Eva and Franco Mattes, No Fun, 2010. Video documentation of a suicide performance on Chatroulette. Soon at Postmasters Gallery, New York.

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

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.

Scott Kildall, Void (2006). Recreation of "Leap Into the Void »" by Yves Klein

Domenico Quaranta, “Displaced Familiarity. Interview with Scott Kildall”, first published in Spawn of the Surreal, August 31, 2007.

Scott Kildall is a visual artist currently living in San Francisco, where he is working as a fellowship artist with the Kala Art Institute. In 2006 he received an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Starting in 2001, he put together a huge body of work in a variety of media including video installation, sound architecture, electromechanical sculpture and single-channel video projection.

Being interested in issues such as “dislocation, transition and emotional upheaval” and in the “exploration of anticipatory moments”, it’s no surprise that he was attracted by Second Life, where he become Great Escape, the purple-faced member of the Second Front performance group, that he co-founded in 2006. There he anticipated the re-enactment trend with his print series Paradise Ahead, and there he is developing (together with artist Victoria Scott) his last project, No Matter, one of the winners of the Mixed Realities Commissions organized by Turbulence.org and Ars Virtua (see the end of this interview for more details on the project). By the way, No Matter is not the first fruit of this collaboration: in 2006 they made, for a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, 2×2, an interactive (that doesn’t mean digital) installation about the psychology of online social networks: basically, a message board with a grid of holes where people can put their messages (written on rolled-up post-its), read and take away messages left by other people in an evolving, “anonymous and public information system”.

I interviewed Scott about Paradise Ahead, a series of 12 large scale digital prints which documents re-enactments of historical performances – but also sculptures, videos and photographs – he made in Second Life, often with the kind help and participation of another Second Life star, Second Fronter Wirxli Flimflam.

DQ. When and why did you start your Paradise Ahead series?
SK. I began working on the series in September 2006; I produced the first performance-print Void [from Yves Klein] in November 2006. I followed this with Shoot [from Chris Burden] in December. I finished the last one in the series of twelve in May 2007.
When I began exploring in Second Life, the unlimited real estate captivated me. I saw an extension of the California dream. Empty structures populated the landscape. Various architectures and landscapes fused in dreamlike configurations. The geography indexed a cultural desire for a world that both conforms to and escapes the ailments of modern life.
My research led to making artworks of remediation of iconic performances, sculptures and video. These produce a feeling of displaced familiarity. At the same time they link Second Life back to what has been done in the physical world while asserting the primacy of the document in the artwork itself. Here, I place the geography in the background of the prints while still examining questions of the body in a simulated world.

DQ. What’s the meaning of the title?
SK. The title refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost, which details Satan’s fall from the heavens and subsequent interference with humankind. In the last 400 years due to advancements in science and philosophy, spiritual space has slowly collapsed, favoring a singular physical reality. Milton’s poem was the last of an era – when the concept of a soul space equaled that of reality.
Second Life opens an alternate space – one that resembles our physical reality but doesn’t exist in any sort of tangible spatial-time grid. The potential is huge. I see many in Second Life looking for transcendental experience. What interests me with this series is capturing those common feelings of hope and fear associated with this re-spatialized world.

DQ. Why did you choose to translate this series of performances into a series of prints, rather than videos?
SK. The original artworks exist in our cultural memory as single frames. Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void is a photograph; Maurizio Cattelan’s The Ninth Hour is a sculpture. While the video documentation of Chris Burden’s Shoot is available in galleries and even on YouTube, it is this one image before he is shot that propagates throughout art history books.
These documents serve an archival purpose and feel frozen in time. They embody a pastness to them related to the role of the photograph. I wanted to mirror the role of the archived document and capture the feel of this simulated world in 2006-2007. In 20 years, I’ll look back at these and think that was what Second Life looked like as a snapshot.
I considered using video, but I felt that this would dilute the tension inherent in the content of each of these performances. An avatar viewed in mid-air after leaping from a building captures the state of being in-between; in a video the avatar would land unharmed in an act of slapstick comedy. By using a single image, I let the viewer resolve the consequences of the action.

DQ. Among the works you recreated in Second Life (not only performances, but also sculptures and photographs), there are not only historic pieces, but also some very recent works. Why? How did you choose them?
SK. My starting point was with conceptual art performances of the 60s and 70s that were captured on video. This is a turning point in performance art where the mediated environment began superceding live performance. A small number of people have seen one of the Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece performance; many times more have watched the video in galleries and museums. The video has both eclipsed and substituted for the performance.

Many recent works have progressed this experience of the mediated environment. Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth is an eight-channel installation dependent on the viewer walking through the space. But, the lone image of the shopping cart in the parking lot is what lingers. Even in a recent artist talk I saw by him, he showed a few minutes of single-channel video of the shopping cart scene played from his computer. He didn’t even mention that it was a multi-channel installation!

The Ninth Hour by Maurizio Cattelan depicts a sculpture of the pope after being struck by a meteorite. But the photographs make the figure look so real that it seems like a person doing a live performance. From viewer’s vantage point, the media gets obscured. Although we read that this is a sculpture, it feels just like a still from a performance piece.

DQ. I read Paradise Ahead as an effort to question Second Life as a medium of representation of reality. It’s like if you are saying: if other media (such as video, photo, installation etc.) are able to reproduce reality, Second Life totally betrays it. You can’t preserve it’s own emotional atmosphere: tragedy becomes parody, the drama is completely lost… Am I right?
SK. The experience in Second Life can’t be captured through media. Any sort of representation appears as an unreality but when operating your avatar, it feels real in many ways. I see a chasm in between viewer and producer that is greater than in video or photography. Because the prints directly refer to other works, we can look at comparisons to other media.
Most people I talk to about Second Life have never ventured into the environment. Many think the prints are from a video game, but then something doesn’t make sense. The scenes are obviously staged and feel familiar. The 3D graphics are unsophisticated compared to current game engines.
Because the prints are indirect in representation but figurative in content, audiences have vastly different reactions. Some see them as emotionally bereft, others as satire and some as hyper-dramatic. I am compelled by the various reads on the works as they point to our collective notions of emotional content in surreal space.

DQ. If simulated worlds can’t be used to reproduce reality, what you – as an artist – can do with them?
SK. Simulated worlds compel me precisely because they fail to reproduce reality. Besides the disembodied actions and 3D graphics, there are many other layers of socialization and economies that diverge from real life. I’m most interested in the gaps between the desired representation and the actual result. From here, I examine at how others relate to the dissonances in the simulated – whether it is as a viewer, performer or active participant.
I am currently working on a Turbulence commission called No Matter in collaboration with Victoria Scott. We are commissioning builders to make “imaginary objects” – material things that have never existed in pure physical form such as the Holy Grail, Excalibur, Schrödinger’s cat and The Book of Love. Also studying the virtual economy, we will pay them Second Life wages, which are below minimum wage. We will extract these models and print them as foldable paper models. At the exhibition, viewers will assemble these on factory-style tables into 3D paper forms using scissors and glue. The get paid the same Second Life wages. Afterwards we will sell the models of eBay as finished artworks.
With projects like this as well as my continued work in the performance art group, Second Front, I’ve seen an incredible amount of artistic space in simulated worlds. I think artists are just starting to uncover other areas for exploration. The combination of simulated space and massive social interactions is unique. Between a whole other concept of space and a semi-anonymous relational environment, there are many facets beyond the reproduction of reality to artistically explore.

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.”
So, he subscribed the Odyssey community and, during the Gate event, he sent out a robot avatar who talked with other avatars in German, using fragments coming from Franz Kafka’s books, and he hacked another’s artist work filling it up with jelly polygons. He called this performance I love recursiveness. I was aware of the first performance and I liked it, since it played with SL’s “social software” and had a kind of surreal effect that I can’t praise more.

