Jeremy Owen Turner is new media artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. He has been an online performance artist since 1996 and has performed in virtual worlds since 2001. Known as “Wirxli Flimflam” in Second Life, Turner has co-founded the group Second Front (est. 2006). He interviewed me for his MA thesis on avatar design.

Jeremy Owen Turner Interviews Domenico Quaranta about Medium Specificity and Avatar Design in Second Life. 2010

TURNER: How is Second Life a medium of its own and how is it a mix of media?

QUARANTA: I prefer to think about Second Life as an environment than as a medium. I know that, saying this, I’m making a choice – and quite a radical choice. Of course, Second Life is a medium as well, and being part of the computer environment, it is intrinsically multimedia. But I think that all the artists who understood Second Life as “just a medium” usually made really bad art. Actually, this happens every time somebody uses a corporate software platform in order to exploit its potential as a medium: web browsers, Flash, Photoshop, Second Life. None of them was created as an artistic medium. You are acting within the framework set up for you by programmers and software designers – which means that you are less free than a painter. In 1997, the English collective I/O/D wrote: “Software is mind control – take some”. You can do it either by designing your own tools or subverting the existing tools.

Formalist artists in Second Life are just making advanced 3D design on a community platform. It is bad as art because it is just exploiting the potential of a software tool; and it is bad as 3D design because Second Life is a bad 3D software platform, with many limitations and a defined aesthetics.

Something better came up when artists understood the potential of Second Life as a place and as a social platform. When weird people with little in common with those Second Life was meant for – net artists, activists, Fluxus-style performers – started gathering in communities such as Odyssey. When they started designing their avatars not in order to make a beautiful or impressive avatar, but to construct a social persona. When they started designing objects and environments, activating scripts etc. not in order to explore the aesthetic potential of their medium, but to challenge their audience, subvert their expectations, make things happen.

Of course, when you are using Second Life as a performative platform, you are still using it as a medium. Making performances still means designing objects, writing and activating scripts, etc. But the perspective is completely different.

TURNER: Have you seen evidence of avatars that were created strictly with visual/optical relationships in mind or with some other aesthetic consideration that seemed independent of a community/social discourse? If yes, please describe any one of these projects.

QUARANTA: If it happened, it’s completely uninteresting to me. If there is something in Second Life you can’t fight against, it is it’s visual side. You can play with its kitschy aesthetics, but you cannot be set free from them.

TURNER: If you were role-playing the art critic Clement Greenberg, how would you critique an avatar’s design in Second Life? For example, would Greenberg insist that an avatar’s form be distributed in order to mirror the 3-dimensionality of virtual worlds or be flattened in order to privilege the 2-dimensional characteristics of the computer screen?

QUARANTA: If I had to play a parody of Clement Greenberg in Second Life, I’d either choose one of the options you suggest. If I had to role-play him seriously, this is a different story. I think Greenberg’s formalism was widely misunderstood, mainly thanks to the way it was used by his followers. Greenberg wrote: «Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium».[1] Since Greenberg was a clever guy, I’m sure he would identify “what’s unique in the nature of Second Life” in code and theater, and he would set his rules according to it. Or, at least, this is how I understand formalism as applied to virtual worlds. A virtual world is not as simple as a canvas. At a first level, it is a piece of software. At a second level, it is a community platform, where everything that happens appears to be on stage. Thus, it seems that to be “formalist” in Second Life means to operate at both the levels of code and of staged performances.

But this is, of course, an interpretation like many others. Greenberg was also one of the harsher enemies of kitsch and pop culture. For him, kitsch was the opposite of the avant-garde, and was part of the cultural strategy of a totalitarian regime [2]. He never understood that the avant-garde may use kitsch in order to tell something relevant about it; thus, he never understood Pop Art. So, it’s even more likely that he would never enter a virtual world.

TURNER: To what degree does anthropomorphism have a direct and lasting influence on avatar design in Second Life?

QUARANTA: To a high degree. An avatar is a persona. You – as its puppeteer – have to identify with it; and the other people, as both the audience of the story you are telling and as the other characters in the story, have to identify with you and recognize you as part of their community.

TURNER: What kind of avatars have you seen “artists” rather than “designers” create, in Second Life? How are the outcomes different?

QUARANTA: Designers create interesting avatars. Artists create interesting characters.

TURNER: How essential is “narrative” when critiquing Second Life as a discrete medium?

QUARANTA: Fundamental. In a virtual world, there is no art without narrative.

TURNER: Have you critiqued virtual art in other worlds outside of Second Life? If not, why did you choose SL over others. If you have explored other worlds, please explain what the art was like within them.

QUARANTA: I’ve never been in other virtual worlds. I joined Second Life because, from the outside, I understood that a really interesting community was developing there. I’m not interested in virtual worlds per se, and I’m definitely not interested in “virtual art” – I’m interested in art, wherever it may happen. Art made in virtual worlds – actually, any art made out of the main art world – is interesting when people who have never been there get interested in them. African sculpture became interesting as art when the cubist started stealing African sculptures from anthropology museums. And art in Second Life became interesting when many people interested in art downloaded the client to see what was happening there. According to what I know, nothing comparable happened in other virtual worlds. There are, of course, many isolated examples; some of them – Lawrence Wiener’s Palace chatroom (1997), Joseph Delappe’s performances, Isbiter and Straus Sim Gallery (2004) – anticipated the Second Life burst; many others were a consequence of the development of the Second Life art community. Also, I’ve seen a lot of good art about World of Warcraft, or about The Sims Online; but no consistent art community seems to have developed into World of Warcraft, or into The Sims Online. Do you know any?

[1] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, in Forum Lectures, Voice of America, Washington, D. C. 1960. <<http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html>>

[2] Cfr. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and kitsch”, in Partisan Review, 1939. <<http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html>>

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

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Pseudo-Futurist Video Game Improvisation Extravaganza, 2009. Synthetic Performance (extract). More performances’ documentation on Eva and Franco Mattes’ Youtube account.

Below you can find some links (reviews, documentation, etc.) regarding the show Gazira Babeli – Acting as Aliens (Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana) and the related seminar.

About the seminar:

- Images by Frieda Korda, Roxelo Babenco, Helfe Ihnen on Flickr.

- An ongoing discussion on the Odyssey Ning.

- A video by Helfe Ihnen on Youtube.

About the show:

- Gazira Babeli‘s archive page

- A video interview on VEST.SI (Italian, sub Slovenian)

- A TV feature on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 47.06)

- The opening performance on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 04.45)

- “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”. A review by Flaminio Gualdoni.

- “Aliena e maga l’artista di oggi“. A review by Agnese Trocchi in Stile.it, 27.10.09.

- “Umetnost v virtualnosti“. A review by Ida Hiršenfelder, published in Dnevnik, 04.11.09.

- My set on Flickr.

- Some pics of the performance from the natives’ point of view on the Second Front blog.

- And some raw footage by me on my Youtube account:

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

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

Patrick Lichty

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Gazira Babeli: ACTING AS ALIENS

Exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta
Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
November 3 – 15, 2009
Opening and performance: November 3, 9.00 PM (CET)

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art and Kapelica gallery are proud to announce “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”, the first solo exhibition of the avatar artist Gazira Babeli in Slovenia. Internationally renowned for her activity in the digital reality of Second Life, Gazira Babeli is born there in spring 2006. She is a character in the Matrix, something in between the Oracle and Neo. What she does has been either dubbed as bug, virus, performance or art; what we can say about it is that it subverts the traditional notions of space, time, body, identity and behavior we inherited from our daily experience.
The show borrows its name from the opening performance, in which Gazira and the audience will share the same space and will play through material means, in an unprecedented overlap between digital reality and physical reality. The remains of the performance will be put on show after the event.
The exhibition will also feature a consistent video documentation of Gazira’s previous performances, including 7UP (2008), a clockwork orange of twelve micro-performances made in complicity with Patrick Lichty, in a compulsive mix between slapstick comedy and Fluxus scores. Also on show two brand new works in which a self standing doll house – be it a desert or a prison – is built around some characters performing a singular, repetitive, sometimes destructive action.

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

—

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

Round table moderated by Domenico Quaranta

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

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

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

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

Join the lecture in Second life HERE

How to create an account on Second Life: HERE

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

- Gazira Babeli;

- and other members of the Odyssey community.

PRESS

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

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

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

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

Credits:

Gazira Babeli
ACTING AS ALIENS
(Exhibition and performance)

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

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

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

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

Executive producers: Marcela Okretič and Janez Janša

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

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

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

Crazy enough, Gazira Babeli’s Collateral Damage has become the set for a scene of the featurelength machinima Vola Vola, directed by Berardo Carboni. Watch it on Youtube.

Strange enough, if I always get angry when I find a Second Life enthusiast, I usually disagree with commonplace criticism of Second Life. What am I, in the end? A wannabe critic or a shameful enthusiast?

