The Cartoonist Manifesto: Performance Art for the Fin de Millennium.

For the past three or four years, there have been a number of artists, interveners, performers, (or whatever you want to call them), who are performing in virtual worlds. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Active Worlds, OpenSim – all these places are merely meaningless names that stand for the fact that there is a portion of the world that is embracing a “New Flesh” of pixels and nothingness. There are communities of “bodies without organs” writhing in a Tron-like fog of shapes and colors in imaginary spaces. But still, here we are – revisiting performance art, Happenings, interventions and the like, dragging the shadows of Dada, the Surrealists, Fluxus, the Situationists, Abramovic, Anderson, Barney, Burden, Export, Gilbert and George, Wiebel, and all the rest into the Virtual on our backs. It is again, like the seminal scene of Tron, where the hacker Flynn’s flesh is ripped apart by the laser of virtualization and pulled into the computer world, upgraded with new, luminous bodies.

But wait! Wasn’t performance art supposed to be the last bastion of authenticity in art? Wasn’t the viscera supposed to be the final resting place of immediacy and affect? This is probably the truth. But with the coming of the 21st Century, it’s obvious that humanity has become cynical about its own flesh; the body has become desensitized to its own suffering; simulations truly have supplanted the physical, whether in the form of games, virtual worlds, or CNN. As Marina Abramovic herself has said, the shift from the body to the avatar reduces performance to the gesture of the Cartoon, and she wished she had thought of it first… And rightly so! That is exactly what we are; As Nitsch, Weibel, Export et al were Actionists, perhaps we are “Lack of” Actionists, or Cartoonists!

We are:

Cartoons for those who hate cartoons.

Performance art for a post-embodied era.

Visceral art after the discard of the body.

Endurance for the mouse-enabled.

What exactly is this, then? It is Bugs Bunny shooting Daffy Duck, reenacting Burden’s “Shoot”, Betty Boop submitting herself to Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”, or Olive Oyl standing fiercely with the Red Star cut into her belly as in Abramovic’ “Lips of Thomas”. It is Mickey Mouse holding the skull of Yorick, pondering his existential state. It is the cat and mouse, Itchy and Scratchy, eviscerating one another, whacking each other with mallets, holding you accountable for your gaze. It is the culmination of a society that has become exhausted with itself, with its own cruelty, with its own desensitization; an ironic stance armed with the arrow of its own cynicism, bow taut, aimed at its own heart.

This is the point of Cartoon Performance, though. Is this to say that the virtual gesture is abject of meaning, of affect? No. As children cry when playing with dolls, boo the amoral Punchinello at puppet shows, laugh at Donald Duck’s fits of rage, we identify with the avatar; the reality of the simulated body. While we know that regardless of how many times Daffy gets shot in the arm, there is still the residual connection to the blood and sinew that creates the momentary flinch before the pull of the trigger before the flash of the barrel and the crack of bone. There is still the question of whether to face the nude Eva or Franco Mattes avatar when passing through the door, the urge to run when the fourteen Gaziras rush at you with the giant wooden mallets, or the vertigo of virtual Ciccciolina atop the simulated Empire State Building in the grasp of the digital Kong. The immediacy of the flesh is gone; but the feeling still remains.

We are Cartoons, and we bleed, scream, fuck, laugh and sing.

Or at least we remind you what that was like.

Patrick Lichty, 2010

Signatories:

Patrick Lichty

Gazira Babeli

Bibbe Hansen

Scott Kildall

Eva and Franco Mattes

Second Front

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.

- My set on Flickr.

- 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:

On Tuesday, the legendary Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana will host Acting as Aliens, a new exhibition by Gazira Babeli. The core of the exhibition will be a performance, revolving around the issue of communication between people and avatars, homo sapiens and homo virtualis. This text by Patrick Lichty, Gazira’s friend, comrade and collaborator, is a smart take on the upcoming performance.

Talking to Gazira Babeli: Can We Understand Avatars, or One Another, for That Matter?