As for the second act, it is more debatable, since it was an act of vandalism against another’s artist work. I will come back to this issue soon. By now, we have to think about one of its consequences: it made the sim crash. Odyssey crashed during the Gate event, a four days long streaming between Odyssey and the iMAL Art Center in Bruxelles I helped organizing, an open stage for performance and interaction with a real life audience. And this is a problem.

At this point, another actor got into the drama. Sugar Seville is Odyssey’s manager. That means that she is responsible in front of the artists and the visitors of what happens on her island – and, in that particular occasion, she was responsible in front of iMAL and its audience. She contacted xdxd and she banned him from Odyssey. Good? Wrong? In my opinion, she did the right thing: that was her role in the drama. She had to protect herself, her place, her audience and her artists, and she did it. Xdxd’s work was an act of griefing – no matter if there was an artistic statement behind it.

Now Xdxd is playing the role of the victim on Rhizome: but that’s just the last development of a screenplay he wrote down from the very beginning. As he told me in a private conversation, the crash was part of this screenplay: “the crash caused by overload was part of the performance… It’s a criticism against the infrastructure (social, technological, perceptive), a criticism which included the server’s crash.” And he was happy when he was banned from Odyssey: complete success!

“People take themselves seriously on a platform that don’t let you to do it. You ban me from your own space in SL? I can come back whenever I want. How can you take seriously this thing? What does it mean?” This is Xdxd’s point. He wanted to demonstrate that, in virtual environments, you are never safe, you can’t preserve your own property, you can’t apply “the rules of property and commerce” which work well in real life. Did he succeed?

At the beginning I though, as Lee Wells does, that Xdxd simply chose the wrong target, and that his performance is more similar to real vandalism than to graffiti. But Xdxd’s words reminded me another similar artist’s performance, happened some years ago. In February 1999, 0100101110101101.ORG (yes, Eva and Franco Mattes) downloaded all the contents of another artist-run website (Hell.com) and uploaded them on their own website. Hell.com described itself as a “private parallel web”, closed to non invited visitors. Fighting against this kind of use of the web, 0100101110101101.ORG put online an “anticopyright version”, open to everyone. No matter who was right or wrong: two completely different visions of the Net were fighting against each other. Hell.com blamed 0100101110101101.ORG for theft and threatened them with an international lawsuit for copyright violation. This was good in two ways: because they had the right to do it and because, doing this, they successfully completed the drama written down by 0100101110101101.ORG.

Now a similar thing is happening. Two completely different visions of virtual worlds are fighting against each other. The first says that virtual life is completely different from real life, and that you can’t import in virtual worlds concepts such as property and business. Who minds if I vandalize an artwork? Com’on, its digital! Who minds if I break down a gallery’s window? They are just polygons!
The second claims that there is not so much difference between virtual and real life, maybe because our real life more and more relies on virtual laws; that property is valid also in virtual life, and that a criminal gesture is not less dangerous because it relies on an artistic statement; that things must be taken seriously in virtual worlds, because more and more people are taking them seriously.

Personally, I think that there are no such things as chimeras and truths. A chimera becomes the truth when enough people believe in it: that’s good for God, peace and democracy, and even for art: why it can’t be good for virtual lives? If most of the people believe that what they are doing in virtual worlds is REAL, it is. If most of the people think that vandalizing an artwork in Odyssey is like doing it in a real gallery, they are right. And Xdxd is wrong.

That said, I love recursiveness is a nice piece of art not because (as Xdxd says) of its relationship with other examples of provocative contemporary art, but because it raised a problem and a discussion. In the same time, Sugar did the right thing banning him from Odyssey, because she made the performance succeed; and she’ll do an even better thing readmitting him on Odyssey, as she suggests at the end of the chat. Because irresponsibility is for children and artists, and Xdxd is not a child. Maybe he is a crap artist (I don’t think so, indeed), but how many crap artists are in Second Life?

First published on Spawn of the Surreal, May 22, 2008.

Yesterday morning I spent a couple of hours in Second Life to visit Kiss the Sky, an huge exhibition curated by artist DC Spensley (DanCoyote Antonelli in SL) for the New Media Consortium in collaboration with the Museum of Hyperformalism, directed by DanCoyote himself. Kiss the Sky pretends to be the “definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism”, with 37 installations by over a dozen artists: Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The notecard of the exhibition includes the following definition of Hyperformalism:

“Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.”
The press release goes on saying that Hyperformalism removes “the comfortable cliché of anthropocentrism”, talking about immersion and abstraction, and concluding that Hyperformalism exceeds our traditional concept of art, because it is “native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.”

This last point is very important, because I think that the very concept of “nativity” is in the same time the strength point and the deafness point of the hyperformalist strategy (and of all the “not possible in real life” approach). Visiting the exhibition, I was quite surprised to notice that I enjoyed it a lot. In the end of the long tour I was quite bored indeed, but nothing different from any big exhibition of abstract art – or from an exhausting visit to the Venice Biennale. Some works, in particular, gave me a great aesthetic and immersive experience. If you are planning to go and see the show, I suggest you to have a look to Pulse Points, by Nebulosus Severine – an enormous ice block that can be visited like a room, with some strange sculptures frozen in it like a Siberian mammoth; to the ambitious Fractus V, a colossal kinetic sculpture which made me think to Boccioni and Pomodoro for its bronze-like textures; to Juria Yoshikawa‘s works, in particular Spiny Bumblebee Abstract; to the ambiguous, surreal sculptures by Chance Abattoir; and, finally, to a classic by Adam Ramona, the wonderful A Rose Heard at Dusk previously installed on Odyssey.

1. Everything, in SL, is constructed. Is everything art?

I enjoyed these works, really. Or, better said, my avatar enjoyed them; he had some interesting experiences, like every time he discovers something new in SL, being it art or not. This is one of the first problems coming to my mind, and one of the things that prevents me to fully enjoy Hyperformalism. Everything, in SL, is constructed. Everything can be art. Do we have to rely on what people say about their work, or on what the New Media Consortium suggests to call art? Yes and no. The answer is related to what we think SL is.

2. Is SL an art world?

So, what is SL? A software or a world? If it is a world, probably there is an “art world” in it. That is, in Howard S. Becker‘s words (1982), a group of people “whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.” Artists, critics, collectors, galleries, institutions and so on. You don’t need a great experience of SL to know that you can find in it all the key figures who build up an art world. So, SL has an art world and Hyperformalism is its avantgarde. Since it can be understood only by people living in that world, and belonging to that art world, no surprise if it is not recognized by any RL community. Better, there’s no need for that: art, to exist, needs to be recognized as such only by its own art world.
Simple, don’t you think? Yes and no. The problems come when you don’t think, like me, that SL is a world.

