Archive for the ‘hacking’ tag
Troubles in Paradise. How happened that an artist was banned from the Odyssey Sim
Domenico Quaranta, “Troubles in Paradise. How happened that an artist was banned from the Odyssey Sim”. First published on Spawn of the Surreal, October 8, 2007.
Some days ago (namely on Saturday, October 06, 18:42 Second Life time), an artist was banned from Odyssey. No playing: Odyssey, well know in Second Life as the most free, open-minded context for artists and performers, the place where Gazira Babeli set her retrospective and where most of Second Front’s performances took place, for the first time seems to set a limit to the freedom of its own residents. Someone ate the forbidden apple, and was expelled from Paradise.
This is, at least, what we could understand reading a current thread on Rhizome. But what really happened that awful day? How can we explain it? Let’s start from the beginning.
Salvatore Iaconesi, alias xdxd, is an Italian new media artist, activist and open source coder who did an impressive amount of work in many fields, ranging from generative art to artificial intelligence, from performance to code poetry to interactive installations. Some months ago, he entered Second Life and he did some un-authorized installations at Ars Virtua and in other places. In many private and public discussions, he never made a mistery of his criticism against Second Life. As most of the best artists inside there, he is conscious to be in a technically limited environment, where most of the things pretending to be “art” are childish efforts, miles and miles away from what we currently call “contemporary art”. But the fact that he kept on working in Second Life demonstrates that he sees in it an interesting socio-cultural context, where he can play with its human (or inhuman) dynamics. Or, in his own words: “I really don’t even value Second Life so much. Want to know what i find interesting in it? the social-niche mindfucker that it became, and the way that it has been exploited from mass media, and the mechanisms behind mediocre people using it to gain attention, and a badly-recycled form of human nature struggling to come out over there, too.”
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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…