Patrick Lichty

An avatar sits in a room, alone. The walls are charcoal gray, the floors ashen cypress plank. She sits before a screen, with people appearing on it, gesticulating, drawing pictures, and mumbling through the window. In return, the avatar, in this case, one without an operator, tries to respond. One could almost imagine the huge sound / light array from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the background, and the only thing missing is the sign language. But in this case, one might be led to ask who is the interpreter, and who is the alien, and whether there is any hope for understanding…

For Gazira Babeli’s Acting as Aliens, native “code artist” Babeli isolates herself in a cubicle, with the only link to the outside world being a video window connected to a webcam into a gallery in Slovenia. Both the subject and object are placed out of context, and are left across the table from one another, left to try to make a connection with one another. What we are left with is the primordial reflection of the Other in each other’s eyes, and forced to resolve the matter, what emerges from the dialogue?

Talking with an alien requires untold layers of translation through endless social protocols, representations, and local grammars (tools, gestures) as well as metastructures like written languages. For this installation, one might be inclined to give up hope, as Gazira is as opaque as any character on any screen.

There are concessions that Gazira has that make the situation hopeful. She will talk to you; she will try to reach out to you. But will you understand one another, or is the entire exercise like trying to understand the idioglossia (secret language) between twins from the outside? Is it like trying to determine whether Schroedinger’s Cat [1] is still alive without opening the box? There are come concessions to this in that all con-versants possess a more or less human form, use anthropomorphized, and share a written language using a latin character set. There are already a myriad of commonalities between you and Gazira that it seems that one may not need a Rosetta Stone. If you draw a cat, she might know it is a cat. If you wave, she may wave back. There is already some groundwork in place when one includes the similarity of language devices, embodied form, and so on. But recent discoveries in animal cognition reveal that the gulf between us is wider than we ever imagined.

Throughout the 1990′s Irene Pepperberg [2] has been doing groundbreaking work in the area of animal cognition with her gray parrot Alex. She learned that Alex was able to understand the concept of zero, which is hard for some children, and express fear of predators outside the house even with the blinds closed, which reveals abstract thought. In addition, Temple Grandin’s work [3] with animal consciousness and autism in her design of more humane slaughterhouses proves how little human beings understand about the consciousness of other beings, or one another, for that matter. You know, when I look into my little Siamese cat’s eyes, I know there’s a thought process there. I have learned her clicks and trills, and although we are of a common culture, but have different languages and different types of consciousness, we have learned to translate, and we have an understanding. But the fact that after tens of thousands of years of civilized development, we have only now begun to learn that other beings on our earth think and feel is nothing less than the realization that African natives were indeed human, and their art entered art museums rather than natural history museums. As a species, humanity has a long way to go. And when confronting an obviously advanced species as Gazira (Homo Virtualis), will she consider you human? I know her well enough to think that she will.

Returning to the black room, the negotiation continues. Gazira shows a stick figure drawing of a boy under a sun, the person on the other side of the screen, shows a picture of a cat. An anvil falls from the sky inside the room. What was that? Nothing? Don’t worry… Let’s keep talking.

Footnotes

[1] From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat (last visited October 26, 2009): “Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschränkung ― literally, entanglement. […] A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.”

[2] For more infos, cfr. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Pepperberg (last visited October 26, 2009).

[3] For more infos, cfr. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin (last visited October 26, 2009).

Text written for the exhibition Gazira Babeli: “ACTING AS ALIENS”, Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 3 – 15, 2009. Curated by Domenico Quaranta.

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.
The exhibition will also feature a consistent video documentation of Gazira’s previous performances, including 7UP (2008), a clockwork orange of twelve micro-performances made in complicity with Patrick Lichty, in a compulsive mix between slapstick comedy and Fluxus scores. Also on show two brand new works in which a self standing doll house – be it a desert or a prison – is built around some characters performing a singular, repetitive, sometimes destructive action.

