this context? How? Do you think it could be interesting in other contexts, and for other communities?
SS. To bring SL native works out of SL at the moment is a lot more challenging than bringing real life works into SL. Part of it is that SL is a new medium that requires a certain amount of adaptation on the part of the viewer. Sure, you can just project SL in a gallery, but that's not SL, that's video. SL requires active participation. The other part is that SL is technologically in it's infancy, and still has a lot missing. What we want as curators and artists is a medium with the same kind of universality that a video tape or DVD or even a linen canvas and oil paint provides. From all indications, it is clear that Linden is taking SL on an open source path. That's great, because like html or other Internet protocols, SL has the potential to become a standard.
One of Adam Nash's installations on East Odyssey
Technological limits aside, there is the issue of context. Without experiencing SL firsthand, one can not readily understand the context, which is problematic at this early stage because not many people have had the chance to explore it. That will change with time as more people sign up and become involved. In the mean time I think it is interesting to see SL taken out of context. Here are some examples of what I mean: A French advertising agency made a Youtube video of it's real life office space with the real workers typing in the air, bumping into walls and nodding off in the standing position - emulating avatars. I have also seen a t-shirt with the "missing image" tag silkscreened onto it. Last spring, an artist created watercolor paintings of scenes from SL. These are amusing extractions from SL that comment well on the medium, but they are not exemplary of what I think might be achieved in a work of art that bridges for the viewer, the real and the virtual, thereby defining and putting into perspective that relationship. I want to, and have yet to see this work; one that shows how close and how disparate the real and virtual actually are. Alan Sondheim's work explores this area, and is amongst the most advanced I have seen to date. I think that as the technology comes into widespread usage, a lexicon will develop. People will not see virtual worlds so much as "video games" but as analogs to the physical world, much the way we regard film and photography today. The first photographic works were not initially received by the art community as valid works - at the same time some thought the technology would make painting obsolete. Obviously this hasn't happened, and photography has found it's place alongside the traditional mediums. I believe SL, or the technology that it evolves into, will become accepted as a valid new medium and one that will have a great impact on the course of contemporary art in the 21st century.
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