3. SL as theatre

SL is a platform. When you enter it, everything you do is to set up your own performance. Choose an avatar. Edit it. Find a name, a costume, a position on the platform. Write down your script and act it. Add some furniture to the stage: everything you do is just a step forward in the development of your story. And of the collective history of SL. Your story can be similar to your (real) life, or radically different. Can be work, play or art. So, the SL “art world” is not real, it is just a collective myth, a narration, and in this sense it is very interesting. Most of the stories are boring, because most of the people are bad players. But some stories are very interesting. Think, for example, to Anshe Chung. Aimee Weber. James Wagner Au. Sugar Seville. China Tracy. Molotov Alva. Or Gazira Babeli. All beautiful stories. Not all of them are art, because not all of them want to be recognized as such. But if Anshe Chung will say. “my story of the first SL billionaire is art”, she will be a better artist then DanCoyote Antonelli.
Like Anshe Chung, DanCoyote is adding furniture to the stage. But while Anshe Chung describes the Anshe Chung Studios as an entrepreneurial venture, Dancoyote describes his installations as art.
Indeed, Dancoyote seems to have understood it, maybe in a vague and faded way. His story is great. His young avatar; the myth of the sixth finger; Hyperformalism as the SL avantgarde: all these things are good entries in a good story. Probably what he does is not art, but Dancoyote Antonelli is, without doubt, the best artwork by DC Spensley. Also other artists, such as Adam Ramona and Juria Yoshikawa, wrote an interesting script for their avatars. Adam Ramona’s avatar is wonderful. But all of them are confusing what their avatars are doing in SL with what their humans did in real life: they call it interactive installations, sound installations, optical art. And they neglect their script, which is exactly what gives sense to what they are doing, and what – I’d dare to say – can make their work interesting even for a real life audience which never experienced SL.
But most of the self-pretending SL artists make their own work without caring at all about their story. SL art is a midsummer night dream, that in a few years will turn into a nightmare, with people realizing that they wasted their time without creating anything valuable. Wake up, artists! Without narration there is no art in SL!

4. Performance, but not only

After what I wrote, probably you can understand why I think performance is the most interesting way to deal with SL. Gazira Babeli, Second Front, Man Michinaga, Eva and Franco Mattes are all feeding, with their works and acts, the mythologies of that cluster of stories that is called SL. They perform everywhere. They don’t need technical settings to be experienced, because my imagination does not need technical settings. They play with the vernacular background of SL, and with their culture and tradition, not just with codes, prims and scripts. They don’t add furniture to the stage, but stories to the script.

And, last but not least, they don’t distinguish between “native art” and “RL art”, because there is no such distinction: there’s only art. That’s why I count among the best examples of art related to virtual worlds such works as Cao Fei‘s RMB City and Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott‘s No Matter: they are not – not only – native, but they say something interesting on both the worlds their authors deal with – and they contribute to both the narratives.

Gazira Babeli, Hammering the Void, Installation with engraved hammer, 100 x 100 x 40 cm, 2009. Courtesy DAM Gallery, Berlin.

Text written for Gazira Babeli‘s first solo exhibition at DAM Gallery, Berlin (May 30 – July 31, 2009). First published on Spawn of the Surreal.

“The world we actually have does not meet my standards.” – Philip K. Dick

In 1920, at the opening of a Dada exhibition in Köln, Max Ernst made an axe available for the audience. As far as I know, this gesture was never reenacted. That’s a shame. An artwork should always come with an axe in attach. This would remind us that art must be loved, or hated. That it deserves more than an idiot gaze. Duchamp took years to make us accept his urinal, yet he’s still unable to persuade us to use it in the more logical way: pissing into it. I bet he would be happy with this kind of interaction: turning an artwork into an urinal.

Gazira Babeli never reenacts – she acts. She’s worshipped as a marabout, but she hates spells and she does her best to break them. Tell her “aura” and she’ll throw an hail of meteoroids onto you. Tell her “virtual” and she’ll shoot you into the air at 900 km/h. When, in 2006, she made Come To Heaven, she released the code of the performance through her website: she discovered the painful delights of being beaten up by a computer graphics card, and she wanted to share this feeling with everybody.
Yet, even on a computer screen, people keep on loving the moonlight instead of killing it, and being charmed by everything is introduced to them as “art”. Thus Gazira created the fourteen sisters. They are called Anger Erin, Envy Sixpence, Gluttony Aboma, Greed Petrovic, Lust Placebo, Pride Placebo, Sloth Swansong, Courage Sparta, Faith Radikal, Hope Varnish, Justice Kimono, Love Brandi, Prudence Miami, Temperance Navarita. They are Gazira Babeli, fourteen times. Carrying a wooden sledge-hammer, they move all together, and hit violently. When you, beloved art lover, meet them, feel free to think at the following references, at your pleasure: La Liberté guidant le peuple, The Night Watch, Il quarto stato, an army of models performing Vanessa Beecroft. At your first blow on the head, art will be replaced, in your mind, by Castor oil and gas chambers.

This platoon in Wellington boots and suspender belt comes without any notice, and intervenes in social events – mostly exhibition openings – making a hell of a mess. Is this the usual, boring self-referential crap we are used to finding in art? What Gazira likes is to intervene in the rituality of the real, and break up its continuity. The world she actually has does not meet her standards, and she hammers it. She works in this direction from the very beginning: just think to her earthquakes, her showers of pop bananas, her Campbell’s Soup cans, her pizzas fouling up the gallery with tomato soup. Isn’t she an arse-hole? If you need, Gazira’s hammers are there for you. Use them, against her too. That’s what she wants.

Postscript

When they are not swooping down on some crowd trying to smash an artist’s head, Gazira’s Furies are imprisoned in a claustrophobic office with a view on Windows’ standard desktop, jumping around all the time. The office is encaged in a computer. The computer is encaged in a gallery. Gaz’ en valise, finally. It looks like a storm in a glass snowball, until you don’t open it. And it comes with an hammer, of course.

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…

Those who believe that it’s excessive to bring in Kant and his definition of Enlightenment [2] to talk about Gazira probably underestimate the number of people for whom discovering her work had the power of a revelation. But to have something to reveal, you need to have made a discovery. Gazira’s first discovery was that Second Life is a much more powerful “illusion” than film: despite the presence of the screen, the “suspension of disbelief” is total, and the “perception of the time spent as our avatars’ ‘assistants’ appears to evaporate.” [3] The disillusion comes about traumatically, as we “close this ‘world’ and find ourselves facing the computer screen, full of files and icons, as flat as a gravestone.”

Gazira learns. She learns that identity, like the body, is something artificial, an assembly of fragments bought in a shop for a handful of Linden Dollars (the currency of Second Life). She learns that the illusory space she inhabits is highly theatrical and that to go from being an unwitting actor to being a fully conscious director all she needs to do is learn the basics of her machines and special effects. She starts working on and playing with scripts. “…I tried to find the limit beyond which my imagination became unacceptable. Not finding it I continued with my experiments…”. Explorations, attempts, trials; but not yet art. She designs a guitar and goes to sing gospel on street corners. She goes to the sandboxes, the places in Second Life where programmers create new objects. She learns how to design weapons. One day in April she finds a huge glass building bearing the ambitious sign “New Media Center”. It is all but empty, and Gazira decides to plaster it with the only thing she has in her inventory: a giant pizza which when touched sings O Sole Mio and sprays tomato sauce everywhere. The owner of the museum shows up, worried but also interested. They talk, the adjective ‘pop’ is mentioned. A few days later Gazira creates an oversize can of Campbell’s soup, which, when you get too close, tries to gobble you up. The phrase “You love Pop Art – Pop Art hates you”, appears in the dialogue box.

She designs earthquakes and starts experimenting with the laws of gravity. She unleashes a “grey goo”, a storm of self-replicating objects that fill an area up to a set point, and can also cause the temporary collapse of the simulator. But here what rains down from the sky are Super Mario icons, question marks, Warholian bananas.

She almost always tries her codes out on herself: when she happens to invade the space of others at times she is given an enthusiastic welcome, but mostly she gets insulted. She learns the importance of language in a virtual world: language as programming code, that the entire structure of her theater rests on; language as communication code, the basis for all social engineering practices, crucial in a world that presents itself as a space for socialization. She develops a weapon that punishes verbal offences, and calls it Don’t Say – a tornado that traps and lifts up anyone using “inappropriate” words. Insults, in the main. Or critics’ jargon.