In the occasion of the show in Ljubljana, the Cultural and Congress Center Cankarjev dom and Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator, Second Life, will host the round table “ACTING AS ALIENS. The ways of Performance Art in Digital Realities” in the frame of the Reflection on Contemporary Art / Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts IX, organized by Maska, Institute for Publishing, Production and Education and the Cankarjev dom.

—

Gazira Babeli and Patrick Lichty
ACTING AS ALIENS
the ways of Performance Art in Digital Realities

Round table moderated by Domenico Quaranta

Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia, hall M3/M4
and Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/122/45/25/
November 2, 2009 at 7 PM (CET), 10 AM (PDT & SLT)

What happens to performance when the place is a computer screen and time is better described as the timelessness you experience in front of it, as both a performer and a spectator? When reality fades into the background to be replaced by a simulated scenario where physical laws are disregarded and almost anything is possible? When the body itself becomes a software (and cultural) construction? On the occasion of the exhibition of Second Life performer Gazira Babeli hosted by Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, this panel will try to answer these questions involving some of the most important practitioners and theoreticians in the field.

From the seminar room, curator Domenico Quaranta will moderate a round table that will alternate theoretical discourse and performances, involving:

- Helfe Inhen, Manager of Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator, the place where the most active community of art practitioners in Second Life gathers. Odyssey will host the panel in Second Life, too;

Join the lecture in Second life HERE

How to create an account on Second Life: HERE

- Patrick Lichty, artist, theoretician, curator and (as Man Michinaga) founding member of the performing art collective Second Front;

- Gazira Babeli;

- and other members of the Odyssey community.

PRESS

Download high resolution image HERE
Gazira Babeli, Self-portrait – Russian Roulette, Courtesy the artist

Gazira Babeli (http://gazirababeli.com/) has been living and working as an artist, performer and film-maker in Second Life since spring 2006. In September 2006 she published records of a number of “non authorized performances” on the web, capturing the attention of art critics and artists. Artists above all. She then became part of Second Front, an international group of artists/performers dedicated to the formal, aesthetic, cultural and social exploration of a reality dubbed “virtual”. She was involved in the launch of the first native artistic community in Second Life: Odyssey. In April 2007, after filming the movie/performance Gaz of The Desert, she staged an exhibition entitled [Collateral Damage]. Gazira Babeli has taken part in various festivals and events outside Second Life, including: Peam2006 (Pescara), DEAF07 (Rotterdam), Fabio Paris Art Gallery (Brescia), iMAL (Brussels), PERFORMA 07 NYC (with Second Front), DAM Gallery (Berlin). Most of Gazira Babeli’s works are currently archived in the Locusolus region of Second Life.

Patrick Lichty (http://www.patricklichty.com/) is a conceptually-based artist, writer, curator, and activist. He has been exhibiting internationally since 1990, and is best known for his 3D animations with the activist group, The Yes Men, and as Editor in-Chief of Intelligent Agent Magazine in NYC. Venues in which Lichty has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney & Turin Biennials, Maribor Triennial, Performa Performance Biennial, Ars Electronica, and the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). He is currently a member of the faculty of the Interactive Art & Media Department of Columbia College, Chicago.

Domenico Quaranta (http://domenicoquaranta.com) is a contemporary art critic and curator based in Italy. PHD, he lectures internationally and teaches at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. With a specific interest in digital culture, Domenico regularly writes for Flash Art magazine. His first book titled, NET ART 1994-1998: La vicenda di Äda’web was published in 2004; he also co-edited, with Matteo Bittanti, GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (Milan, October 2006) and edited or contributed to many other books. As a curator, he organized several exhibitions in Europe, including: Connessioni Leggendarie. Net.art 1995-2005 (Milan 2005); GameScenes (Turin 2005); Radical Software (Turin 2006); Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (Bruxelles 2008); For God’s Sake! (Nova Gorica, 2008); RE:akt! | Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting (Bucharest – Ljubljana – Rijeka, 2009); Expanded Box 2009 (ARCO Art Fair, Madrid 2009); Hyperlucid (Prague Biennal, Prague 2009).

