Archive for the ‘odyssey’ tag
Acting as Aliens – Ex Post
Below you can find some links (reviews, documentation, etc.) regarding the show Gazira Babeli – Acting as Aliens (Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana) and the related seminar.
About the seminar:
- Images by Frieda Korda, Roxelo Babenco, Helfe Ihnen on Flickr.
- An ongoing discussion on the Odyssey Ning.
- A video by Helfe Ihnen on Youtube.
About the show:
- Gazira Babeli’s archive page
- A video interview on VEST.SI (Italian, sub Slovenian)
- A TV feature on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 47.06)
- The opening performance on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 04.45)
- “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”. A review by Flaminio Gualdoni.
- “Aliena e maga l’artista di oggi“. A review by Agnese Trocchi in Stile.it, 27.10.09.
- “Umetnost v virtualnosti“. A review by Ida Hiršenfelder, published in Dnevnik, 04.11.09.
- Some pics of the performance from the natives’ point of view on the Second Front blog.
- And some raw footage by me on my Youtube account:
Gazira Babeli: ACTING AS ALIENS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Gazira Babeli: ACTING AS ALIENS
Exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta
Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
November 3 – 15, 2009
Opening and performance: November 3, 9.00 PM (CET)
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art and Kapelica gallery are proud to announce “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”, the first solo exhibition of the avatar artist Gazira Babeli in Slovenia. Internationally renowned for her activity in the digital reality of Second Life, Gazira Babeli is born there in spring 2006. She is a character in the Matrix, something in between the Oracle and Neo. What she does has been either dubbed as bug, virus, performance or art; what we can say about it is that it subverts the traditional notions of space, time, body, identity and behavior we inherited from our daily experience.
The show borrows its name from the opening performance, in which Gazira and the audience will share the same space and will play through material means, in an unprecedented overlap between digital reality and physical reality. The remains of the performance will be put on show after the event. Read the rest of this entry »
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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“Being an avatar, the virtual is my focus”. Interview with Sugar Seville
Sugar Seville
Domenico Quaranta, “Being an avatar, the virtual is my focus”. Interview with Sugar Seville. First published in Spawn of the Surreal in two parts, November 27, 2007.
When talking about art in Second Life, it’s difficult not to talk about Odyssey. Almost everyone working in the art field seems to converge, before or later, on the Odyssey Simulator. In the beginning there were Gazira Babeli, Second Front and Ian Ah; then came Juria Yoshikawa, Aldomanuzio Abruzzo, Fau Ferdinand, the Ludic-Society crew (Superfem Beebe and MosMax Hax), Avatar Orchestra Metaverse and Adam Nash among others; and many more will come, be sure.
Not that Second Life is missing places for art, even bigger, more official and more respected than Odyssey. There is Ars Virtua, a well-reputed new media art center founded in 2005, with its two exhibition spaces and its AVAIR program for artists in residence, organized in conjunction with Turbulence. There is NMC Campus, an experimental effort of the New Media Consortium, a powerful association gathering nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. And there is, above all, Burning Life, an annual festival set up by the Lindens from the beginnings of Second Life in homage to the legendary Burning Man festival, the official – and more visible – platform for art in Second Life.
But Odyssey is different, someway. Maybe because, as its co-founder Sugar Seville says in this interview, it’s more a community than an exhibition space. Maybe because it’s an open, free space, where almost everyone can propose a project, where there is no censorship, no limits (besides, obviously, technological limits and quality standards), and where the first guy was temporarily banned, with some regrets, just some days ago. Or maybe because of the approach of it’s manager, who sees herself more as an affectionate gardener than as the chief of a burgeoning art venture…
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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.
