Remediations

The Swedish magazine HZ has recently published a longer version of my article on art in Second Life originally written for Flash Art (pdf here) - together with many other interesting writings, such as an in-depth description of the Analog Color Field Computer (ACFC) project by artist Gregory Shakar.

"Hz is published by the non-profit organization Fylkingen in Stockholm. Established in 1933, Fylkingen has been known for introducing yet-to-be-established art forms throughout its history. Nam June Paik, Stockhausen, Cage, etc. have all been introduced to the Swedish audience through Fylkingen. Its members consist of leading composers, musicians, dancers, performance artists and video artists in Sweden."

Here is the first paragraph of the article:

Stella Costello, Primolution, 2006. Sculpture, Second Louvre Museum. Photo: D. Quaranta

Second Life: hardly a day goes by without it being talked about. The media success of the virtual world launched in 2003 by the Californian company Linden Labs appears to be on a par only with its user popularity (around 10 million residents as I write) and commercial success. These three things are obviously closely connected: people flock to SL, companies follow, the media talks about it and this attracts new people and new companies.

The hype – which strangely enough, as activist and media critic Geert Lovink notes, is fed by "old school broadcast and print media and the wannabe cool corporations" is starting to show its first cracks, and while on the one hand it has served to make concepts like "avatar", "virtual worlds" and "social networks" popular, on the other, with its uncritical enthusiasm and superficiality, it has created false expectations that risk leading to an equally uncritical condemnation of a context that does have its problems, but is undeniably rich in potential.

It's all true: the habitual users of SL represent a ludicrously tiny percentage of the 10 million curious visitors who set up an account for a single visit, without ever following it up; the only returns on the million dollar investments made by the big companies have been in terms of publicity, while their virtual headquarters are usually deserted; SL's graphic engine and scripting language are vastly inferior to those of other virtual worlds; its world is built around a trashy, kitsch aesthetic; the prevalent image is that of "a mega milkshake of pop culture", and life revolves mainly around the banal repetition of real-life rituals (having sex, going dancing, and attending parties, openings and conferences) and the same principles: private property, wealth and consumption. As Paolo Pedercini writes: "There is something terribly dystopic about a universe that is so vast and engaging, yet at the same time so privatized and privatizing. This is more than just a nice dream to buy into, more than yet another incarnation of the panopticon....Every day and in an increasing manner this virtual world lays claim to around three and a half years of the intellectual activity of the users who contribute to making it bigger, more dynamic and more attractive".

Many view SL as a superficial, hedonistic, phoney bandwagon, a world which is alienating, self-perpetuating, closed off from life, dedicated to profit and the pleasures of the flesh (in a virtual sense, obviously); it lives off the unpaid creativity of its users and its consumerist aspect is like an endemic cancer at the heart of the system (it has been estimated that an avatar consumes as much energy as the average Brazilian citizen); both its technological infrastructure and the social structure it has spawned are frustratingly limited, and last but by no means least, it is tedious, utterly tedious.

This type of criticism often crops up in online artistic communities. At times it springs from mere prejudice, but in many cases it comes from people who have a fairly broad experience of life "in-world". The American artist G. H. Hovagimyan, one of the pioneers of Net art, asserts, "When you allow an engineer to dictate how you are creative and what form that takes then you have given up your artistic freedom. This is the case in SL."

Yet despite this, SL is literally teeming with artists. No other virtual world can boast such a variegated, complex and rich artistic community, and it is probably the only virtual world to have succeeded in focusing global attention on contemporary art, thanks to artists such as Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG) and Cao Fei, who took her virtual alter-ego China Tracy to the Venice Biennale.

Continue reading it on HZ # 11!

Open considerations on The Gate - Part 1

Finally, my reflections on The Gate adventure have been published on the beautiful Italian zine Digimag. If you are an Italian reader, you can find my short essay in two parts at the links below:

THE GATE: CONSIDERAZIONI APERTE - PARTE 1

THE GATE: CONSIDERAZIONI APERTE - PARTE 2

Digimag is translating the whole piece for the English version of the magazine. The first part, published here, is reblogged below. Thanks Digimag!

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The Gate (or Hole in Space , Reloaded ) is an installation realized for the opening exhibition of the iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels (4 th -10 th October). Come up in Yves Bernard's mind, manager of the iMAL Center , the installation was created to handle a only apparently simple question: how to build a bridge between real space and virtual worlds. The objective in mind was the enjoyment of virtual spaces and the interaction with their inhabitants in the physical space without the interaction of a graphic interface. The problem is not new and the solution proposed – the showing in real space of a video-streaming from the virtual world - showed more times not to work. The Gate has not solved the problem and the found solution is far from being the definitive one. Yet a step forward has been made and many people have tried to go beyond the limit. But let start from the beginning…


