In my very first post, I said that the aim of this blog should be to understand what's the meaning of the word "art" in Second Life. However, in the beginning, could be simpler - and even helpful, in order to reach that target - to understand why Second Life can be attractive for an artist operating in real life. Cao Fei is a well known and highly esteemed Chinese artist. In her curriculum she lists a lot of Biennials, and important art centers and museums such as De Appel and Migros Museum in Zurich; she was featured in magazines such as Artforum, Art Review, Flash Art and Modern Painters, and art critics such as Hou Hanru, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Pollack wrote about her work. For the last Venice Biennale, she was invited by Hou Hanru to make a project for the China Pavillion, under the exhibition title Everyday Miracles. She built up a large, multi-chambered inflatable white installation, where the visitor can see i.Mirror (2007), her documentary trilogy about Second Life, and visit the virtual replica of the pavilion in Second Life (or is the real world installation a replica of the China Tracy Pavilion in Second Life? No matter...).
China Tracy is Cao Fei's avatar in Second Life. Probably Cao is the very first established artist entering Second Life, and I'm happy of that. Her previous work, from Rabid Dogs (2002) to Cosplayers (2004), reveals a grasp on simulation, pop culture and the hyper-mediated reality that is perfect to approach Second Life. And in fact, i.Mirror is a great work. The whole project can be explained through what China Tracy said to Wagner James Au in a recent interview: "SL is a lab, a world lab, but it consists in a huge global economic systems. It bring us business and democracy, at the same time with feelings and culture. We can't avoid capitalism's wave; at the same time, we can't avoid Communist aspirations in our heart. This world is not only dualistic, we're inconsistent. Communism is our Utopia, Second Life is our E-topia... SL is our mirror, it tells us the truth." I don't agree completely with this statement, and that's what makes me quite cool in regards to the choice of the documentary form. I'm quite skeptical about the metaphor of the "second life", whereas Cao Fei seems to take it quite literally. i.Mirror is a thirty minute movie in three parts. The first is about Second Life as a "place", and it talks about consumerism, capitalism, pollution, the nightmares of the past and the techno-utopia, life and death in a virtual world. The second is about Second Life as a set for stories, as a world in which your life becomes cinema. Quite obviously, China Tracy chooses to tell a love story, HER OWN love story with a fascinating avatar, Hug Yue, in a deeply classical, Hollywood style. The third part, finally, is about "people", and it features, in a beautiful gallery of portraits, the manifold humanity which peoples Second Life.
The reason I like i.Mirror, besides its documentary approach, is – first of all - its melancholic atmosphere, so suitable for every “second” life we live, from dreams to virtual worlds; and, secondly, because it betrays it's own premises: it wants to describe SL as a truthful portrait of the real world, but it ends up demonstrating that, the more SL tries to mirror RL, the more it shows its radical difference from it. The mirror is a distorted mirror, and what it shows is more similar to what William Gibson, in his seminal short story The Gernsback Continuum (1981), calls "semiotic phantoms", "bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own".
As for the China Tracy Pavilion in Second Life, located at the Parioli Museum [Parioli (225, 217, 40)], it deserves a different consideration. In my opinion, if you take it as a work of art, it doesn't work at all; but it's fine if you take it as a kind of exhibition device, and as an open door on Second Life for non-residents. The pavilion is a common SL suspended architecture, with a pool where you can sit down and relax; even the mini China Tracy Pavillion car, that you can take for free and drive as a car, is nothing more than a pretty gadget. If you teleport down from the pavilion, you land in the Parioli Museum, where China Tracy shows the research part of the project, developed with Zafka Ziemia and Rivers Singh. The floor is covered by water, and the museum is full of Italian (mostly Venetian) stereotypes: gondolas, bridges, Italian architectures, Michelangelo's David and so on; in the meantime, some suspended bubbles with image slideshows make you think about hot issues, like sex, politics and religion in Second Life.
So, if (maybe) the project fails in showing to the art world that Second Life is an interesting place to make art, it successfully proves that Second Life - and the relations between the virtual life and the real life - can be an interesting issue for an art project. And that's good, indeed...
Strange enough, if I always get angry when I find a Second Life enthusiast, I usually disagree with commonplace criticism of Second Life. What am I, in the end? A wannabe critic or a shameful enthusiast? The fact is that bot enthusiasts and censors always seem to miss the point. Take, for example, the article published by Helen Stoilas in The Art Newspaper on July 04. It is quite a good review, but it fails in applying the same attention - and the same, uncritical enthusiasm - to the galleries which sell traditional - and, usually, artistically irrelevant - artifacts to the residents; to the traditional - and, usually, artistically irrelevant - artists who re-invented themselves as avatar artists; and to those who try to experiment with art in this virtual world in not always convincing, but always interesting ways. That's how to say that in 1996 the Internet was a great place for art because you could see that little gallery from Michigan, the photos of an insignificant Lithuanian amateur and Vuk Cosic's CNN Interactive spoof page. Or that TV in the Sixties was enhancing art not only thanks to Gerry Schum's Video Gallery (1969) or the Spatialist Manifesto for Television (1952), but also to the first TV auctions... In my opinion, Second Life will become an interesting place for the art market when you'll sell a piece not just for an handful of Linden $, but for a lot of real $. But it's already an interesting place for experimenting with art, even if many people don't seem to know that...