These projects reveal a growing level of awareness, which is not only the result of her growing maturity, but also comes from dealing with a certain social context: artists, critics, curators. Gazira pieces it together: if Second Life is a theater, then she is a performer. Her “actions” use code which becomes an event, the language of performance: they are therefore code performances. Like all the other residents, Gazira records her adventures. When she starts seeing these as works of art, and other people start to recognise them as such, she produces a website. In December the members of Second Front [4], Second Life’s first group of performance artists, approach her to invite her to join. A mutual friend, Sugar Seville, decides to buy a piece of land that can be made into a safe place for their work: this is the first nucleus of Odyssey, set to become one of the most interesting art environments in Second Life. A few months later, on 16 April 2007, Gazira opens a big exhibition in a newly opened museum-sized venue. It is called Gazira Babeli: [Collateral Damage]. There is a table with aperitifs, a catalogue, even a guest book. Given the size of the show, which presents twelve installations and a film, the term ‘retrospective’ is not presumptuous. In the two months that follow the show is visited by 1,178 real visitors: which means that 1,178 people have clicked, often more than once, on a link to visit it. Gazira Babeli exists and she is an artist.

GAZIRA, THE ARTIST

Being an artist means doing something that can be recognised by a community of people, be it big or small, as “art”. The concept of art changes over time, so this acknowledgement comes about when the would-be artist references a tradition of practices and ideas that the community in question calls “art history”. The concept of art is not something absolute, but a socio-cultural construct that can change over time. In a virtual world it is the same: art exists when there is an art world ready to embrace it. This world may share the value system adopted by other art worlds (for example the contemporary art world), but this is not strictly necessary [5]. In Second Life, an art world exists. In his essay for this book Mario Gerosa talks about a sizeable community of “unaware” artists, whose art becomes a “social connection”, a factor for aggregation and recognition. Moreover, these artists shoot portraits of avatars in line with traditional aesthetic criteria; they fill the galleries of Second Life with works that lie midway between kitsch and popular taste. Gazira is not part of this world, and does not seek or obtain its approval. The art of the social networks feeds the illusion; Gazira ruptures it. Gazira does on occasion do kitsch portrait shots and voluptuous nudes herself, but she uses these in a completely different way.

Nudes Descending a Staircase is a work she created for Collateral Damage, in which a series of carefully framed nudes fall headlong down a marble staircase, ending up in a heap at her feet. With great irony, Gazira appears to be repeating Duchamp’s diatribe against a form of art which confines itself to producing static images in a world which offers endless possibilities for action, and following up his battle against turpentine poisoning with a new battle against image poisoning. This is a work that comments on Second Life, reflecting good-naturedly on a world of gadgets that offers up the values of the “real” world to the letter; values that are entirely alien to its own internal logic. But this is a work that talks to those, like her, who acknowledge that Duchamp is one of the most important figures in contemporary art, and those, like her, who acknowledge the viral nature of the artistic act. Gazira Babeli is without a doubt well aware of these two genres: contemporary art and net.art, namely the art that exploits the conceptual potential and potential for signification that only viruses, codes and network protocols can offer. Hurling your body at great speed from thousands of meters up, until your computer’s graphics card can take it no more and spews out a splatter of smashed polygons, replicated limbs and popping eyes (Come To Heaven, 2006) is an operation that sits perfectly with this tradition. It is Cubist fragmentation, and it is performance, in the sense attributed to the term by seventies artists like Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman (testing your own relationship with space and time, exploring your body’s limits). It is checking out the limits of the machine, as Nam June Paik did and as Dutch duo Jodi do, and it is Software Art, formalized instructions that translate into an event.

We could make similar observations regarding many other works by Gazira Babeli.

Her “grey goo” attacks are an artistic version of the tactics adopted by the “griefers” the bad guy hackers of Second Life; but they also recall a number of ambitious landscape projects, like the orange fabric that Christo and Jeanne-Claude unfurled over Central Park in 2005. Unbroken Eggs (2007) is a monumental installation comprising two colored marble towers that collapse on top of the visitor as he or she passes, then resume their original position, in a constant cycle of death and resurrection. Once more code sparks off an event that would be impossible, in these conditions, in the real world, but the work, originally a tribute to Luciano Fabro, establishes a profound dialogue with his art, and explores form and sculpture, and the ethical value of creating art, as well as addressing a collective trauma – the collapse of the Twin Towers. Only in a virtual world can such an event be repeated ad infinitum without “collateral damage”: only here it can be representation without ending in tragedy.

After looking at Gazira as the “ghost in the machine”, a glitch in Second Life, in the essay that follows the American critic and artist Patrick Lichty points out that her lexicon is curiously “modern”. As we have noted, for Gazira, as for Nanni Moretti, words are all-important. By calling her works “acts”, “sculptures”, “paintings” and “installations”, Gazira performs a specific intellectual operation which has the aim of dissociating her works from the “New Media” jargon that is all the rage in Second Life. She thus frames her work in an artistic context that explores the concepts of the body, time, space, identity. All of her works require the active involvement of the viewer, but the word “interactive” never appears; everything is interactive in Second Life. At the same time, and for the same reason, Gazira has no interest in immersive environments, penetrable spaces, reactive installations, or exploiting or implementing the innate multimedia potential of Second Life’s graphic engine. All of this is natural, just as flying and teleporting from one place to another is natural. What’s new, in the context of virtual worlds, is being able to start talking about the body, time, space, identity once more. As usual Gazira sums it all up in a pointed one-liner: “For me net.art is like the wild Middle Ages of the internet… Second Life seems to offer a Renaissance Perspective.” [6]

Everything (or almost everything) she does would be “impossible in real life”: not because it is built in mid air, or because it challenges the fundamental laws of the static nature and permeability of bodies, but because – as Alan Sondheim asserts – it is intrinsically dangerous. The shower of frogs was one of the plagues of Egypt, and collapsing buildings, earthquakes and tornados often end in tragedy. While in Collateral Damage, the rogue critic who dares mention the words “New Media” will have the pleasant surprise of being lifted into the air by a tornado and hurled around the venue, all without any collateral damage, of course.

GAZIRA, THE WORK

Each of Gazira’s works adds another facet to her persona, and her legend. A painstakingly cultivated legend, in the knowledge that in a virtual world, identity building is one of the main strategies of signification, and the avatar is the artist’s very first work. “My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes”, she once declared [7]. And while she has often exhibited nudity before a society which is highly sensitive to the issue of the naked body, she also dedicates great care to her appearance. Tanned skin, almost always dressed in black, her eyes are masked by a pair of dark glasses. She wears a strange top hat, which she often uses to carry her scripts in, and compared to other avatars, her gait is rather rigid. Some describe her as evasive and unfriendly, others as open and affable. The fact that she is not subjugated to a “real” identity has done a lot for the legend that surrounds her, but also to the concreteness of her persona. In Second Life you can meet loads of avatars but few people. Gazira is one of the latter. She is not someone’s puppet: she is someone in her own right. As a total work of art, an overall artistic project, Gazira is the crowning of a century of work on identity building: from Rrose Selavy to Luther Blissett, passing Roberta Breitmore on the way [8]. But at the same time she is a cultural construct, a fictitious identity that in Collateral Damage can be purchased for just one Linden dollar, the equivalent of a few cents: a clonable, democratic body that we can all buy and use.

But maybe this is exactly what Buy Gaz 4 One Linden Dollar! intends to demonstrate: we can all be like Gazira, but Gazira herself is something very different; we can all own a Gazira, but the real Gazira will always elude us.