The fact is that bot enthusiasts and censors always seem to miss the point. Take, for example, the article published by Helen Stoilas in The Art Newspaper on July 04. It is quite a good review, but it fails in applying the same attention – and the same, uncritical enthusiasm – to the galleries which sell traditional – and, usually, artistically irrelevant – artifacts to the residents; to the traditional – and, usually, artistically irrelevant – artists who re-invented themselves as avatar artists; and to those who try to experiment with art in this virtual world in not always convincing, but always interesting ways. That’s how to say that in 1996 the Internet was a great place for art because you could see that little gallery from Michigan, the photos of an insignificant Lithuanian amateur and Vuk Cosic’s CNN Interactive spoof page. Or that TV in the Sixties was enhancing art not only thanks to Gerry Schum’s Video Gallery (1969) or the Spatialist Manifesto for Television (1952), but also to the first TV auctions…
In my opinion, Second Life will become an interesting place for the art market when you’ll sell a piece not just for an handful of Linden $, but for a lot of real $. But it’s already an interesting place for experimenting with art, even if many people don’t seem to know that…

Some days ago, an Italian art critic, Giuseppe Frazzetto, published on his website an article about Second Life. It is mainly a complaint about the hype of Second Life, with all the topoi of this kind of pamphlet: SL as a pantomime of real life, with millions of open accounts but just a fistful of real residents; SL as a boring, ugly place, graphically obsolete, absolutely irrelevant if confronted with other synthetic worlds like its eternal enemy, WOW. Most of these things are right, but Frazzetto avoids to make the great question that inescapably arises from them: notwithstanding that, why is SL so attractive for a lot of people?
About art in SL, Frazzetto says: “SL is a virtual world where you basically do what you are already doing. The typical example is that of the artists who aren’t able to exhibit in “rl”, and so make shows in Second Life. But who see those shows? (besides, SL is so graphically obsolete and even revolting that there’s nothing to see there).” Frazzetto, what kind of art have you seen in Second Life? Filthy Fluno? Ah, now it’s all clear… I’m joking, but this position doesn’t come from ignorance. As the parenthesis makes clear, Frazzetto is looking for beauty: quite a strange quest for a contemporary art critic…

Artists doesn’t enter SL looking for beauty, audience and money: not, at least, those who are trying to develop a native art for Second Life. They enter SL because it is a good place to experiment with art, and to reflect on the virtual body, the virtual space, the virtual self, the new meaning of such words as identity, performance, time and space. Because it tries to replicate real life, but it still is completely different from the real world. Because it’s ugly, full of companies, money, pornography, politicians and other pretty things that make real life “so different, so appealing”. Because it’s part of our media environment, in a way WOW will never reach.

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.

Let’s say it: Second City, German artist’s Aram Bartholl curatorial project for Ars Electronica 2007, was far from being a success. OK, it was raining, and the rain changed the sandbox/beach (called Lido) installed in Pfarrplatz into a morass, and dropped merciless onto the heads – and the mood – of the “residents”. But is that the only one reason? Second City failed – at least, partially – notwithstanding the strength of some of the projects shown, in spite of the fact that it was the first important show organized in real world and devoted to art propagated from the Metaverse, and under the umbrella of a credible institution such as Ars Electronica.

It’s clear that the concerns that most of the hacktivism-open-source-new-media-art world feels for Second Life didn’t played in favor of Bartholl’s project; but, in the same time, it’s clear that Second City made no effort in order to dissipate these concerns. The most common claim you could hear stretching your legs in Marienstrasse was: “Good advertisement. Did Linden Labs pay for it?”
Lindens didn’t layed out a cent for it. At least, they were not among the sponsors of Goodbye Privacy (even if there was, among them, an Austrian company called Second Promotion, specialized in “promoting brands and products in Second Life in such a way that it will enhance the experience the users have with the products and brands”); and Bartholl seems all but an hype-victim, at least according to what he said (or wrote on the keyboard of his Chat installation) during the conference Everything you ever wanted to know about Second Life (Kunstuniversität Linz, September 8, 2007). Maybe, Ars Electronica is an hype-victim: but even this point could be highly debatable. So, what went wrong with Second City?

My opinion is that Bartholl failed in attempting to apply the concept of his own work to the whole show. Educated as an architect, Bartholl works (through workshops, installations and performances) on the impact of the habits and the metaphors of the digital world on our daily life. On his website, he raises questions such as: “In which form does the network data world manifest itself in our everyday life? What comes back from cyberspace into physical space? How do digital innovations influence our everyday actions?” In his projects, Bartholl wrongfoots us adapting objects, icons and other elements of our life on the screen to the real world. For example, Map (2006) relocates in the real streets the Google Maps’ red marker, exactly where Google’s highly realistic satellite visualizations show it; DIY (2004) reproduces the green rhombus which hovers as a three-dimensional marking over the head of the active figures in The Sims Online; De_Dust (2004) makes some strange crates covered with the wood texture used in the computer game Counter-Strike appear in real public spaces; WoW (2006) invites the passers-by to walk along the streets with their own nickname hovering above their heads, as in WoW and in Second Life; Missing Image (2007) is a playful transformation of a texture graphic error from Second Life into a t-shirt; Speech Bubble and Chat (2007) invite you to communicate through a comic-strip-like dialogue balloon projected above the speaker’s head, as in many virtual worlds. Bartholl’s work discusses the one-way relationship between our real and virtual lives, and in doing that puts us in a third dimension in which these two worlds are mixed together.

So: if there is any “spawn of the surreal”, Bartholl must be accounted among its best children. BUT – try to apply this concept to a whole block; take a street (let’s call it Marienstrasse) and a square (namely, Pfarrplatz) and fill them up with notecards, advertisements and freebie boxes; put nicknames over the heads of the visitors and make them talk through speech bubbles; take all this imaginary from a single virtual world (let’s call it Second Life): and, all of a sudden, all the magic and the surreal quality of this operation fades, and you find yourself into a gigantic advertisement. A frame that makes difficult for you to experience in the right way projects such as Terminal Air (by the Institute of Applied Autonomy), which deals with the “extraordinary transfers” organized by CIA in the US for the arrested terror suspects; a frame which even betrays the spirit of things happening in Second Life, such as the Synthetic Performances by Eva and Franco Mattes, which deal in a critical way which the issues of body, sex and violence in virtual worlds.

That said, one might argue that another problem of Second City is that in the show you don’t find any of the artists animating the art scene in Second Life. Where is Gazira? Where are Adam Ramona, Juria Yoshikawa, Second Front, The Port, Avatar Orchestra Metaverse and so on? Where are Odyssey and Ars Virtua? I can understand these questions, but I don’t agree with them. Even if the curatorial concept was quite open, these things didn’t fit in it. Bartholl is most interested in the consequences of virtual lives in the real world, and chose the works featured in the show according to this concern. And some of them were really interesting: Havidol, by Justine Cooper, is a fictitious marketing campaign to launch a new wonder drug designed to treat “dysphoric anxiety attacks due to a deficiency of social esteem and retail spending”; Übermensch / Become Your Avatar, by Joachim Stein, through modern training methods, pharmaceutical supplements and plastic surgery helps you become as good-looking as your avatar, dealing with the issue of self-representation in virtual worlds; In Your Hands, by the British artist Dash Macdonald, lets installation visitors remote-control the roller skates strapped to the artist’s feet; while another project dealing with the “avatarization” of the human (Intrigue_E by SILVER and Hanne Rivrud) is a public performance in which a person, not immediately identifiable, is literally “played” via cellphone by the artists, acting as an unpredictable virus in a social context.

Not a complete success, but not a failure: Second City has been a problematic show that, for the first time, raised some question that we – curators and artists dealing with virtual worlds – have to take into serious account: what’s the meaning of making art into a private virtual world? How can we bring this – in my opinion, highly valuable – experiences in the real world without making it seem corporate advertisement? If you have an answer, please make me a call…

Second City – the show “curated” (reading on you will understand why I use the quotation marks) in Linz by the German artist Aram Bartholl – has been – no doubts – one of the cardinal points of Ars Electronica’s last edition, Goodbye Privacy. The show disseminated through the city was highly representative of the “nice side” of surveillance in the age of digital exhibitionism, an issue that was at the core of the Festival. “Showcasing ones customized persona, staging ones own image is the order of the day. Feature yourself or its GAME OVER, dude!”, wrote the curators Christine Schöpf and Gerfried Stocker.
As one of the first big shows raising the issue of art and virtual worlds, Second City has been an important show, and a point of departure for further research. In the same time (and for the same reason), it has been an highly problematic show, too. People liked the idea to bring the exhibition to the city and the streets, but there was a lot of mumbling and discussion about an approach that, for many, was superficial and looked like promotion. As you may guess from the previous post, I agree with this criticism, but what Bartholl is saying below made the show more clear to me – and made me more indulgent to the show. Hopefully, it will be the same for you…

DQ. How is the project born?
AB. Ars Electronica asked me this spring if I was interested in doing a concept and design for Second City – Marienstrasse. The idea of going into public space and Second Life as a topic of Marienstrasse existed already then. I was quite excited about the idea and developed several workshops and projects. In the beginning I was not sure which role I should play: curator or artist. I decided to put emphasis on being artist showing several projects at Marienstrasse related to Second Life. Which means I didn’t curate Marienstrasse although I brought in some artists in cooperation and had some influence. In the end my name was on top for whole Marienstrasse, which is an honor but also a great responsibility, as I realize now. My interest has been more into developing and showing, rather than “curating”.

DQ. Did you encounter any difficulties in organizing it?
AB. Of course there have been many difficulties in organizing. Very basic elements like electricity infrastructure in Marienstrasse took a lot of time. So in the end when the festival started Marienstrasse was as buggy as Second Life. But also the process of choosing and decisions in developing projects took quite some time. It has been the first time that I worked on a project of this size and I think I learned a lot.

DQ. Are you satisfied of the results?
AB. Good question. First of all I was happy that in the end more or less all the parts were put together and things worked. But with some distance after the exhausting week of Ars I questioned this myself. I think you made a good point in your article on Second City, which I already also noticed. I do work in a very simple way of transferring elements or situations from virtual world to physical space. Every single of these projects has its own quality and is contrasted by public space. But adding too many of these transformations up in one spot takes away the effect. I tried not to rebuild a complete scenario. But in the end, yes, maybe we had too many of these virtual elements in Real Life.

DQ. What did you like more in the project?
AB. The moment when a new project comes alive is always most exciting. Does it work? Do people react to it? Testing Chat for the first time on the market place was really fun. To see how four trees are build and set up is very exiting. The Synthetic Performances of Eva and Franco I did like a lot. Despite the rain I think the concept of putting an exhibition in a street worked out very well. The chinese restaurant / blumenberg food cooking in the yard was my favorite place.

DQ. What would you change in the project if you could put together a follow-up?
AB. There is a lot which could be done different, sure. Yes right, the in-world part involving Second Life inhabitants and artists was missing. There have been some attempts but not serious enough to set up a parallel program in SL. I concentrated mostly on Real Life interventions developing installations and workshops. I am aware that one general Second Life panel is not enough to discuss all aspects of the development. All my projects involve a critic view on digital worlds including Second Life. But they do it in a silent and ironic way. This is probably not enough in a context like Second City. More criticism and discussion is needed. Next time I’ll make sure what position I am in.