The Gate, RL and SL

The backgrounds

I personally had to face a similar problem just once in my life. In December 2006 I was offered by Mr. Luigi Pagliarini to take part to the Peam in Pescara , Italy . There I decided to show a phenomenon I was following for a while: the performer Gazira Babeli, acting on the virtual stage of Second Life. It was the first physical time for Mrs Babeli and we watched her with great interest. At the end we chose to show 3 pictures (a self-portrait and 2 pictures representing 2 of her most meaningful performances) and the video-documentation of other performances. Also the idea of a Gazira Babeli's live performance interested us, but we feared the final output. As all virtual words, Second Life lies upon conventions not for beginners, and we couldn't take it for granted in the variety of audience attending the Festival. The visual aspect plays for sure a pivotal role, but in a live video you loose the prominent dimension of the interaction, as well as the fundamental aspects of production (the inside camera is directly controlled by the user, what let him have a global view of the world) and communication, most of the time by chat. If you take away the public all these aspects, you see on the screen an imperfect clip, without cuts, dialogues and captions. A limited use of a definitively more interesting reality.As Dante in his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise , we needed our Virgil, a “human interface” showing us the way in a world where we don't get the rules. As Mrs Gazira is used to say, Second Life is at the end a theatre stage: we had to bring the theatre inside reality. To do it we asked the Italian-Spanish curator Lele Lucchetti for help – and of course Mrs Gazira who was a friend of him in another life, agreed with us for making Mr Lucchetti her interpreter-. So, while the alien Gazira was executing in a live show her best performances (from Super Mario's storms to the awful cans of Cambell's Soup), Mr Lucchetti was translating the chats into words and briefly telling what was happening. The cooperation was successful, but not completely. Despite Mr Lucchetti's ability, what was happening in the screen remained distant from the public of the Peam, usually used to more direct and “sensorial” experiences. Unfortunately this distance was always present in all Second Life's live performances, not allowing the quality to shine through the performance in act there. Moreover, if you take into consideration that Second Life is plenty of bugs and that time perception is by far more amplified than in reality, you can easily understand how important the problem is, as well as the right solution.


Lele Lucchetti interfacing with Gazira at Peam 2006.

Waiting for it, Second Front is focused on the Fluxus-Punk impact of its crazy performances, while other performers rely on the appeal of the audio-visual effects of their interventions. As far as I know, only two people, Eva and Franco Mattes, tried to solve the problem. I had the opportunity to follow their performances on two projects ( Real Life / Second Life) on the 8 th September 2007 in Linz, Austria, during the Ars Electronical Festival. The Mattes tried for a new way: the obsessive control of the “preproduction”. Their performances – re-enactments of famous performances of the Seventies by Vito Acconci to Marina Abramovic - take place in accurately prepared sets and are entirely codified in order to avoid improvisation. Also production plays a major role. On this purpose there is an assistant who follows every single act for conveying the most impressive impact to the key-moments of the performances. In other words: the Mattes seem to solve the problems caused by virtual world just erasing it. They are not concerned in trying to make the screen appear as a video, on the contrary they do anything to do it, as the live TVs do for plays and operas. Is seems that it works both for the real public and the audience inside Second Life -by the way, in a couple of occasions the artists didn't show to pay much attention to inside spectators-. Their performances have a stage in Second Life, but they don't look for audience there. In fact, the exhibitions are conceived for the real world, not for the avatar public. Troubles arise when you have the ambition to involve both the two kinds of audience…

The Gate : the planning

I've got Mr. Yves e-mail in the last, oppressive days of August. In short, she upgrades me about iMAL's next opening and about a project she'd like to realize for the exposition, perhaps with my collaboration: ‘something very simple, a 'Junction Point' between the 2 worlds, a floor surface in both worlds where real user and SL user can meet.' The idea is interesting, though not original. It deals with the construction of a mirror-stage in real and virtual space, allowing open happenings and various communication experiments. I do find interesting to give birth to a performance stage, an installation working as a “box” for a range of events spontaneously born by both sides. And I accept the collaboration. In the following days, in collaboration with Mr. Yves and Mr. Yannick Antoine , the The Gate's irreplaceable architect, we define some details regarding concepts and design. The most immediate cultural reference are the holes in space and time among the classic science fiction parallel universes; the aesthetical reference is the colossal 2001 - A Space Odyssey, appreciated for its prominent minimalism. The artistic one that is also present in the title is Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's memorable satellite performance realized in 1980 and entitled Hole in Space. It was composed of the installation of two mega-screens in two squares in NY and Los Angeles , connected by satellite and respectively broadcasting what was happing in front of the other screen. The unannounced event had produced at the time an increasing interest, from the first curiosity of passers-by to the next and also spectacular interaction attempts between the two groups of spectators. As in that memorable occasion, we do want the space beneath the screen to become the place for improvised performances, based on communication and interaction between people and avatars. To get our goal we rely on the symmetry of the two installations (a black carpet delimiting the action area, shot by a camera set on the side of the vertical screen, showing the other world). Beside delimiting the area, the carpet is useful to create a theater space accessible to everybody, welcoming as a break-dance stage. We want to avoid the fear for the stage and on the contrary promote improvisation, Second Life's soul: spontaneous theatricals.


Galloway & Rabinowitz, Hole in Space, 1980

Of course the place where to install The Gate in Second Life is fundamental. No doubt, to me: because of the community it gathered, the quality of the cultural offer, the particular attention paid to the performance aspect and freedom of action I do think the right place is Odyssey. We speak about with Sugar Seville, curator for Odyssey, who loves this proposal. We also think of involving the famous collective Second Front for the opening exhibition on the 4 th October…a choice that is by far the right one./the best one. Second Front chooses to install, in front of The Gate and consequently of the camera eye, a reconstruction of the universally known Auguste Rodin's The Gates of Hell (1900). The performance consists of a kind of mime where the group, entirely naked, blend with Mr Rodin's plastic statues of, taking the same magnificent postures. In reality these poses suit with the erotic animations of Second Life, in a definitively sadomasochistic sense.


Second Front performing at the Gate

[to be continued]

www.imal.org/
http://odysseyart.ning.com/
www.gazirababeli.com/
www.artificialia.com/peam2006/
www.0100101110101101.org/home/performances/index.html
http://slfront.blogspot.com/
www.ecafe.com/getty/table.html