Her works represent an active contribution to the construction of this identity. They all help form a picture of an unpredictable, caustic performer, entirely capable of summarily rupturing the magic of the rite we are witnessing. All she needs to do is enter an exhibition and unleash a shower of bananas to free those in attendance from the illusion of taking part in a real opening, and to reveal its nature as a worldly ritual. In Ultimate Submission, she does the chicken dance, dressed only in a barrel – at the entrance of one of the biggest porn-fetish-S&M stores in Second Life [9], making an extreme (and sardonic) bid to join that world of synthetic beauties, but at the same time showing us just what they are and what we ourselves risk becoming: mere simulacra. In Who’s Afraid of…, she does a sexy dance number in front of a series of art history beauties, from Rembrandt’s Bathsheba to Botticelli’s Simonetta Vespucci, brazenly comparing herself with the other works of art; and in Anna Magnani she tests out her acting talents, performing all the facial expression animations available in Second Life in quick-fire, random sequence.

Lastly, in the medium length film Gaz of the Desert (February – March 2007), Gazira actively contributes to writing her own legend, starring in a hagiographic version of her own story, along the lines of Simón del Desierto (1965) by Luis Buñuel. Gazira is subjected to a series of temptations by Satan, as well as some genuine attacks: erotic dances and locusts, hatchets and Kalashnikovs. At the end of a death sequence (real or faked?) Gaz reappears in a call center, sitting beside her stunning temptress, both at work. She is wearing a t-shirt which reads: “Fuck off. I’m scripting.” An enthralling production, which presents the finest eye candy Second Life has to offer, though it is hardly recognizable as such, and a story which could be interpreted as a parable on the subject of “second lives” lived along a fine line between the seductive power of illusions and the awareness of reality [10].

GAZIRA, INSIDE AND OUT

After Collateral Damage, Gazira took herself off to a little island not far from Odyssey, that she has christened Locusolus. Here she has “archived” the entire show and created new works. The visitor or curious passer-by might encounter an atmosphere very similar to that of the villa of the same name belonging to Martial Canterel, the weird inventor in the Raymond Roussel novel [11]. Gazira has a lot in common with Canterel. Like him, she tries to carve out her place in the world by dominating nature, mediated by bizarre mechanisms that someone later termed “celibate machines”. A different world, different nature. Ursonate in SL is an installation composed of a giant tap, which seems to suck up from the earth and spew out a plethora of assorted junk: toy cows, globes, merry-go-rounds, boats, vans, cars, balls and other bits and pieces. All in time to the ultra-famous Ursonate (1922 – 1932), the “phonetic poem” by the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Gazira stages a visual interpretation of the Ursonate, but without sacrificing its intrinsic characteristic: experimenting with verbal language. Under this aspect Gazira also has a lot in common with Raymond Roussel. The latter wrote his books starting with a verbal game, the phonetic similarity of two different phrases, which he used to build complex images and narrations. Language as a generator of images, the first cog in complex mechanisms of meaning. Language as performance code, code as a linguistic act. Machines which are celibate, but not infertile.

Gazira Babeli, along with a few other artists, has given rise to a complex system of meaning in Second Life, a 3D simulated world entirely constructed and owned by its residents. Her oeuvre belongs to that world and speaks to that world. At present Second Life boasts around twelve million users, but it is not the only virtual world. The experience of life on screen is a common, widespread one. We do not know what the future holds for these virtual worlds, but we do know that their present is our present, even if we have never entered a virtual world, and never intend to. Which is where the challenge to leave Second Life comes in. Gazira has managed it on various occasions, taking part in exhibitions, touring and releasing her film. In October 2007 she took part in the project The Gate, a portal linking a real space (the iMAL Center in Brussels) and the virtual world of Second Life. From the real venue, the public could communicate and interact with her and anyone else who turned up in the area in front of the portal. The Gate provided Gazira with further confirmation of her existence. It showed her that even though humans are aliens, you can communicate with aliens. She holds a gun to the head of one in a cowboy hat. Another attempts an impossible dialogue then holds up a hand-written note reading: “I don’t have a computer”. What does it matter? You don’t need a computer to understand Gazira. This is why she comes out of Second Life, in this book for instance. And this is why she will come out again.

Notes

[1] A quick guide: Second Life (www.secondlife.com) is a 3D persistent world on the internet entirely designed by its residents. The company that launched it in 2003 (Linden Labs of California) supervises it, collects the rent and updates the software, but leaves it up to the clients, or “residents” to develop it. Residents are those who adopt a virtual alter ego, known as an avatar, to frequent this world, using it as a platform for communications, social life and creative activities. In other words, they can chat to other users on line at the same time, have a drink, have sex, visit an exhibition and perform a host of other varyingly mundane “real life” rituals, without moving from their computers. They can also use internal 3D design and programming tools to build a house, and design clothes or other objects. If they wish, they can do this for a profit, selling what they make in exchange for the local currency, Linden dollars (which can be exchanged for real dollars). Some do art. At present Second Life has around 12 million residents. Each resident has an inventory, a section of the interface which lists all of his or her possessions. Geographically Second Life is divided into one main area (mainland) and a series of islands of different sizes; technically speaking the world resides on a number of servers, very powerful computers which keep a set area of territory online, 24/7. These portions are divided into independent areas known as sims or simulators; one server runs around four simulators. Polygons are the basis for 3D modelling, and are covered in texture, modular images which make the objects in question look more realistic. A script is a piece of computing code which makes something happen, a glitch is a computing error, something like a virus (purists will be horrified). And that just about rounds up the list of difficult words you will find in this book.

[2] Immanuel Kant, Answering the question: what is Enlightenment?, 1784.

[3] Gazira Babeli, “Memoria Burattinaia”, 2007. Published in Il Sole24ORE [Ventiquattro Magazine], N° 7, July 2007, pp. 76 – 78 entitled “La Grande Illusione”.

[4] Second Front: http://slfront.blogspot.com/

[5] The concept of “art worlds” was put forward by Howard S. Becker in Art Worlds, University of California Press, Berkeley – Los Angeles – London 1982.

[6] In Tilman Baumgärtel, “My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes. Interview with Gazira Babeli”, in Nettime, 23 March 2007.

[7] Ibid.

[8] For Luther Blissett, the multiple name that sparked a media frenzy in the 90s, see http://www.lutherblissett.net/. Roberta Breitmore was the fictitious identity created by American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson at the beginning of the 70s.

[9] The Latexia Space Station Mall, in the “Fetish VooDoo” region.

[10] Pau Waelder offers an interesting, highly detailed analysis of the film in his article “Day For Night”, in Le Magazine électronique du CIAC, n. 28, 2007. Online at: //www.ciac.ca

[11] Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, Editions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris 1914.

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.

Now we would not have concentrated for so long on Gazira’s appearance if we had not read quite so much on the grey attire of Joseph Beuys, his felt hat, and his shaman-like presence. Gazira, who sees herself first and foremost as a performance artist, is well aware of the fact that, from Beuys to Orlan, the body represents any performer’s first work of art, and that the construction of one’s persona is not a sideline, but a key part of the oeuvre. No details must be overlooked. Life and art are one. But here there is also another level to consider. Gazira Babeli lives and works in Second Life, a 3D virtual world launched by the Californian company Linden Lab in 2003, and entirely constructed, owned and run by its residents. The latter are conscious that their avatars are their first, true creations, and dedicate much of their attention to their appearances. In other words the specific characteristics of an artistic genre (in this case performance art) are inextricably bound up with the internal logic of the universe that hosts it, giving rise to a succession of superimposed layers we will often come back to.