DQ. How can we organize a show about virtual worlds without making it seem corporate advertisement?
AB. Difficult. In general this question fits to many of my projects. A giant Google pin is perfect advertisement. Sure, this kind of topic should also involve other virtual worlds than just Second Life. We had the plan for an overview on Metaverses and history for the exhibition but unfortunately it hasn’t been realized. On the other hand Second Life polarized a lot this year. People love it or hate it. For me it is just a tool and a new development. I am curious about when Google will enter the market…

DQ.Can you say something about your new project, Sandbox Berlin?
AB. I developed the sandbox concept for Second City, where the beach at Pfarrplatz was realized instead. I think the possibility of creating and collaboration are the most important parts of Second Life. I love the bizarre Sandboxes. These and some very view other places are totally different to what we know or are used to. Quoting from the introduction of the project: “The Sandbox in Second Life is a place where all conventions are abandoned. It is the real wild west of the already untamed Second Life. The Sandbox is like a three-dimensional sketchbook. Every day, thousands of users leave their tracks here: abstract forms, digital building sites and house-car-plane clichés form a collective surrealistic dream scenario. In a world without rules, inventive users programme swarms of screaming Sponge Bobs which other users pursue. Anti-gravitational bubbles or whole fields of alarm sirens impede concentrated work. The Sandbox is a kind of black market emporium of digital objects and their programs.
The formal chaos and absurd situations generate a particular atmosphere of digital roughness and originality that can only be found here.”

Sandbox Berlin translates this field of experimentation into public space in Real Life. In a three-day workshop, production of custom objects in a spontaneous and collaborative process will be tested in Real Life. Everyone is invited to join us on a deserted area, formerly part of the Berlin Wall, in the Mitte district, to build whatever they want. Tools, wood and other materials will be provided by Sandbox Berlin, so that flexible groups can quickly design and materialize objects.” Everyone can take part in the project, simply registering by e-mail. Spontaneous participation and visits to the workshops are welcome, completely in the spirit of Second Life.

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?

Sugar Seville

Domenico Quaranta, “Being an avatar, the virtual is my focus”. Interview with Sugar Seville. First published in Spawn of the Surreal in two parts, November 27, 2007.

When talking about art in Second Life, it’s difficult not to talk about Odyssey. Almost everyone working in the art field seems to converge, before or later, on the Odyssey Simulator. In the beginning there were Gazira Babeli, Second Front and Ian Ah; then came Juria Yoshikawa, Aldomanuzio Abruzzo, Fau Ferdinand, the Ludic-Society crew (Superfem Beebe and MosMax Hax), Avatar Orchestra Metaverse and Adam Nash among others; and many more will come, be sure.

Not that Second Life is missing places for art, even bigger, more official and more respected than Odyssey. There is Ars Virtua, a well-reputed new media art center founded in 2005, with its two exhibition spaces and its AVAIR program for artists in residence, organized in conjunction with Turbulence. There is NMC Campus, an experimental effort of the New Media Consortium, a powerful association gathering nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. And there is, above all, Burning Life, an annual festival set up by the Lindens from the beginnings of Second Life in homage to the legendary Burning Man festival, the official – and more visible – platform for art in Second Life.

But Odyssey is different, someway. Maybe because, as its co-founder Sugar Seville says in this interview, it’s more a community than an exhibition space. Maybe because it’s an open, free space, where almost everyone can propose a project, where there is no censorship, no limits (besides, obviously, technological limits and quality standards), and where the first guy was temporarily banned, with some regrets, just some days ago. Or maybe because of the approach of it’s manager, who sees herself more as an affectionate gardener than as the chief of a burgeoning art venture…
DQ. What’s, in your own vision, the Odyssey project? Why did you launch it?

SS. I started out with a bunch of land in Yanguella, a region on the mainland of Second Life, back in November of 2006. I opened it as a kind of artists sandbox for all my friends in SL. At that time I was really just having fun in SL, and it wasn’t always art related. I was playing with the idea of opening a crazy space-age 1960′s style bar modeled after Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and “Barbarella”, when I found that the people that I was spending the most time with were artists like Gazira [Babeli], Wirxli [Flimflam], Man [Michinaga], Chi5 [Shenzhou]. There was a high level of creative energy that was being concentrated around the Bitfactory which was next door and later became Man Michinaga’s “I Am Columbia” sim. Gazira’s scripted works and the initial performances by Second Front at Bitfactory were inspiring to me, and told me that SL had potential beyond the commercial wasteland that so much of it is. I knew I wanted to explore this potential.

Making art on mainland caused a bit of turmoil in the neighborhood, and I’ll confess that my own antics played no small part. There is a line between art and griefing, and it’s not really very well defined. Mainland SL is the wild frontier, and to this day pretty much anything goes, so it was kind of fun brushing up against people that had no understanding or for that matter tolerance for art. After a while it degenerated into an ugly battle ground, with walls of red type going up everywhere. The outcome was that the meanest people in the area won, and the artists all left; not unlike the real world where real estate agents take over artists neighborhoods. After this experience, I wanted to provide a kind of sanctuary for all my friends that I felt were doing important explorations into art and performance. Somehow I convinced Pacino [Hercules] to buy an island and let us all play there, actually this was something that he really wanted to do. My reasoning was that if we all created interesting content people would come, we would be able to set up some rentals and shops to help pay the bills, and there would be a place where artists could present thoughtful meaningful work with the support of a community of like minded individuals. At the time Linden was offering a great deal on private islands, so it wasn’t that much money, and if it didn’t work out the island could be sold for a profit, so we did it. I didn’t really know exactly what would become of Odyssey, but I felt that if I nurtured it, there would be growth, and that’s in fact what has happened! We still don’t have any retail operations on Odyssey outside of sales of art work, but there is a plan to do so. The idea is to sell editions, books, interesting clothing and furniture etc. to help cover the costs of renting the servers.

DQ. How did the project evolve in time? What are your future projects and your ambitions?

SS. The one thing I have always said about Odyssey is that it is foremost a community, and that everything that the simulator is used for must play a part in the community. There are no private areas on Odyssey, and the only person that has a house is Pacino, and he let’s everyone use it. When I give someone land to use or set them up for a rental, we agree first on this principal of openness and sharing that is so critical to any SL community.

My role has really just been as an orchestrator, or as Ian [Ah] likes to call me, an arts administrator (sounds official, I like that one). When someone approaches me with an idea, I try to make it happen. Early on I was just inviting artists to come and do whatever, this produced a lot and is embodied in the Ian Ah squat – a sort of homeless camp set up under the observation deck on Sugar Mountain. Ian never really asked me if he could build something. I just gave him perms to do so, and in a few weeks he had built out almost a third of the sim! Then I had to start being an administrator and manager, which is not always easy.

What has evolved is the result of many contributors, among them Ian, Wirxli, Gazira, Beavis [Palowakski], Chi5, Man Michinaga, DeThomas [Dibou], Esther [DeCuir], the Mattes, Miulew [Takahe], Max [Maximillian Nakamura], Evo [Szuyuan]… the list goes on. I really don’t see the project as mine alone, it’s kind of an organism that has a life of it’s own, all I have to do is water it and tend to the details.

There have been some projects on Odyssey that I instigated. Commissioning the build of the ExhibitA gallery was one, and co-curating the first two shows there, were big projects. I was really happy about how Beavis’s build and Gazira’s show, [collateral damage], turned out. I’m working on a follow up to [collateral damage] at the moment, I think it will be a group show with Second Front and the Mattes amongst others. The hard part about collaboration is relying on other people to do what they say they’re going to do, so not all plans work out, especially when people are donating their time. There are a few new projects in the works, Adam Nash [Ramona] has created a site specific installation on our new sim to the east, and I am collaborating on a show about virtual architecture in SL with Malcolm Smith and Object gallery in Sydney that is being hosted on East of Odyssey as well. I hope more projects will come up through the network as we get in to winter, preferably ones with funding. I look forward to Art Metropole picking up again in the fall and opening their space on the north east corner of the island.

I am also working on getting funds established for artist residency grants on Odyssey. This would allow artists to cover real life expenses while they devote time to a work created on Odyssey, or to hire builders to work under an artists direction – thus freeing them from the burden of learning the SL toolset. We have already done this to some extent with a few artists, by giving them land to use. I would like to be able to draw the attention of established artists from the real world to explore the possibilities in SL, so a monetary grant would be a nice incentive.

DQ. I find very interesting that, in Second Life, the most open, free and various art community gathered around a place (such as Odyssey) opened not by a new media art institution or something like that, but by a web publishing corp which conceived it – I guess – to reinforce its own image in SL. How do you explain that?

SS. Dynamis is a company in London that resells businesses and provides online services for business. It is headed up by Pacino Hercules (Marcus Markou), whom I met in SL in late 2006. We each had our own ambitions of creating a place for artists to play, but I was the one with the time to put it together, so Pacino offered to fund the server costs. He has from the start, generously given me complete control, and I think there is wisdom in that decision on his part. It was his idea to start the Odyssey website, and to use Ning, which is an excellent service, but he doesn’t want to tell us what to do. I have in turn been able to extend his generosity to artists by delegating resources and contributing hundreds of hours of my own time to manage and build.

Dynamis is keen on being an early adopter of the technology that SL provides, and own another island that is devoted solely to their business ventures. For all intents and purposes, Odyssey is funded out of a philanthropic interest in supporting works of high artistic merit in SL, but that’s not to say that our supporters don’t see an investment potential. In the end what is being created is a concentration of rich content that draws visitors, and where there are people there is potential for commerce.

That said, Odyssey is not about making money, and there will never be huge rotating billboards advertising products or any form of overt commercialism. The way the world is though, artists need money, just as museums and galleries do. Odyssey is no different and I see us finding ways to cover costs and fund more projects by using the same kind of methods that real world arts institutions do. I think Dynamis is getting a fantastic opportunity to play the role of patron for such a thriving creative community, and will benefit in much the same ways that arts patrons have traditionally in the real world.