Credits:

Gazira Babeli
ACTING AS ALIENS
(Exhibition and performance)

Curated by Domenico Quaranta
Produced by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Co-produced by Kapelica gallery

Gazira Babeli and Patrick Lichty
ACTING AS ALIENS – the ways of Performance Art in Digital Realities
(Lecture)

Moderated by Domenico Quaranta
Produced by Aksioma in the frame of the Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts organized by Maska and Cankarjev dom
Co-produced by Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator

These activities are part of Aksioma’s international program 2007-09 supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana.

Executive producers: Marcela Okretič and Janez Janša

Special thanks: Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Helfe Ihnen, Jansmina Založnik, Bojana Kunst

Contacts:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art
Neubergerjeva 25, SI – 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tel. +386-(0)41-250 669
aksioma@aksioma.org
www.aksioma.org

Links:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana | www.aksioma.org
Kapelica gallery | www.kapelica.org
Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator | http://odysseyart.ning.com
Maska, Institute for Publishing, Production and Education | www.maska.si
Cankarjev dom – Cultural and Congress Centre | www.cd-cc.si
The Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts | www.maska.si/en/symposium/seminar_of_contemporary_performing_arts

Brody Condon - Performance Modification (Nauman), Machine Project, Los Angeles, Saturday February 9th, 2008.

Domenico Quaranta, “Re-enact! Or, Just Like the Real World, only Different”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal in 2 parts,August 22 and August 23, 2007

“The difference between what is evoked and what is real can even be sensible: I always happen to take no account of it.”

I started thinking to post on reenactment some time ago. That’s why when I read on -empyre- Patrick Lichty’s “missive” on The Issue of Remediation, I was happy and disappointed at the same time: disappointed because he came first, and happy because he showed the way, giving me some points of departure to enter this complicated issue. Let me sum up Lichty’s points:

- “ironic tension between the physical and the virtual” vs “affective connection [of the user] to online identity”;
- history and memory vs ephemerality and ahistoricity in virtual worlds;
- reenactment of performance-based works as “a way to preserve their degree of affect in space and time” vs reenactment as a way to challange/criticize Performance art.

As for the first point, I completely agree with Lichty. The problem is: which is the target of this irony? Lichty notes that, in the passage from the real to the virtual, an act, for example, of violence, doesn’t become “wholly symbolic”, because “residents in Second Life clearly have investiture in the avatar as extensions of themselves.” That’s right, but this observation works only when the victim of violence is your own avatar. In other words, in Second Life this affect takes the shape of self respect, but doesn’t produce solidarity for other virtual identities. So, if I’m frightened, worried and even angry when Gazira Babeli confines me in a Campbell’s soup can, or when she breaks up my legs with Code Deforma; I don’t feel anything similar to what might have felt the audience of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) when Eva Mattes fires Franco Mattes, or when Wirxli Flimflam shoots Great Escape.

In the same time, I believe that these two reenactments of the same performance are coming from a very different order of ideas. In his Paradise Ahead Series (2006 – 2007), Scott Kildall aka Great Escape “captures the anticipation and familiarity of [the] simulated environment by restaging iconic art installations, films and photographs. Using only primitive graphics of Second Life, the documentation of these performances – large-scale prints serves as a historical record of the initial launch point into simulated worlds.” His target is the graphic environment of Second Life; or, better, Second Life as an artistic medium. And his message is, I think, that in Second Life reality becomes powerless, ineffective, fake. Even the most emotional, dramatic event, when re-staged in Second Life, becomes a parody of itself. Kildall’s prints are more similar to comics than to the source images he used for his remediation. In other words, the medium is stronger than the reality it tries to emulate.