Living in Second Life

“We still don’t understand what ‘life’ is and yet, we are talking about a second one. One life at a time, please! Maybe these lives (RL and SL) are not so different: symbolic abstractions and virtuality are common attributes.” [1]

Having said this, we should however note that Gazira’s existence in Second Life is radically different from that of all other residents. Second Life is an alluring metaphor which aims to offer exactly that to its residents. If our “first lives” are those in the real world, our second lives are played out in a virtual world by our digital representations, or avatars. The latter exist in a simulated world which largely reproduces the dynamics of the real world: avatars go shopping, look after their houses and appearances, work, have sex and travel. Most of the residents do all this in total acceptance of the simulation, namely without realizing they are inhabiting an interface made up of data, a world held together by code and script. When this awareness comes to the fore, we can talk about a “third life”, as Matteo Bittanti termed it in a recent essay. In Bittanti’s view, the third life is “the set of activities carried out by a subject acting in Second Life through an avatar”: “a subject boosted by analogical and digital extensions and prostheses such as an avatar, computer, keyboard and monitor.” [2]

This subject is constantlyoverlaying practices of social life and programming practices or 3D modelling, constantly combining the two levels of reality he or she inhabits: “the analogical plane (first life) and digital plane (second life)”. Gazira Babeli operates on yet another level of life (and awareness). She does this, first and foremost, by doing away with the first life: for Gazira, the subject – be it a man or a woman – that created her, is not her ‘real’ alter ego, but simply the stupid deity that manipulates the interface she lives in, the mysterious being that governs her actions from on high. In this way, Second Life becomes her real plane of action, and it is from this perspective that her radical identification between social life and manipulation of code acquires meaning. Living in any world means acting with an awareness of the rules that govern that world. But the social conventions that rule the virtual world of Second Life, just like the linguistic conventions that support its interface, only work on the surface: the world that Gazira has chosen for herself is based on other laws, those written in programming code.

This is why her performances are not based on acting – like any normal avatar – on the Second Life platform, but on manipulating and activating its code. She is not a performer, but a “code performer”. She does not pretend, like everyone else, to be in a world made of objects and atoms, but is aware of inhabiting a world made of code, and being made of code herself. Performance art is always a critique of the norms the surrounding world is based on. And Gazira operates precisely in this way, which is why she appears like some kind of bizarre shaman to those who see her. In all cultures, shamans have the power to enter into contact with the world of primitive forces and mediate those forces. Gazira runs scripts as if they were magic spells, unleashing earthquakes, natural disasters and invasions of pop icons like plagues of locusts.

And as in Second Life every fragment of code has to have its own “physical” location, Gazira keeps her scripts in her hat, her magic wand. She knows that the body is a construct, and enjoys deforming it or rendering it interchangeable. She knows that space is an illusion and she plays around with these contradictions. She knows that “reality depends on our graphic card”, and never misses a chance to call attention to that. But she transfers everything onto the artistic plane, by means of what she terms “performances”, “sculptures”, and “paintings”. In this way she introduces another level of action, another idiom to decodify and another set of rules to subvert: those of the art world.

The Space

“Falling down from 21.987.0987 meters height is not so safe in RL…” [3]

In October 2006 a minor apocalypse hit a beach in Second Life, burying it under a flood of skipping Super Marios. In technical jargon this is called “grey goo”, an expression used in nanotechnology and science fiction to describe a hypothetical apocalyptic scenario in which self-replicating robots consume all living matter on the earth [4].

Although the cataclysm did generate a certain level of anxiety, Gazira appears to be more interested in setting off a mental short circuit than a genuine system collapse. This was why she populated the three-dimensional, baroque world of Second Life with the definitive icon of the 8-bit era.

This process is evident in Kaspar Goo (November 2006), where she asks an actor to play the part of Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer, going into raptures over the wonders of nature. It is dawn, and our wanderer, in his wide-brimmed hat, watches the sun come up over a fairy-tale scenario. The mimesis appears to be played out to perfection, till the traveller’s doubts appear in concrete form, embodied as a shower of question marks sullying the horizon. A couple of days later Gazira showed up at the opening of a show held in Ars Virtua [5], an exhibition dedicated to avatar portraits by Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org) [6]. At a certain point the venue filled up with bananas, and not just any old bananas, but a replica of the banana created by Andy Warhol for the cover of The Velvet Underground’s first LP. It is hard to say whether this is a comment on the work of the Mattes (that’s all pop!) or a competition over who is most “pop art” of all. But above and beyond this play of references, and observations about past art forms, which we will return to later, Gazira displays her desire to intervene on the surrounding space, in this case occupying it and revealing its conventional nature by inserting elements which are completely “foreign” to the three-dimensional illusion she lives in: out-sized two-dimensional objects borrowed from language (the question marks) or visual communications (Super Mario, Warhol’s banana).

The spatial-temporal model of Second Life is a rather peculiar one. The force of gravity is present, but residents can fly. There are dimensions, distances, journey times and speed limits, but these can all be circumvented in an instant by teleporting. The latter practice, mutated from science fiction, is based on an implicit pact: the blind faith that, once activated, we will be teleported exactly where we want to go: a “real” place which can be physically identified on a map.

COME.TO.HEAVEN (July 2006) was a performance which explored a very simple hypothesis: what happens if, combating the force of gravity, I hurl my body (or someone else’s) from millions of meters at extremely high speed? The result depends on the characteristics of the graphics board on the computer being used. In some cases the polygons shatter, and the result no longer has a human semblance, while in others the body appears to have gone through a kind of turbine, with limbs multiplying and breaking up, and the body becoming a messy pulp of flesh and hair. Exploiting the physical characteristics of her environment, Gazira appears to be exploring various strands of twentieth century art, and indeed she describes her work as a painting on the computer’s graphic card. At the same time the frame of reference can only be that of an imaginary “flight” like Yves Klein’s famous leap into the void.

Created on occasion of the exhibition [Collateral Damage] [7], U AreHere (April 2007) consists in two sculptures which violate the pact of trust implicit in the practice of teleporting. Or rather, they represent an overly-literal application of the latter. The sculptures are two simple models on pedestals: the first represents a desert with some archeological ruins, the other a room with a window we can peep into to see what’s inside: a banal-looking office with a clock, a desk and a computer. By clicking on the models we are transported into the setting in question: an arid, apparently infinite desert, or a closed room with no way out. Have we been shrunk or just taken hostage inside a “real” version of the setting represented by the two sculptures? We will never know, also in view of the fact that to get out we cannot fly, but have to use an internally-located device that we have to track down. But this is of little importance, for in any case the spatial/temporal model of Second Life has been violated. As for the office, for the time being we will only note that while Gazira views Second Life as a sort of Dickian replica of the world of Perky Pat [8], the real world (the room in which our real body is linked to the world) is none other than another imaginary dimension.

Earthquakes are another obvious way of manipulating space. Here, as in the various “grey goo” scenarios, it is fairly natural to think that Gazira is attempting a hack, or “griefing” as they say in Second Life. But while this is undoubtedly bound up with various attempts at artistically sabotaging a system – be it digital or social – we get the impression that in recreating a real-world phenomenon strangely absent from this virtual world which is so realistic in many other aspects, Gazira is once more playing around with its reality coefficient.

The body

“My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes.” [9]

As well as taking center stage in performance art, in Second Life the body acquires some very particular characteristics. On the one hand the user is aware of dealing with a conventional representation of him or herself, a digital alter ego that enables him to interact with the surrounding space and the other beings present: nothing more or less than the little round faces used in the very first graphic chatrooms. On the other hand relations with one’s avatar soon come to resemble those we have with our real bodies: it needs to be taken care of, dressed, groomed, kept satisfied (mostly in terms of sex and having drinks); it is inviolable and irreplaceable. In her work Gazira Babeli frees the body of the avatar from these restrictions, and invites us to see it for what it is: a representational convention that we are free to ‘violate’ at will. Buy Gaz’ 4 one Linden! (April 2007) enable us, for the symbolic price of 1 Linden Dollar, to purchase Gazira Babeli’s open source body: we remain ourselves but we can use (and abuse) her black coat, her body, even her hat.