So, yes it may seem odd that an internet company is co-founder and supporter of a place like Odyssey, until you understand that they are fulfilling the same role that is a critical component to the function of any real world arts organization. Corporate sponsorship of the arts is nothing new.

DQ. What’s the relationship between art and business in SL? Do you think that artistic experimentation – even the most radical, conceptual and self-referential – can be inspiring and useful for business?

SS. I don’t think you should mix art and business any more than you should mix religion and politics – but they still have to coexist and provide the vital roles that they do. As soon as you have business interfering in the creative work of artists, art is being compromised, and that can not be allowed to happen.

Again, corporate sponsorship of the arts goes way back, and before there were corporations, there was the Medici family, and so on. I think if there are artists creating meaningful works in SL, they will be well served by patronage of some form, and those that support have much to gain in contributing to the opening of this new territory to art. If you think about it, commerce is easy – just set up a business selling whatever. Creating culture is something else. I don’t think you could buy culture if you wanted to. So naturally the smart business people that have the means, support the arts. The benefits are more than monetary.

DQ. What kind of art are you most interested in? Multimedia installation? Performance? Aesthetic research or conceptual pieces?

SS. It’s hard to say that I like one form of art over another, and while my human has a wide range of interests in real world arts; being an avatar, the virtual is my focus. SL at the moment is the networked environment that is presenting the most possibilities to artists. Not only does one have an open platform upon which to create, but most importantly, the work can be seen by potentially many more viewers than an artist might normally expect in the real world. The most recent show on Odyssey of Gazira Babeli drew over 1200 unique visitors and over 1800 total visits in 3 months. I am drawn to works that really use the SL medium in a new way, this early stage is ripe for explorations – so I look for artists that are really working in the medium of SL and making paths for future exploration.

From the perspective of an avatar, I find performance to be the most interesting art form in SL. SL is a lot of things, but everything comes back to the avatar and has to relate to the avatar in order to really be successful in SL.

The other area that I am interested in is what I term “mixed reality” works. The use of video streaming can be an effective device for mixing real life and second life – but it can also be disastrously ineffective. Presenting a projection of SL in a real life space is essentially just showing one face of a world that is inherently immersive; rendering it bland and dullish. When using streaming video to mix realities, it is important to take into consideration the interactive nature of SL and to build in to a project, ways to convey this experience. A good example of this would be the recent installation of The Gate. Until the real life audience saw a re-projection of themselves in the SL space, they did not make a connection. Over all I think The Gate was a successful integration of real and virtual space. Much still needs to be explored of course, but these early experiments are important as foundations for future works.

There are many galleries, perhaps the majority, that are importing works to SL from the real world. I think it’s fine to use SL like a 3D web page, and it can be a great experience to walk through a virtual gallery and see images displayed in a certain way. This type of exhibition is more about the architecture and the context that it creates than it is about the content of the reproductions of paintings and photographs that are being displayed. I’ve seen many beautiful exhibits of this type in SL, but it’s not the direction that I am most interested in.

DQ. Are you interested in bringing art developed in SL out of this context? How? Do you think it could be interesting in other contexts, and for other communities?

SS. To bring SL native works out of SL at the moment is a lot more challenging than bringing real life works into SL. Part of it is that SL is a new medium that requires a certain amount of adaptation on the part of the viewer. Sure, you can just project SL in a gallery, but that’s not SL, that’s video. SL requires active participation. The other part is that SL is technologically in it’s infancy, and still has a lot missing. What we want as curators and artists is a medium with the same kind of universality that a video tape or DVD or even a linen canvas and oil paint provides. From all indications, it is clear that Linden is taking SL on an open source path. That’s great, because like html or other Internet protocols, SL has the potential to become a standard.

Technological limits aside, there is the issue of context. Without experiencing SL firsthand, one can not readily understand the context, which is problematic at this early stage because not many people have had the chance to explore it. That will change with time as more people sign up and become involved. In the mean time I think it is interesting to see SL taken out of context. Here are some examples of what I mean: A French advertising agency made a Youtube video of it’s real life office space with the real workers typing in the air, bumping into walls and nodding off in the standing position – emulating avatars. I have also seen a t-shirt with the “missing image” tag silkscreened onto it. Last spring, an artist created watercolor paintings of scenes from SL. These are amusing extractions from SL that comment well on the medium, but they are not exemplary of what I think might be achieved in a work of art that bridges for the viewer, the real and the virtual, thereby defining and putting into perspective that relationship. I want to, and have yet to see this work; one that shows how close and how disparate the real and virtual actually are. Alan Sondheim’s work explores this area, and is amongst the most advanced I have seen to date. I think that as the technology comes into widespread usage, a lexicon will develop. People will not see virtual worlds so much as “video games” but as analogs to the physical world, much the way we regard film and photography today. The first photographic works were not initially received by the art community as valid works – at the same time some thought the technology would make painting obsolete. Obviously this hasn’t happened, and photography has found it’s place alongside the traditional mediums. I believe SL, or the technology that it evolves into, will become accepted as a valid new medium and one that will have a great impact on the course of contemporary art in the 21st century.

MG. Nei social network e nei mondi virtuali sta prendendo corpo un nuovo tipo di arte (è chiaro che in molti social network la gente presenta opere che circolano anche fuori, ma mi riferisco a quelle che hanno una propria specificità). E’ un’arte della cultura partecipatoria che spesso viene elaborata da gente che non sempre ha un background culturale artistico. Questa nuova cultura artistica ha dei contorni ben precisi? Si possono ravvisare dei filoni? Nel mio libro, in particolare, mi soffermo sul neokitsch, una nuova tendenza che ho colto e che non carico di un significato negativo, anzi.
DQ. L’arte dei social network e dei mondi virtuali è un fenomeno complesso, difficilmente riconducibile a una unità. Personalmente, farei molta attenzione persino all’utilizzo del termine arte, che con la sua ambiguità rischia di creare dei fraintendimenti difficili da dissipare. Buona parte di questa produzione, infatti, ha poco a che vedere con l’arte contemporanea come siamo abituati a intenderla, e si confronta piuttosto con arti “popolari” come il fumetto, l’illustrazione fantasy, la pubblicità, i manga, il fandom, il cyberpunk, la pornografia delle “digital beauties”, HR Giger, certi generi cinematografici, il cinema d’animazione digitale, la moda. L’arte contemporanea, quando è presente, agisce allo stesso livello dei riferimenti già citati: l’immaginario di Matthew Barney e dei fratelli Chapman, ad esempio, risulta spesso un riferimento imprescindibile. Non si tratta di un fenomeno del tutto nuovo, dato che ha precedenti nell’illustrazione underground e nelle fanzine degli anni Ottanta; ma di certo, la rete e i mondi virtuali hanno dato al fenomeno una dimensione e una complessità sconosciute fino ai primi anni Novanta.
Se si guarda a tutto ciò dal punto di vista dell’arte contemporanea, c’è ben poco da salvare. Il fenomeno, del resto, si sviluppa secondo regole proprie, lontane anni luce dal nitore concettuale e dalla consapevolezza estetica che si richiede a un artista. Bada che non sto facendo una distinzione di valore: sto solo parlando di codici linguistici differenti. Eppure, sono convinto che questi fenomeni stanno avendo, e avranno sempre di più, un impatto decisivo sulla cultura alta, dato che sempre più numerosi sono gli artisti che ce l’hanno nel proprio background, o che scelgono coscientemente di confrontarsi con questo magma ribollente, all’interno del quale avvengono di continuo strane contaminazioni e alterazioni genetiche sorprendenti, in grado a volte di dare una scossa alle estetiche contemporanee. Ad esempio, il fenomeno del neo-barocco, cui sono già state dedicate diverse mostre, e di cui le opere recente dell’italiano Nicola Verlato sono un ottimo esempio, deve molto a quello che tu chiami neokitsch. Ancora: nessun presunto “innalzamento”: si tratta semplicemente di una ibridazione tra codici linguistici.

Personalmente, nel mio lavoro di critico d’arte tendo a collocarmi a questo livello. Guardo con interesse alla fan art e al game modding, ma mi dedico alla Game Art: una pratica artistica che pesca a piene mani nei primi due fenomeni, ma servendosi dei codici linguistici dell’arte contemporanea. La cultura manga mi interessa nei limiti in cui mi aiuta a decodificare l’opera di Murakami, Cao Fei e gli Annoying Japanese Child Dinosaur (2007) di Eva e Franco Mattes. Nei mondi virtuali, il mio interesse va più a Gazira Babeli e a Isbiter e Strauss che non a Starax Statosky. Ovviamente, faccio tutto ciò nella consapevolezza che una cosa non potrebbe esistere senza l’altra, ma anche che si tratta di fenomeni fondamentalmente diversi.

MG. Sarebbe ora di definire dei parametri per l’arte dei social network e dei mondi virtuali? Oppure ritieni che in qualche modo possano funzionare le stesse categorie che si applicano all’arte “ufficiale”?
DQ. Altra questione scottante. La creazione di categorie e, inevitabilmente, di gerarchie è sempre vista, da chi lo vive, come il tentativo di “ingabbiare” un fenomeno vitale e fluido, che vive bene anche senza critici supponenti e rompiballe. D’altra parte, essa costituisce un passo inevitabile in direzione dello sviluppo di un sistema atto a salvare ciò che, abbandonato alla cultura dell’immediatezza di Internet, andrebbe irrimediabilmente perso. Quando si decide di salvare qualcosa, bisogna inevitabilmente fare delle scelte. Noè ha deciso di abbandonare i dinosauri, e i paleontologi non glielo hanno mai perdonato.
Quindi: sì a dei parametri. Non ho dubbi che la maggior parte di essi possano esserci forniti da pratiche precedenti, ma – sulla base di quanto ho detto in precedenza – non credo che la critica d’arte contemporanea possa aiutare molto. Bisogna fare riferimento a un’estetica molto più aperta, che costruisca le sue categorie guardando non solo all’arte contemporanea, ma anche al più ampio bagaglio della cultura pop; e soprattutto, che abbia ben presente l’alto potenziale “ricombinante” delle comunità online, all’interno delle quali l’evoluzione stilistica e l’ampliamento dei modelli è vertiginoso. Per decodificare tutto ciò, parole d’ordine della critica d’arte come “postmoderno”, “kitsch”, “postproduzione” etc. non bastano più.