Coming to Eva and Franco Mattes, in their interviews they are very critical about Performance Art: “Eva and me, we hate performance art, we never quite got the point. So, we wanted to understand what made it so un-interesting to us, and reenacting these performances was the best way to figure it out.” With their Syntethic Performances, they are questioning the works they recreate, reproposing them in the most literal way in a context where they appear senseless and paradoxical. Their realistic avatar are perfect to this purpose. And in fact, their reenactment of Shoot is more similar to the source, and much more dramatic than Kildall’s one: they are not saying that in a virtual world violence is meaningless and reality loses its own drama; they are saying that, in a world anaesthetized by media, the original Shoot is almost as powerless as their own virtual version. In a world where, in front of a car crash, people take pictures with their beautiful smart phones instead of trying to help the victims, Shoot can’t be anything more than an interesting spectacle. Video killed the performance art stars. RIP.

In his Missive 3, Lichty asks: “could the remediation of historical works, from 7000 Oaks to sculptures of the David be prime examples of the appropriations of history in cultural milieus that do not possess them?” I don’t think that the answer to this question would be “yes”. Believing that Second Life is “a dumpster of the imaginary”, the fruit of the collective dream of the amount of its residents, I can’t believe that it suffers of a lack of memory. Quite the opposite, I think that Second Life in itself IS memory. Second Life IS remediation. Second Life IS re-enactment, not of our first life – as most people think – not of Snow Crash or The Matrix – as many other people think – but of a sort of mediated unconscious, that is nothing more that our visual culture, and that helps building up the frame through which we look at reality.

Virtual worlds are the places where pop culture, the cyberpunk imagery, cinema, television, postmodern architecture, pornography, contemporary art, literature, design and so on all collapse and mix together to create a new world. Making art, you can choose and recycle one of the bricks of the wall or add your own brick. So, when Eva and Franco Mattes remediate Warhol’s portraits, or when Patrick Lichty himself remediates Cicciolina, they point out to a stereotype that is commonplace in Second Life – where most avatars want to be young, sexy, beautiful, photogenic – and they improve it by recalling its historical roots, namely the ideal of beauty imposed by media and pop culture, investigated by Warhol in his Screen Tests and in his tons of portraits, and embodied by Cicciolina in the Eighties. They are improving a memory, rather then creating it ex-novo. This is virtuous recycling. When Dancoyote Antonelli builds up a new installation, he is remediating the aesthetics and the ideals of Cyberart of the Early Nineties, or – better – he is emulating it on a new machine; this is all the new I can find in hyperformalism (and in fact, what is new and fascinating in the hands of Dancoyote Antonelli, appears pretty old-fashioned and overtaken in the hands of DC Spensley); but it’s not that bad, because we forgot almost all about Cyberart, and a refresh can be useful…

About the relationship between re-enactments and the original piece, I think the question is really complex, and we can’t come out with just one answer. In the press release of the show History will repeat itself. Strategies of Re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance (HMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, June 9 – September 23, 2007), curator Inke Arns writes: “Artistic re-enactments are not simply affirming what has happened in the past, but rather they are questioning the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory. Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory.” The show is more about repetition of historical events than of Performance Art of the past, but this observation works also in SL: artists use reenactment as a way (1) to question the present and (2) the way media mediated memory. Besides that, they question (3) the medium they work in (Scott Kildall) and (4) the original work of art (Eva and Franco Mattes), raising questions such as: why is it significant / meaningless to me? why does it work / doesn’t work in SL? What does REALLY change when I change the contest and the medium?

This very last question introduces another interesting issue, and another interesting form of re-enactment: what will happen if we start re-mediating Second Life in the real world? This is a really compelling question. We usually think about the relationship between virtual worlds and real life as univocal, even if many events – from the Columbine massacre to cosplaying – showed us that it is definitely bi-univocal. Some artists already started to work on that, with interesting results: from Eddo Stern’s SCA Arab Intervention (2004) to Brody Condon’s Death Animations (2007), in which an actor performs the death animations of a videogame. Concerning SL, I know just a few examples, such as Goldin+Senneby’s Objects of virtual desire (2006) and Aram Bartholl‘s Tree (2007), an unfinished “virtual” tree brought to the public space. But what will happen if, let’s say, Second Front will start performing in real life, or Gazira Babeli will rebuild her provocative installations in the real space? Then we’ll see that virtual worlds are not “just like the real world”, as many people think, but something completely different.