Second Life is full of twins: the avatars of the greenest residents, who have not yet learned to personalize their bodies. This also recalls the world of Perky Pat, where the people, in their drug-induced state, identify with a limited number of people, ending up by being ‘translated’ into the body of Perky Pat or her boyfriend Walt. But this work was also a more general reflection on the concept of identity, something which is not only increasingly ambiguous, but which has now acquired such importance that in Second Life it is a kind of social divider, distinguishing crowds of newbies sharing the same stereotyped bodies, from an elite of experts capable of displaying their own individuality.

Meanwhile Come Together (April 2007) explored the concept of the fusion of bodies. The work is a pedestal surrounded by many coloured balls, which in Second Life represent sexual relations. By clicking on these, the avatar is transported onto the pedestal, where it merges into the bodies of the other visitors, in a series of uncontrollable random movements. Once more symbols are subverted, and the parody of a real action (sex) is converted into a kind of fusion with synchronized movements only possible between avatars.

But the most radical violation is that of Avatar on Canvas (March 2007), a series of three Francis Bacon paintings where the main figure has been replaced by a three-dimensional chair. This is an implicit invitation to sit down, but when we do, our avatar is subjected to hideously violent deformations (thus completing the Bacon). At this point we can choose to leave then come back with our usual appearance, or hang out in our new anamorphic but still entirely serviceable body.

Avatar on Canvas is in fact a watered-down version, in the guise of a work of art, of a theatrical performance by Second Front [10] (a group of which Gazira is an active member) entitled Spawn of the Surreal (February 11, 2007). On that occasion, Gazira incorporated her deforming code into a few of the chairs set up for the audience of the Second Front show. The audience members in question ended up being deformed without any prior warning, and their consequent panic and embarrassment reveals the – entirely irrational – sense of attachment that residents of Second Life have with regard to their virtual bodies, deemed sacred and inviolable exactly like our physical bodies.

Don’t Say New Media!

“… a ‘world in a valise’” [11]

Second Soup, performed in May 2006 (and recorded on video), sees Gazira tackling a giant can of Campbell’s soup, another pop art icon. The artist is looking at it on a poster, when all of a sudden the can leaves its paper domain and grabs hold of her. From that moment on she just can’t get rid of it. Gazira jumps, flies and runs, but the can always catches up with her. Pop art as an irksome deity, a cumbersome legacy that we just can’t seem to shed? The penetrability of bodies in Second Life makes some of the scenes amusing, but Gazira doesn’t appear to be enjoying herself much. “You love Pop Art – Pop Art hates you!”, is the ironic subtitle to the piece.

In [Collateral Damage], Second Soup is presented as an installation of 5 soup cans that are activated when the spectator gets too close. Globally, this piece is a good starting point for considering the nature of Gazira’s art. The performance dimension is undoubtedly a key element, but there is more to it than that. Gazira writes the code, runs it in person, and records her performances in photo and on video just like any performance artist, from Marina Abramovic to Vanessa Beecroft. But Gazira’s performances are computing code, that the artist offers on her site under Creative Commons license, so that anyone can use it. She operates in a network environment (Net Art?). She writes code (Software Art?). She uses legends and icons from pop culture (Pop Art?). In reality Gazira’s work is above and beyond these categories, or rather it resides in a context where such distinctions no longer apply.

The comparison with Software Art would appear to be the most relevant in this case. In a 2004 essay the German critic Inke Arns introduced the concept of the performativity of code in software art, adapting it from John L. Austin’s theory of the linguistic act.

As Arns writes:

“… this performativity is not to be understood as a purely technical performativity, i.e. it does not only happen in the context of a closed technical system, but affects the realm of the aesthetical, the political and the social. [...] Code thus becomes Law…” [12]

Arns concludes by observing that “software art directs our attention on the fact that our (media) environment is increasingly relying on programmed structures.” Gazira Babeli does more than just operate inside our media environment. She lives there. The code she writes transforms her environment, because her environment is made of code. In other words there is a shift from performative code to performance. When software artists write code they manipulate the environment of that medium. When Gazira Babeli writes code she manipulates the world she lives in, and undermines the illusion which that world is based on, the illusion that all the residents (artists included) take great pains to maintain. She reveals the secret behind the Perky Pat dolls and forces us to think about just why this doll’s house attracts us so much.

The use of code is however where any resemblances between the work of Gazira and New Media Art in general end. It is no coincidence that Gazira does not relate that much to the other artists in Second Life, and only if pressed will she reveal her relations with net.art. Her references are Friedrich, Warhol, Bacon and Duchamp. At the same time she always tries to link her works to traditional, recognized art forms: painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance.

In [Collateral Damage], this is self-evident: Buy Gaz’ 4 one Linden! is a mural; Avatar on Canvas is a series of three paintings; U AreHere and Second Soup are sculptures, and so on. Simply put, Gazira exercises the right to “implement” these traditional forms using a series of possibilities ingrained into the world she inhabits.

Nudes Descending a Staircase (April 2007) is an installation that ironically resolves the contradictions raised by exhibiting a painting in a setting like Second Life. It is a series of nudes printed on canvas, which fall off the wall and end up in a heap at the bottom of a staircase. Now this is obviously an animation in a virtual setting. And many of these works are interactive. But can we still talk about “new media” and “interactivity” when the world we live in is a software environment and the possibility to interact with things and people is one of its most natural characteristics, a given? For Gazira these are terms that should be banned from Second Life. But if you are tempted to use them, then just don’t do it during the show: you could be swept away by the current version of Don’t Say Tornado, a whirlwind that is activated when someone pronounces the words “new media”. In its own way, another interactive multimedia installation…

Surreal Real

“…a portable desert” [13]

Another thing which really annoys Gazira, when it comes to Second Life and virtual worlds in general, is our inability to get over the interpretational models offered up thirty years ago by cyberpunk culture.

Constantly harking back to William Gibson’s Cyberspace (1982) and Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse (1992) not only means hindering the development of new models, but also neglecting the numerous metaphors for ‘elsewhere’ that have also had a hand in shaping virtual worlds: from the Christian heaven to the island in The Tempest, from Moore’s Utopia to Carroll’s Wonderland. Gazira’s works make constant references to these ‘other’ places (such as the heaven in COME.TO.HEAVEN, which in [Collateral Damage] is accessible to all, simply by typing “heaven me”). But it is in the short Gaz’ of the desert (2007), and the other works closely connected to this that references to a specific vision of ‘elsewhere’ are put forward with the force of a statement of poetics.

And this elsewhere is none other than the “surreality” conceived by the surrealists in 1924, and explicitly referenced in the title of the Second Front performance. In other words Gazira Babeli asserts that Second Life is a 3D manifestation of our collective subconscious, an imaginary sphere where body and space reveal a new dimension, where the notions of cause and effect cease to apply and where the succession of events is rapid, irrational and gratuitous, like a flow of thoughts. Second Life is a new mental space, where even an invasion of pizzas which spurt tomato sauce in all directions and sing “O Sole mio” when trodden on (SingingPizza, 2006) can be accepted; a dream-like landscape where space becomes animated, as in the installation [Collateral Damage] = [Pizzaiolo!!!] + [Devil's Right Hand] (2007), a stage where a pizza spatula and a guitar play ping pong with pizzas and vinyl records, which when they hit someone in the audience, project him or her to a space in front of an audience forced to applaud. This is a place where, like in our dreams, our bodies can undergo sudden metamorphoses, and an image or a sculpture can unexpectedly become a real space, an infinite desert that can be explored in all directions.