MG. Finora ti risulta che qualche critico sia entrato in qualche social network o mondo virtuale per capire cosa c’è veramente di interessante e fare una sorta di censimento?
DQ. Personalmente, sto tentando di fare un lavoro simile su Second Life, con il mio blog Spawn of the Surreal. Parto dal presupposto che i mondi virtuali siano una sorta di traduzione in poligoni del nostro inconscio collettivo, o, se vogliamo, della surrealtà a cui i surrealisti cercavano di accedere tramite il sogno, l’ipnosi e le tecniche automatiche come il frottage o il metodo paranoico-critico di Dalì. Alla “prole del surrealismo”, ossia agli artisti che operano nei mondi virtuali, basta un login per entrare in questa discarica dell’immaginario e utilizzare in maniera creativa ciò che un secolo di mass media vi ha depositato.
Ovviamente, non sono il primo e nemmeno il solo. Second Life pullula di esploratori, a caccia di arte e di tendenze: Patrick Lichty (che è anche artista), Lythe Witte, Amalthea Blanc. Ovviamente, non siamo mai d’accordo!

MG. Ci sono musei veri che si siano interessati a questo tipo di arte? Musei che abbiano magari già fatto qualche acquisizione?
DQ. Che io sappia, no. Ovviamente, esiste qualche caso isolato, ma è troppo poco per parlare di interessamento istituzionale. Artport, la galleria online del Whitney Museum, ha ospitato nelle sue “Gate Pages” The Port, una community artistica di Second Life. Eva e Franco Mattes hanno presentato per la prima volta le loro Synthetic Performances (2007) alla Galleria Civica di Trento, e hanno esposto spesso in contesti istituzionali. All’arte in Second Life si sono interessati alcuni festival come il DEAF e (a settembre) Ars Electronica, e sono in programmazione alcune mostre sui mondi virtuali in spazi istituzionali, artistici e non (musei scientifici e università). Esistono centri, come il d/lux media arts di Sydney, direttamente coinvolti nella ricerca sull’arte in Second Life. Venendo alle comunità online, l’Edith Russ Site für Medienkunst di Oldemburg, in Germania, ha organizzato di recente una bella mostra sul tema (My Own Private Reality – Growing up online in the 90s and 00s, a cura di Sarah Cook e Sabine Himmelsbach). Di acquisizioni vere e proprie non ho ancora sentito parlare. Del resto, credo che dopo la crisi dell’interessamento istituzionale per net art e new media a cavallo del millennio, i musei siano diventati molto più prudenti su questo fronte: dopo una fase di stasi, la situazione si sta muovendo, ma in maniera molto prudente.

MG. Si può ipotizzare un mercato dell’arte per le opere che circolano nei social network e nei mondi virtuali? Mi riferisco alle opere di artisti sconosciuti o quasi. Per intenderci, non parlo degli 01.org o di Cao Fei. Qualche galleria si sta già muovendo in questo senso?
DQ. Come ho detto all’inizio, non credo che fenomeni come il neokitsch possano entrare nel mercato dell’arte contemporanea, fatto salvo qualche occasionale e isolato “adattamento” ai suoi codici: ad esempio, so che si vendono molto bene le opere del collettivo russo AES+F (presente quest’anno anche alla Biennale di Venezia), che con il fenomeno hanno una decisa parentela. Ovviamente, un mercato di nicchia per amatori è decisamente auspicabile, e per certi versi esiste già. Altro discorso per progetti che si collocano consapevolmente sul piano dell’arte contemporanea. Per restare a Second Life, l’ambito che conosco meglio, Gazira Babeli (artista celebre in SL, ma ancora sconosciuta sul mercato dell’arte) ha iniziato una collaborazione con la Fabio Paris Art Gallery, che lavora anche con i Mattes, Ubermorgen.com, Alison Mealey (che viene dal game modding) e Todd Deutsch (che fotografa i Lan Parties). Babeli vende video delle sue performance. In America, Scott Kildall (che opera in SL come membro del collettivo di performer Second Front) ha esposto in diverse occasioni le sue stampe, che documentano alcune sue performance. Jakob Senneby e Simon Goldin, tra i fondatori di The Port, vendono sul loro sito a prezzi interessanti (dai 200 ai 3000 euro) i loro Objects of Virtual Desire, sculture derivate da oggetti d’affezione progettati dagli avatar. È ancora poco, ma è qualcosa.

MG. Sempre a proposito del mercato, capita di vedere opere interessanti realizzate in Second Life da artisti pressoché sconosciuti vendute a cifre irrisorie (10-15 US$) e altre opere proposte a cifre molto maggiori. A cos’è dovuto questo mercato selvaggio? Sono meccanismi che si riscontrano anche al di fuori di questo tipo di circuiti?
DQ. Il mercato dell’arte in SL è un fenomeno molto articolato e ancora privo di regolamentazione. Non esistendo un metodo di certificazione delle tirature, un’opera può essere venduta al prezzo che si vuole, e i prezzi bassi – adatti a una tiratura illimitata, come quella di un poster o un dvd – restano sempre quelli più onesti. Ma ovviamente, il culto che un artista riesce a costruire attorno a se può produrre improvvise impennate di prezzo, esattamente come nel mondo reale.

MG. Presto avremo piattaforme che permetteranno a chiunque di creare un proprio mondo virtuale. In questo caso un artista potrebbe pensare di creare un mondo virtuale visto come un’opera concettuale?
DQ. Sicuramente! In parte, questa via è già stata esplorata, ad esempio dal collettivo belga Tale of Tales, che ha progettato The Endless Forest, un mondo persistente online concepito come opera d’arte. Personalmente, credo molto in questa possibilità, che consentirà agli artisti di sviluppare in una direzione inedita una pratica operativa che ha avuto un peso importante negli anni Novanta: quella dell’arte relazionale, dell’artista come costruttore di nuovi contesti sociali.

MG. Ci sono degli artisti nell’ambito delle arti visive che sono già delle celebrità in qualche social network e che presto verranno scoperti, come è successo a Mika per la musica?
DQ. Non avendo ancora stabilito se sono un profeta o una Cassandra, preferisco non fare nomi. Tuttavia, sono sicuro che accadrà. È nell’ordine delle cose. In parte, ciò è già accaduto a Cory Arcangel, un mito delle comunità online che sta scalando molto rapidamente il sistema dell’arte contemporanea, con una presenza costante sulle riviste di settore e una mostra al MoMA.

MG. Per il momento, tra i vari progetti realizzati in Second Life e creati senza intenzioni artistiche, ne vedi qualcuno che potrebbe essere considerato arte concettuale? Per fare un esempio, poco prima di lanciare Synthravels, l’agenzia di viaggi per i mondi virtuali, chiesi a Christiane Paul del Whitney se poteva essere considerato un discorso di arte concettuale e lei mi rispose di sì.
DQ. E io sono perfettamente d’accordo con lei. Tuttavia, invece che ricondurre all’ambito artistico operazioni nate al di fuori di esso, preferisco pensare che l’arte concettuale abbia avuto un lascito molto ampio, che si può riconoscere anche in progetti sperimentali nati da altre esigenze. Tutto può essere arte, se lo si vuole; e molte cose che nascono come progetto artistico smettono di esserlo loro malgrado. Marco Cadioli ha sviluppato il personaggio di Marco Manray come progetto concettuale di “reporter nei mondi virtuali”, ma le riviste non smettono di prenderlo sul serio e di commissionargli veri servizi per le loro pagine culturali. E ovviamente, molti progetti privi di una intenzionalità artistica risultano concettualmente più interessanti di altre nate come arte: ad esempio, Synthravels, così come Virtual Hallucinations (il progetto di James Cook che vuole informare la gente sulle malattie mentali) sono molto più interessanti del China Tracy Pavillion di Cao Fei. Ma l’arte contemporanea, per essere tale, ha bisogno di una volontà artistica e da un contesto che la riconosca come tale: senza passare per questa gogna, Virtual Hallucinations non sarà mai un’installazione, il che non è necessariamente un male. Una volta il critico Steve Dietz ha scritto che Internet restava infinitamente più interessante della net art. Si potrebbe dire la stessa cosa per i mondi virtuali.

MG. L’arte presente nei social network viene filtrata soltanto da un pubblico popolare, che ne può decretare o meno il successo. Non credi che sia rischioso? In questo modo non si rischia di ignorare qualche artista emergente solo perché non ci sono giudizi sufficientemente affidabili?
DQ. Farei molta attenzione all’uso che fai del termine “popolare”. Il pubblico dei social network costituisce una comunità di riferimento, come quello della New Media Art o dell’arte contemporanea. Come tale, è formato, attento, culturalmente consapevole. È con le sue aspettative che si misurano gli artisti. Sta a loro decidere se accontentarle o sfidarle. Ma questo è sempre accaduto: negli anni Dieci, potevi essere un tardo impressionista o Duchamp; nel primo caso potevi mettere in conto un successo immediato, nel secondo ti conveniva ritagliarti una nicchia e aspettare un po’…

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.

Rinascimento Virtuale. L’avatar è un’opera d’arte?
Domenico Quaranta. L’avatar può essere un’opera d’arte, come qualsiasi altra cosa del resto. Nella maggior parte dei casi, ovviamente, non lo è. Il mio avatar in SL, ad esempio, non è un’opera d’arte: è solo la maschera che io mi sono disegnato per interagire in un mondo sintetico. È un autoritratto, un dispositivo di socializzazione, un sistema di navigazione. Certo, ci ho messo della creatività per farlo, come del resto ne ho messa nel realizzare il mio biglietto da visita. Nessuno dei due è arte, anche se entrambi potrebbero diventarlo, in certe condizioni.

RV. Si metterebbe nel salotto un quadro realizzato in Second Life?
DQ. Lei si metterebbe in casa un quadro realizzato in Photoshop? Si e no, dipende dal quadro, non certo dal mezzo. In SL non si realizzano quadri: si importano realizzazioni esterne, si scattano fotografie, si realizzano installazioni che possono avere una valenza iconica.

