Archive for the ‘grey goo’ tag
Gaz me two times, baby (Gaz me twice today)
Gaz me two times, baby (Gaz me twice today)
Published in: Domenico Quaranta (ed), Gazira Babeli, FPEditions, Brescia, March 2008, pp. 88, € 20.00, ISBN 978-88-903308-2-7 [italian edition] 978-88-903308-3-4 [english edition]. With texts by Patrick Lichty, Alan Sondheim and Mario Gerosa.
Babeli. On 31 March 2006, when Gazira chose her surname from the options on the Second Life registration page, she must have guessed that language was going to be crucial aspect of her life as an avatar. She would have seen it from the fact that an avatar, even before it has a body, gets a name. What she couldn’t have known then is that she would be responsible for a body of work that, starting from language itself, would turn Second Life on its head. And she certainly could never have guessed that she was set to become a household name among its residents [1]…
Gaz /gaz/ verb (gaz-zing; past: gaz-zed; past part. gaz-zed) 1 [trans.] deform; submerge under a shower of pop icons; hurl someone from hundreds of meters, dashing his or her polygons onto the graphics card; shut someone into a can of Campbell’s soup; transform a respectable avatar into a crazed maniac running every animation in its inventory in random order… 2 [fig.] Remove an avatar from its self-imposed state of immaturity, by showing it that the consensual hallucination it inhabits is not real, or a poor imitation of a mistaken idea of reality, but an imperfect mishmash of code, textures and polygons, in which Gaz too lives and works. [Derivatives] Gazhat; Gazwork…
Gaz’, Queen of the Desert (2007)
Gaz’, Queen of the Desert
Catalogue text for the exhibition Gazira Babeli – [Collateral Damage], ExhibitA, Odyssey, Second Life, April 16 / June, 2007, curated by Sugar Seville and Beavis Palowakski
Gazira Babeli is an artist born in Second Life on 31 March 2006. Tall and willowy, her expressionless eyes hidden behind a pair of dark glasses, she exudes a strange allure somewhere between voodoo priestess, drag queen and X-men heroine. Of mixed race, she almost always appears dressed in black, usually alternating between her performance outfit (a severe-looking long black coat), and her more casual everyday look (t-shirt, mini-skirt, fishnets and Doctor Marten boots). One thing she is never without, not even when she takes everything else off, is her outlandish cone-shaped head gear, a key part of her get-up, which as we will see, also has its own precise function.