Some days ago, an Italian art critic, Giuseppe Frazzetto, published on his website an article about Second Life. It is mainly a complaint about the hype of Second Life, with all the topoi of this kind of pamphlet: SL as a pantomime of real life, with millions of open accounts but just a fistful of real residents; SL as a boring, ugly place, graphically obsolete, absolutely irrelevant if confronted with other synthetic worlds like its eternal enemy, WOW. Most of these things are right, but Frazzetto avoids to make the great question that inescapably arises from them: notwithstanding that, why is SL so attractive for a lot of people? About art in SL, Frazzetto says: "SL is a virtual world where you basically do what you are already doing. The typical example is that of the artists who aren't able to exhibit in "rl", and so make shows in Second Life. But who see those shows? (besides, SL is so graphically obsolete and even revolting that there's nothing to see there)." Frazzetto, what kind of art have you seen in Second Life? Filthy Fluno? Ah, now it's all clear... I'm joking, but this position doesn't come from ignorance. As the parenthesis makes clear, Frazzetto is looking for beauty: quite a strange quest for a contemporary art critic...
Artists doesn't enter SL looking for beauty, audience and money: not, at least, those who are trying to develop a native art for Second Life. They enter SL because it is a good place to experiment with art, and to reflect on the virtual body, the virtual space, the virtual self, the new meaning of such words as identity, performance, time and space. Because it tries to replicate real life, but it still is completely different from the real world. Because it's ugly, full of companies, money, pornography, politicians and other pretty things that make real life “so different, so appealing”. Because it's part of our media environment, in a way WOW will never reach.
Let's start from Gazira Babeli. She deserves it. She involved me in all this mess... Here are some links to what I wrote about her, or what I did with her complicity. This is the text (Italian only, sorry) I wrote for a little exhibition set up for the last PEAM meeting ( Pescara, Italy, December 6 - 10, 2006), called Second Life / Real Life. And this is the critical essay (Gaz', Queen of the Desert) for the exibition Collateral Damage (ExhibitA, Odyssey 38,30,23, from April 16 2007), downloadable (in Italian and English) from Gazira's website.
Thanks to Gaz', in the fall of 2006 I came across Second Front, the very first Performance Art collective in Second Life. About them, I wrote an article for the Italian art magazine Exibart (Virtual Fluxus, May 7 2007). A wider analysis of the state of Performance Art in Second Life (focused on Gazira Babeli, Eva and Franco Mattes and Second Front) has been published in February by the Italian newspaper Liberazione, and can be read (in Italian) here. The english reader can check out my interview with the Second Front crew, commissioned by Rhizome.org. Have a nice reading!
Spawn of the Surreal is the title of a performance by Seconf Front which took place on February 11th, 2007 at the NMConnect Campus as part of the Chaos Festival. I didn't see the performance, indeed, but from the very first moment I was very impressed by the title, which was like honey for some ideas that were buzzing like bees in my head... According to Second Front member Alise Iborg, the idea of the performance came out when Gazira Babeli reported that one of her code scripts was behaving badly and deforming her avatar. " Second Front took this as an opportunity to interrogate the idea of beauty and perfection in avatar beings since it seems that human simulation in Second Life and generally, in other virtual worlds (ie: multiplayer online games), there is a compulsion to create physically attractive avatars." So, Second Fronters built on this bug a classical performance in 3 acts. They created a fake theater, with seats for the audience, and they put the bad code - called Code Deforma - in some of the audience seats. When the audience came, most of the avatars were transformed into strange beings with inverted heads and elongated arms. At this point, Second Fronters started to dance on the stage, and since they were all "spawned", the performance evolved into kidn of a sabbatic dance. This crescendo of emotions culminated in the fire and the barricades already seen in Border Patrol. "The title of our performance came to us after much back and forth discussion and we finally settled on Spawn of the Surreal which we liked because it encapsulated the Fantastic of the B-horror film genre and the kind of Surrealistic operations of disturbance, disorientation and rupture that we were planning on releasing on our audience", says Alise Iborg. That's why it is perfect for the performance. Reading the next posts, you'll understand - hopefully - why it is perfect for this blog...
Traveling without keeping memories of the travel is frustrating. I pile up pictures on my hard disk, but when I go back to them I don't remember what they are picturing, and when and where I shot them. I entered Second Life some months ago, and for the first time I have more things to say than what I can usually pour in articles, reviews and exibitions. So, I came up with the idea of a blog - an idea always thrown away to the folder of the "NOT TO DO" things. At least till now... But Spawn of the Surreal - the title coming from a celebrated performance by Second Front - doesn't want to keep just memories of my travels in Second Life. Lots of people are doing it, probably better then me. I'n not a reporter, I'm an art critic. I want to understand what art is, and what does it means to make art in a virtual world. Sisiphus, come with me. You have lots of experience to share about impossible jobs... ART. Every time I go to an ART gallery, an ART museum; every time I meet a wannabe ART work, or a self-declared ARTIST in Second Life, I have to ask to myself: what's ART for me? In real life, we can accept everything with an art label as art. In Second Life, it's totally different. Out there the art spell is broken, victim of another spell. The aura breaks into fragments: shattered not by the collapse of the mystique of the artifact, but by the rise of a new mystique: that of the virtual world. How shall we rebuild it? Make your own bet! I have my own idea about art in Second Life. For me, SL artists are the spawn of the surreal. What does it mean? That's my own bet: try to make it make sense...
Domenico Quaranta is an Italian art critic and curator focused on New
Media Art. He is the author of the book "Net Art 1994 – 1998: La vicenda
di Äda'web" (Milan 2004) and, together with Matteo Bittanti, the editor
of "GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames" (Milan 2006). He curated several exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including: "GameScenes" (Turin 2005), "Radical Software" (Turin 2006), "Connessioni leggendarie. Net.art 1995 – 2005" (Milan 2005, co-curator), "Holy Fire" (Bruxelles 2008) and "For God's Sake!" (Nova Gorica 2008). He teaches
"Net art" at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. http://domenicoquaranta.com