RV. Quanto può valere un’opera realizzata in Second Life?
DQ. Ancora: 0, 1.000 o 1.000.000: dipende dall’opera, dall’interesse che suscita, dal desiderio che riesce ad attivare.

RV. E’ scoccata l’ora del Rinascimento virtuale?
DQ. Non credo. Su questo vorrei essere molto chiaro, a costo di sembrare un vecchio censore. Non esiste alcun movimento artistico nei mondi virtuali: esiste qualche buon artista che ha deciso di sperimentare con questo medium e una schiera di individui che hanno confuso con l’arte quello che fanno. È una cosa che succede spesso, e che può avere anche una sua funzione positiva, contribuendo ad allargare la nostra idea dell’arte. Quasi sempre nasce dalla confusione tra due termini: creatività e arte. La creatività viene usata in tante cose: allestire presepi, disegnare un libro o una rivista, progettare un marchio, gestire un’azienda, cucire un vestito. Nessuna di queste cose è “arte”, anche se l’arte si può verificare in ciascuna di esse.

RV. Conviene investire nell’arte sviluppata nei social network?
DQ. Conviene investire nei buoni artisti. Compresi quelli che emergono dai social network.

RV. Quanto durerà la moda dell’arte di Second Life?
DQ. Non esiste una “moda dell’arte di Second Life”. Esiste una nicchia operativa che si è costruita su uno strumento, e che ha scarsi riscontri fuori da questo contesto. La sua durata dipenderà dalla capacità dello strumento di innovarsi e stimolare la creatività delle persone, di estendere il proprio modello ad altri mondi virtuali; dalla capacità di questa nicchia di strutturarsi, di dotarsi di gerarchie e criteri di valutazione; dall’esistenza dei mondi virtuali, del tempo libero e della disoccupazione.

RV. Meglio i writers (i graffitari) o gli artisti dei social network?
DQ. Entrambi i termini sono fuori luogo. Keith Haring non è un writer né Gazira Babeli è un’artista dei social network, ma entrambi sono artisti di ottimo livello. Se devo scegliere tra le due cose intese come fenomeni culturali nel senso più ampio del termine, scelgo senza dubbio il writing come fenomeno di appropriazione illegale dello spazio pubblico: è spontaneo, illegale, ha una lunga tradizione, incide sulla realtà e non si ammanta della parola arte, anche se qualcuno cerca di applicargliela forzatamente.

RV. L’arte di Second Life è quella degli artisti affermati che si cimentano anche con questo strumento oppure è un’arte che nasce dal basso, un’arte da autodidatti?
DQ. La distinzione è artificiosa: l’arte può emergere ovunque, e anche se è più facile che un artista che si è già guadagnato credito altrove faccia un buon lavoro, non è affatto scontato. Ma è l’espressione “arte di SL” che mi lascia forti dubbi. Se devo per forza definire una nicchia operativa, preferisco ficcarci dentro i creativi naife piuttosto che i veri artisti, quale che sia il loro curriculum. Questi fanno arte senza aggettivi.

RV. Lei ha un’avatar in Second Life?
DQ. Si. Si chiama Domenico Quaranta, ha barba e capelli bianchi e porta un cappello a cilindro.

RV. Come definirebbe Second Life?
DQ. Una discarica dell’immaginario.

RV. Meglio mondo vero o mondo virtuale?
DQ. Preferisco il mondo vero per il clima, i mondi sintetici per la compagnia.

RV. Second Life è una bolla mediatica?
DQ. SL è il prodotto sofisticato di diverse linee evolutive delle tecnologie digitali. Ed è, sicuramente, un modello per il futuro. In essa vi è molto di interessante, ma raramente ha attratto i media. Diciamo che alcune aziende e individui, per un certo periodo, hanno cercato di sfruttare in chiave pubblicitaria l’interesse morboso che sembrava suscitare chi investiva denaro reale in un mondo sintetico. Oggi questo interesse si è spento, e gli spazi aperti da queste aziende sono tutti vuoti.

RV. Sa che sono stati girati dei film in Second Life? Gli avatar prenderanno il posto degli attori?
DQ. Solo quando riusciranno a rifare la scena dello specchio di Taxi Driver come e meglio di Robert de Niro.

RV. Matrix è il futuro o il presente?
DQ. Matrix è il passato. Ogni futuro immaginato somiglia al presente che l’ha generato, e Matrix è stato girato nel 1999 rielaborando un immaginario che risale agli anni Ottanta.

RV. Cosa pensa del virtuale?
DQ. Da cultore della Patafisica, preferisco il potenziale.

RV. Ci si può innamorare di un avatar?
DQ. Ci si può innamorare di qualsiasi cosa.

RV. Qual è l’espressione più avanzata dell’arte di questi anni?
DQ. Come sempre, è l’arte che parla di noi e del nostro presente con un linguaggio che sarà comprensibile anche agli uomini che ci seguiranno, nonostante i loro innesti tecnologici e i loro avatar.

RV. Cosa pensa della net art?
DQ. Penso che sia stata un grande momento dell’arte dell’ultimo decennio, e che non c’entri nulla con ciò di cui stiamo parlando.

RV. L’arte del futuro sarà quella dei grandi maestri o quella dei naif del web?
DQ. L’arte del futuro sarà quella degli artisti, dei critici e del pubblico del futuro. Potremmo fare tante previsioni, e sarebbero tutte sbagliate, perché il tutto dipende da come evolverà l’idea di arte. Ma francamente credo che i “naif del web”, come li chiama lei, abbiano poche chance. Ma nulla esclude che il Warhol del XXI secolo ora stia scattando ritratti su SL. Dopotutto, quello del XX secolo disegnava pubblicità per le scarpe. Ma non è certo con quelle che è entrato nella storia.

RV. Fumetti, cinema di serie B, ritratti realizzati in Second Life: è vera arte?
DQ. L’arte è un fatto così magico e misterioso che a migliaia di anni dalla sua nascita siamo ancora qui a chiederci cosa sia arte e cosa non lo sia. Francamente, non credo che la mia sia la risposta definitiva al problema. Quello che posso fare è richiamare la sua attenzione su alcune convenzioni relative al termine arte: questo viene utilizzato di solito per designare le arti visive, ma anche (al plurale) per le altre arti (musica, architettura, cinema, etc.) e anche numerose tecniche. Tutto ciò conferisce al termine una grande complessità, che ne rende molto complicato l’utilizzo. Le faccio un esempio. Il cinema è un’arte (qualcuno l’ha definito la settima arte), ma non tutto il cinema è Arte (con la A maiuscola). Inoltre, quando diciamo, ad esempio, che Taxi Driver è Arte, non intendiamo dire che esso meriti un posto di rispetto nel mondo delle arti visive, ma nella storia del cinema come arte. Tuttavia, qualche film (ad esempio, Drawing Restraint 9 di Matthew Barney) è arte in entrambi i sensi, avendo cercato (e ottenuto) il riscontro di entrambe queste storie. Allo stesso modo, il fumetto è un’arte, ma pochi fumetti sono Arte, e solo alcuni di essi sono stati realizzati come opere d’arte nel senso conferito a questo termine dal mondo dell’arte contemporanea. Ma non le dirò mai che il Fumetto è Arte, e che un gallerista deve vendere i ritratti di SL perché sono Arte, anche se alcuni di essi lo sono.

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.

Domenico Quaranta

D. QUARANTA, “Rinascimento virtuale?”, in M. Gerosa (ed), Rinascimento virtuale, exhibition catalogue, Firenze, Museo di Storia Naturale, November 2008.

Nel 1927, un signore tedesco di nome Erwin¹ ha riconosciuto nella prospettiva, il frutto più succoso del nostro Rinascimento, una nuova visione del mondo, che viene ricostruito e organizzato attraverso lo sguardo dell’uomo, piazzatosi beatamente al centro. Qualche anno fa, un altro signore (questa volta, un russo di nome Lev²) ha sostenuto che la prospettiva è stata soppiantata da una nuova forma simbolica, quella del database. Se oggi il mondo ci appare come una collezione infinita e destrutturata di immagini, testi e altri dati, ha scritto Lev, l’unico modo per dargli ordine è organizzarli in un database, un archivio strutturato di dati. La logica del database, dice Lev, si oppone a quella della narrazione – una successione lineare di dati – e, dico io, a quella della prospettiva – un insieme di dati organizzati da un determinato punto di vista.

I mondi virtuali sembrano conciliare queste due prospettive, pardon, queste due forme simboliche. Si affidano a un database, un insieme strutturato – e infinitamente ampliabile – di dati, e organizzano questi dati secondo le regole della prospettiva, attorno a un punto di vista unico. L’uomo, presuntuosamente rinominato avatar³, torna ad occupare il centro, e a riorganizzare con il suo sguardo il mondo che lo circonda. L’universo, nella, sua versione “virtuale”, torna ad essere antropocentrico, pardon avatarcentrico. Questo mondo non è “rappresentato”, come nei quadri rinascimentali, ma “simulato”, come nel teatro. Il corridoio di Thalia del Palladio, già riconosciuto da Salvador Dalì come luogo emblematico dell’inconscio, diventa simbolo della nuova vita sintetica, che con l’inconscio ci azzecca parecchio.