In this desert – the “portable set” of Gaz’ of the Desert, which also appeared in U AreHere -, amid dawns and sunsets of overwhelming beauty, Gazira retreats, like Simeon the Stylite (the hermit who gave rise to that singular ascetic practice of spending a spiritual retreat seated atop a column) [14] to take on the temptations of the devil, interpreted in the film by the stunning Chi5 Shenzhou. Perched on her column in the driving rain, Gazira holds out for as long as she can, but in the end she is forced to give in. Only then are we catapulted into the anodyne setting of a call center (the office of U AreHere), where between calls Gazira appears to be busy putting together her story: imprisoned in the “world in a valise” she has chosen to live in, in her own surreal reality.

Notes

[1] Gazira Babeli, in Wirxli Flimflam, “Gaza Stripped. Interview with Gazira Babeli”, in Slate Magazine, January 2007.

[2] See Matteo Bittanti, “[Introduzione]“, in Mario Gerosa, Second Life, Meltemi, Rome 2007. P. 14.

[3] Gazira Babeli, in Wirxli Flimflam, quoted.

[4] See the definition of “Grey Goo” in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

[5] http://arsvirtua.com

[6] 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, curated by Marisa Olson. See http://0100101110101101.org

[7] Gazira Babeli, [Collateral Damage]. Second Life Works 2006 – 2007, ExhibitA Gallery, Odyssey (38, 30, 23). April 16, 2007.

[8] See Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1964. In the novel the Perky Pat dolls are simulacra that, when associated with the use of a hallucinogenic drug, Can-D, enable earthlings deported to Mars to be temporarily “translated” into an imaginary world where they can experience an existence similar to their terrestrial lives through the body of Perky Pat, a Barbie-like doll.

[9] Gazira Babeli, in Tilman Baumgärtel, “‘My body can walk barefoot, but my avatar needs Prada shoes’. Interview with Gazira Babeli”, in Nettime, March 23, 2007, online at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0703/msg00032.html

[10] Second Front(http://secondfront.org) is an international collective of performance artists established in Second Life on November 23, 2006. See Domenico Quaranta, “A Leap Into the Void. Interview with Second Front”, in Rhizome.org, March 1, 2007, http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=24830&page=1#46877

[11] Gazira Babeli, in Wirxli Flimflam, quoted.

[12] Inke Arns, “Read_me, run_me, execute_me: Software and its discontents, or: It’s the performativity of code, stupid!” In: Olga Goriunova / Alexei Shulgin (eds.), Read_me. Software Art and Cultures Conference, Aarhus: University of Arhus (DK) 2004, pp. 176-193. Available online href=”http://www.projects.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/Media/Arns-Article-Arhus2004.pdf

[13] Gazira Babeli, in Tilman Baumgärtel, quoted.

[14] Gazira took her inspiration from Simón del desierto, the 1965 Luis Buñuel film dedicated to Saint Simeon.

THE GATE (or Hole in Space, Reloaded)

The Gate is an installation connecting real life and Second Life, a junction point, a door between two worlds and two representation spaces. Basically, it is a simple window between both worlds where real users and SL users see each other and can meet. A view of the SL Gate is permanently projected in the real life venue; when an avatar comes in front of The Gate, it is visible in the public space; when one arrives physically in front of the door in the public space, he/she can interact with the SL user currently in front.

Installation connecting real life and Second Life

Authors: Yannick Antoine, Yves Bernard (BE)

Curatorial Assistance: Domenico Quaranta (IT), Sugar Seville (SL)

Opening Performance: Second Front

iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, Brussels; Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance, Second Life (Odyssey 122/45/25)

04/10/07 – 07/10/07

Original press release

Official Website – http://www.imal.org/iMAL_opening/mac/index_en.html

Images:

- My Flickr set (with photos by me, Gazira Babeli and Sascha Pohflepp)

- Yhancik Hax’s Flickr Set

-  Alexia Cournoyer’s Flickr Set

- Photos by Emika Insoo

- Photos by Yannick Antoine

Videos:

- Video by Second Front (on Google Video)

Reviews:

Osprey, “Second Front at The Gate“, in Second Life Art News, October 5, 2007.

Marshall Sponder, “The Gate – merging Second Life with Real Life“, in WebMetricsGuru, September 30, 2007.

Sascha Pohflepp, “iMAL opening“, in we-make-money-not-art, October 8, 2007.

Astrid Girardeau, “iMAL, du numérique au coeur de Bruxelles“, in écrans, October 4, 2007.

Domenico Quaranta, “Open considerations on The Gate. Part 1“, in Digimag 29, November 07.

Domenico Quaranta, “Open considerations on The Gate. Part 2“, in Digimag 30, December 07.

The Gate (or Hole in Space, Reloaded)

THE GATE (or Hole in Space, Reloaded)

Yannick Antoine, Yves Bernard (BE)

With the collaboration of: Domenico Quaranta (IT), Sugar Seville (SL)

Opening Performance: Second Front

iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, Brussels; Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance, Second Life (Odyssey 122/45/25)

04/10/07 – 07/10/07

The Gate is an installation connecting real life and Second Life, a junction point, a door between two worlds and two representation spaces. Basically, it is a simple window between both worlds where real users and SL users see each other and can meet. A view of the SL Gate is permanently projected in the real life venue; when an avatar comes in front of The Gate, it is visible in the public space; when one arrives physically in front of the door in the public space, he/she can interact with the SL user currently in front.

The result will be a kind of happening where the virtuality of SL is transferred in the physicality of our public space and vice-versa; a stage for performance and interaction, something between a breakdance platform, an inter-dimensional portal and a peep show through parallel universes.

The Gate has been designed for the opening show of iMAL new space in Brussels. The show explores the fusion between the physical world and the net through networked sculptures and installations which question the physical space as well as the digital world. Featured artists: Yannick Antoine (BE), Pascal Baltazar (FR), Justin Benett (UK), Yves Bernard (BE), Jonah Brucker-Cohen (USA), Mathieu Chamagne (FR), HC Gilje (NO), Linda Hifling (DK), Thomas Israël (BE), Sven König (DE), Walter Langelaar (NL), Sascha Pohflepp (DE), Antoine Schmitt (FR), SecondFront (Second Life), Walter Verdin (BE), Visual Kitchen & Eavesdropper (BE).

Perform from iMAL with people on Second Life

The Gate is installed on Odyssey, an island in Second Life dedicated to art and performance.
In the opening hours of iMAL (October 5 – 6, 11 AM – 7PM [2AM - 10AM SLT]; October 7, 10AM – 8PM [1AM - 11 PM SLT]), people, avatars and performance artists are kindly invited to come, perform and interact at The Gate, both in real life and in Second Life.
During the vernissage on October 4 (8:30 – 12 PM [11:30AM - 3PM SLT]) Second Front, the first performance art group in Second Life, will use The Gate as a in-between stage in front of iMAL visitors and SL passer-by.

Perform from The Gate in Second Life with visitors at iMAL

First create a free account in Second Life (http://secondlife.com/join) and run the software (http://secondlife.com/download)
Once you have this properly installed use this SLurl to teleport to Odyssey:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/122/45/25/

The Gate is installed on the beach of next to the teleport hub.

+++

iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology
30 Quai des Charbonnages/Koolmijnenkaai
1080 Bruxelles/Brussel

Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/122/45/25/

More informations:

http://www.imal.org/
http://odysseyart.ning.com/
http://slfront.blogspot.com/
http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/

Press Images:

http://www.imal.org/iMAL_opening/presse/high_reso_pict/the_gate_01.jpg
http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/imgs/thegate_press.jpg