In questo senso, Rinascimento virtuale è un titolo perfetto per una mostra sull’arte dei mondi virtuali. Tuttavia quest’ultima, in un contesto interamente “artefatto”, si colloca un po’ a tutti i livelli, e un uso particolarmente esteso del termine non aiuta quindi a fare chiarezza. In Second Life, tutti sono artisti di qualcosa. Diciamo subito, quindi, che quando io parlo di arte non parlo dell’arte dell’architetto, dell’arte del progettista, dell’arte del designer, dell’arte dell’illustratore etc. Tutte “arti” assolutamente legittime, e che hanno un ruolo importante nella costruzione dei mondi virtuali. Non faccio riferimento a una concezione relativa di arte, né a un concetto esteso di arte come “techne”. Quella di cui parlo è l’arte senza aggettivi, l’arte di Roberto Longhi o, se vogliamo, di Francesco Bonami. L’arte che studiamo a scuola quando studiamo “storia dell’arte”. È questa arte che voglio riconoscere. Mi rendo conto che questo riduce di molto il campo d’indagine, e che forse in questo modo non rispetto il concetto di arte adottato in questa mostra. Ma credo che sia una distinzione che va fatta, se vogliamo capire qualcosa dell’arte legata ai mondi virtuali. E, come vedremo, anche se l’obiettivo si restringe, rimane ancora molto da dire. Ad esempio, che non basta fare un ritratto di avatar, o un’installazione, per fare arte. O che esiste un’arte nei mondi virtuali e un’arte sui mondi virtuali. Certo, spesso un progetto può essere l’una e l’altra cosa. Ma questa distinzione merita di essere fatta comunque, perché se è facile riconoscere come arte il progetto di Cao Fei per la Biennale di Venezia, il riconoscimento è più difficile all’interno dei mondi virtuali, in un contesto in cui la definizione di arte si fa più sfumata. Ma andiamo con ordine.

Contro il postkitsch

Con quale diritto, e con che presunzione, posso arrogarmi il diritto di dire cosa è arte e cosa non lo è? Che, ad esempio, i Portraits (2007) dei Mattes sono arte e un qualsiasi ritratto di avatar reperibile su Flickr non lo è? Che le foto di Marco Cadioli sono arte e le innumerevoli cartoline di Second Life caricate su Deviantart no? Il discorso è complesso, in primo luogo perché spesso ciò che fa l’arte è poca cosa, e in secondo luogo perché non è mai la stessa. In questi due casi specifici, lo statuto artistico sembrerebbe derivare dalla combinazione di tre fattori: estetica, progetto e contesto. Quasi mai uno dei tre basta da solo. I ritratti dei Mattes rivelano un’estetica matura, che sa prendere le distanze dal soggetto e riflettere in questo modo il suo significato più profondo. Fanno parte di un progetto più ampio che riflette su un nuovo concetto di identità, un nuovo ideale di bellezza, e che replica l’atto warholiano di creazione dell’icona a partire dal blob confuso della cultura popolare. Infine, circolano e vengono apprezzati in un contesto che è, appunto, quello dell’arte. Tutti questi fattori si ritrovano anche nei progetti fotografici di Marco Cadioli: spostando l’accento dal soggetto all’atto stesso di fotografare un mondo virtuale, ponendolo sullo stesso piano del mondo reale, quest’ultimo compie un’operazione genuinamente artistica, che “riscatta” scatti altrimenti poco significativi. E tuttavia tutto ciò si potrebbe riconoscere anche, che so, nel ritratto di Raegan caricato da Raphael Masala su Flickr. Che cosa li differenzia allora?

Si racconta che Andy Warhol, quando, nel 1964, iniziò la serie dei Flowers, ebbe dei problemi con Patricia Caufield, autrice della fotografia da lui utilizzata. È interessante, innanzitutto, notare che non ebbe gli stessi problemi con il grafico che disegnò le scatole Brillo, o il fotografo che immortalò Jackie Kennedy durante il funerale del marito. Questi due oggetti, per riconoscimento unanime, non sono “arte”. La foto di Caufield vorrebbe esserlo, ma non lo è, perché fa parte dello stesso armamentario pop da cui provengono gli altri due artefatti. La Pop Art non rende arte il pop (o, se preferiamo, il kitsch), ma costruisce su di esso un discorso di secondo livello. È questo discorso che distingue l’avanguardia dal kitsch. Mutuo questi due termini, ovviamente, da Clement Greenberg⁴, che pur non riconoscerà mai lo statuto artistico della Pop Art. Eppure il suo discorso supporta a meraviglia il nostro. Secondo Greenberg, il kitsch è la risposta del mercato alle nuove esigenze estetiche aperte dall’estrema rarefazione dell’avanguardia: “Per far fronte alla domanda del nuovo mercato, venne inventato un nuovo prodotto, la cultura ersatz, il kitsch, destinato a coloro che, insensibili ai valori della vera cultura, sono tuttavia avidi di quelle distrazioni che soltanto la cultura, di qualsiasi genere essa sia, è in grado di fornire.”⁵ Una delle prerogative più interessanti del kitsch, individuata genialmente da Greenberg, è la sua capacità di assorbire l’avanguardia: “da essa il kitsch ricava dispositivi, artifici, stratagemmi, pratiche, temi, li converte in sistema e scarta il resto… quando è trascorso abbastanza tempo, il nuovo viene saccheggiato per delle nuove bevande miste, dei ‘cocktails’ che vengono poi annacquati e serviti come kitsch.”⁶

Questo meccanismo è valido ancora oggi. Quello che è venuto meno, complicando di gran lunga le cose, è il fattore tempo. Oggi l’avanguardia viene assorbita immediatamente dal kitsch. Accade sempre più spesso che la pubblicità assomigli all’arte dell’anno prima. Ma il fatto che la cosiddetta arte dei social network abbia assorbito la Pop Art e persino il Postmoderno non basta a farne “arte”. Il fatto che i ritratti di avatar abbiano preso a somigliare un po’ tutti ai ritratti dei Mattes non li pone sul loro stesso livello. Questo non accade perché è questa stessa produzione a posizionarsi su un altro livello: quello del kitsch, appunto. Lo nota lo stesso Mario Gerosa, quando parla di “arte souvenir”, di “arte fatta per stimolare un commento”, e della funzione sociale e aggregativa della produzione dei social network.⁷ L’arte non ha funzione. Il kitsch si, il postkitsch anche.

È per questo che non credo, a differenza di Gerosa, che il postkitsch possa essere promosso ad arte di primo livello. Perché ciò accada, questi “artisti” devono cambiare gioco: come Warhol, che ha smesso di fare il pubblicitario e ha cominciato a fare l’artista. Per lo stesso motivo, non credo che l’arte possa insegnare qualcosa al postkitsch: quello che può accadere, al massimo, è che il postkitsch metabolizzi l’arte e la trasformi in kitsch. Infine, è per questo stesso motivo che ritengo l’operazione Rinascimento virtuale insieme pericolosa e interessante: pericolosa, perché pone tutto sullo stesso livello; interessante, perché non tutto è sullo stesso livello, e credo che la mostra lo dimostrerà, in un modo o nell’altro.

Contro l’iperformalismo

Un discorso simile, ovviamente, può essere fatto per i numerosi video e machinima girati all’interno dei mondi virtuali. Molti di essi, peraltro, non ambiscono nemmeno a porsi come arte, essendo decisamente più conveniente, e più remunerativo, posizionarsi al livello della cultura di massa: serial televisivi, videoclip, video pubblicitari, etc.

Più complesso, come notavamo, è entrare nel merito dell’arte prodotta all’interno dei mondi virtuali: un fenomeno che, a parte il caso isolato della performance, che ha spesso luogo anche in altri ambienti sintetici, da The Sims a World of Warcraft, interessa soprattutto Second Life, che più di altri mondi risulta impostato sulla creatività degli utenti. Qui, l’unica possibilità di fornire un’analisi convincente si radica nella capacità di rispondere a una semplice domanda: in quali termini è possibile l’arte in un mondo virtuale – premesso, ancora una volta, che arte e creatività sono due cose diverse, e che escludiamo da questa analisi architettura, design e tutte le altre “arti”?

Nel primo paragrafo abbiamo introdotto brevemente il concetto di “teatro”. Un mondo sintetico come Second Life è tante cose insieme: come Photoshop, è un tool dotato di un ricchissimo menù di opzioni; come Habbo Hotel, è una piattaforma di comunicazione. Ma se lo guardiamo dal punto di vista dell’avatar, che come abbiamo detto ne costituisce il centro ideale, un mondo virtuale è, essenzialmente, teatro. Dico “teatro”, e non palcoscenico, perché il mondo riunisce palcoscenico, attori, sceneggiatura, pubblico e gli strumenti per sviluppare tutte queste cose.

Teatro, dunque. Si comincia disegnando la propria maschera, e attribuendo una personalità, e una vita, al proprio personaggio. Poi si passa allo scenario. Molto spesso, si entra in una sceneggiatura già scritta: è quanto accade in tutti i giochi di ruolo online. In Second Life, questo non succede, se non parzialmente. Alcune scelte iniziali sono decisive: se si decide di essere per sempre. Per il resto, si tratta semplicemente di entrare a far parte di un sistema sociale complesso, con alcune regole di base e ampio spazio d’invenzione. È questo, per inciso, che rende Second Life tanto noioso, e a tratti angosciante: la maggior parte dei suoi abitanti sono personaggi in cerca di autore, maschere senza sceneggiatura. Storie scritte male.

La forza della sceneggiatura diventa la forza del personaggio. Aimee Weber è stata abilissima a costruirsi il personaggio della designer di successo, Lanai Jarrico è perfetta nel ruolo di giornalista, Anshe Chung un’ottima milionaria. Aprire una galleria è, prima che un’avventura economica, teatro. Fare l’artista è, prima che una carriera, teatro. Le opere d’arte realizzate dagli avatar ed esposte nelle gallerie di Second Life non sono arte in quanto tali. La loro funzione è, unicamente, quella di conferire solidità al personaggio. È solamente a livello del personaggio, della sceneggiatura a cui riesce a dare vita, delle storie che riesce ad attivare, che l’arte è possibile. In questo senso, parlare di arte in Second Life è un equivoco: in Second Life non c’è arte, ci sono artisti. Artisti che sono a loro volta progetti artistici, opere d’arte. Quella che chiamano arte è, in realtà, scenografia, o, al massimo, elemento drammaturgico. Credere – come fanno molti – nella possibilità di un’arte in Second Life vuol dire soccombere alla finzione, ritenersi persone invece di attori. Un’architettura visionaria, un’installazione audiovisiva, un’immagine, un avatar bizzarro non hanno, come nella realtà, valore in sé. Se la narrazione non funziona, l’arte perde qualsiasi tipo di interesse. L’artista deve essere consapevole di essere il fulcro di una storia, e deve essere in grado di scriversi un buon soggetto. Un artista senza un buon soggetto non è un artista. Non lì. In un mondo virtuale, senza narrazione non c’è arte.

Per lo stesso motivo, una qualsiasi delle identità appena citate, se rivendicate come arte, potrebbero esserlo a tutti gli effetti. È uno dei paradossi di questo mondo: in un contesto in cui tutto vuole essere arte, spesso operazioni squisitamente imprenditoriali, o gesti privi d’ogni logica (come attraversare a piedi l’intera

Tornando a quest’ultima, ritengo fortemente emblematico il caso dell’iperformalismo, il presunto “movimento artistico” lanciato da Dancoyote Antonelli. Non mi interessa entrare nel merito dell’estetica del movimento, che ricicla, con l’estetica imposta dal motore grafico di Second Life, le premesse poste dall’op art e dalla “cyberart” dei primi anni Novanta, essa stessa ben poco degna di interesse. Non mi interessa perché, come ho detto, le opere di Dancoyote Antonelli sono interessanti come arte solo nei termini in cui contribuiscono alla storia di Dancoyote Antonelli, lui stesso opera dell’artista americano DC Spensley, e a quella della comunità intera dei residenti. La storia di Dancoyote è quella di un artista giovane e intraprendente, con una pettinatura punk e il sesto dito della creatività, che in pochi mesi di vita si è costruito un museo che svetta nei cieli della sua sim e ha dato vita a un movimento a cui ha aderito un ampio numero di artisti. Il canovaccio, non c’è che dire, non è male. Rimpolpato con qualche dettaglio, potrebbe somigliare alla biografia di Marinetti o di Tzara. Il problema è che la storia finisce qui. Le sue opere non aggiungono nulla al personaggio, sono pure esplorazioni formali di un mezzo. Né, d’altra parte, danno vita a delle storie: superato il primo momento di stupore “estetico”, chi visita il suo museo cade invariabilmente preda della noia.

Purtroppo, gli altri artisti che hanno aderito al movimento non si distaccano da questo modello. L’iperformalismo è, dal mio punto di vista, scenografia senza narrazione. Una raccolta di racconti mediocri. O, se vogliamo cavarcela con un gioco di parole, senza sceneggiatura. Si può salvare, ma solo a patto di scendere dal piedistallo dell’arte per competere onestamente con quell’oceano di creativi che operano in Second Life.

Ma, vi chiederete: ci sarà pur qualcosa che ti piace, no? Si. C’è Gazira Babeli. Anche Gazira Babeli fa installazioni e performance, ma è molto lontana sia dall’optical che dalla cyberart. La sua estetica è pop e aggressiva, e somiglia poco a Second Life. Ma non è questo che ne fa un’artista. È, in primo luogo, il suo essere una storia avvincente, di quelle che non ci si annoia mai di sentire. È, in secondo luogo, la sua capacità di dare vita ad “opere” che aggiungono dettagli al suo ritratto, e che contribuiscono alla storia di chiunque abbia l’occasione di imbattersi in esse.

Gazira Babeli è l’opera di qualcuno, ma siccome non sappiamo chi sia questo qualcuno, diventa personaggio a tutto tondo, l’unico volto di se stessa. È alta, veste di nero, indossa occhiali scuri e un buffo cappello. È bella, ma legnosa nei movimenti e acida nel comportamento. All’inizio della sua storia, suonava la chitarra, nuda, agli angoli delle strade. Poi ha cominciato a costruire strane armi (lattine di Zuppa Campbell’s che imprigionano i passanti, terremoti, tornado, grey-goo) e a piazzare pizze in luoghi pubblici. Il collettivo di performer Second Front l’ha riconosciuta come artista, e è diventata una di loro. Fra i primi frutti di questa collaborazione si ricorda la performance Spawn of the Surreal, in cui ignari avatar vengono deformati da uno script nascosto negli scranni di un teatro. Il suo mediometraggio Gaz of the Desert ha offerto una versione agiografica della sua storia. È stata la prima artista ad avere una retrospettiva in Second Life, e la prima avatar artist ad avere una personale fuori da Second Life. In omaggio a Raymond Roussel, ha chiamato la sua isola Locusolus, e l’ha popolata di strane creature: pizze che cantano O sole mio, environment surreali in cui una chitarra gioca a tennis con una paletta da pizzaiolo, un enorme rubinetto che raschia il fondo del suo inventario, due torri di marmo che crollano e si rialzano come un gioco a molla e, più di recente, un tempio greco che gioca a Pong col passante di turno. Diamine, questa si che è una storia!

Conclusione

Pontificare sull’arte può essere una pratica snervante. Nel crogiolo di creatività esplosa attorno ai mondi virtuali, abbiamo cercato di separare, come si dice, la pula dal grano, e abbiamo trovato molta pula e poco grano. Nella pula, come abbiamo cercato di chiarire, c’è molto che potrebbe diventare grano, in altri contesti e con altre chiavi di lettura: ma non si parli di arte, per favore!

Detto questo, ad alcuni potrebbe sembrare che la morale di questa storia sia la seguente: attorno ai mondi virtuali c’è molto hype, tanta confusione e poca arte. Al contrario, di arte ce n’è molta, e molta di buona qualità. L’elenco che segue non vuole essere esaustivo, ma solo suggerire la complessità del fenomeno.

Abbiamo già citato i ritratti dei Mattes, i progetti fotografici di Marco Cadioli e Gazira Babeli. Aggiungiamo le performance di Second Front, che ha risuscitato Fluxus e il punk in quel mortorio che è Second Life; le performance dei Mattes, che rimettono in scena attraverso i loro avatar alcune celebri performance degli anni Settanta, esplorando il senso di concetti come corpo, spazio, violenza e sessualità in un mondo virtuale; quelle di Joseph Delappe, che si muove da The Sims a Second Life, da America’s Army a Battlefield Vietnam nel tentativo di imporate il dibattito politico in questi contesti sociali; i lavori recenti di Eddo Stern, che recuperano i miti, l’iconografia e la produzione vernacolare dei fan di World of Worcraft nei suoi video e nelle sue installazioni cinetiche, e che con il suo monumentale Portal ha dimostrato lo statuto di realtà di questo mondo parallelo in modo spettacolare; i video e le installazioni di Cao Fei, che rivelano la personalissima visione dei mondi virtuali che può avere chi, come lei, vive la sua prima vita in una realtà altrettanto confusa e contraddittoria qual’è quella cinese; le sculture e i modelli di Goldin+Senneby e di Scott Kildall e Victoria Scott, che esplorano la cultura del gadget e il legame affettivo che può legarci a questi oggetti virtuali.

Insomma, c’è arte su Marte: basta saperla riconoscere.

Footnotes:

I

Gazira Babeli è un’artista nata in Second Life il 31 marzo 2006. Alta e sinuosa nel lungo abito nero che scende leggero sulle sue anche poligonali, lo sguardo spento nascosto da un paio di occhiali scuri, Gazira trasuda uno strano fascino che la colloca a metà strada tra la strega woodoo e un’eroina alla X-men. Una descrizione che non le rende giustizia, perché il suo alto copricapo a tronco di cono fa pensare anche al Cappellaio Matto, o all’acconciatura elaborata di una dama del Settecento; e il suo magnetismo rievoca quello del Pifferaio Magico, tanto che non ci stupiremmo di veder comparire, dietro di lei, un corteo di roditori. Insomma, un bel guazzabuglio culturale, che si muove a suo agio sull’orizzonte postmoderno di Second Life.

Non avremmo dedicato tanto spazio all’aspetto di Gazira se non avessimo letto tante pagine sull’abito grigio di Joseph Beuys, il suo cappello di feltro e il suo fascino da sciamano. Come per Beuys, e per molti altri artisti prima e dopo di lui, la costruzione del proprio personaggio non è un elemento accessorio, ma un tassello indispensabile nello sviluppo dell’opera. Nessun dettaglio va trascurato. L’identificazione tra arte e vita è totale. Vita, non seconda vita: perché se gli altri residenti di Second Life sono semplici avatar, proiezioni virtuali di un io reale, Gazira Babeli è forse il primo vero indigeno del regno inventato dal Linden Lab. Ma andiamo con ordine…

Second Life è un mondo virtuale in 3D costruito e posseduto dai suoi residenti. Costoro trascorrono la maggior parte del loro tempo ad arredare la propria casa, vestire il proprio avatar, comprare gadget e oggetti di ogni tipo, fare vita sociale, lavorare. C’è chi si sposa e chi preferisce farsi un giro per le strade di Amsterdam in cerca di prostitute. C’è una economia interna, un’ora interna, regole, pesi e misure. Si può trascorrere la propria seconda vita senza quasi rendersi conto che ci si trova in una interfaccia fatta di dati, in un mondo tenuto in pieno da codici e script.
Gazira questo lo sa bene. E infatti le sue performance non consistono nell’agire – come un qualsiasi avatar – sulla piattaforma di Second Life, ma nel manipolare e nell’attivare del codice. Non è una performer, ma una “code performer”. Non agisce fingendo, come tutti, di trovarsi in un mondo fatto di oggetti e di atomi, ma consapevole di trovarsi in un mondo fatto di codici, e di essere codice lei stessa. La performance è sempre un agire critico nei confronti delle norme su cui si fonda il mondo che ci circonda. Gazira agisce nella consapevolezza che le convenzioni sociali che regolano il mondo virtuale di Second Life agiscono solo sulla superficie, e che in realtà il suo mondo si regge su altre leggi: quelle scritte nel codice di programmazione. Sono queste le regole che sfida con le sue “code performance”. Per questo appare, agli occhi di chi la vede in azione, come un bizzarro sciamano. Gazira lancia script come fossero formule magiche, scatena terremoti, calamità naturali, invasioni di icone pop fitte come cavallette. Lo scorso ottobre, ad esempio, ha destato una certa preoccupazione una piccola apocalisse, che ha visto una spiaggia di Second Life riempirsi di immagini di Super Mario saltellanti. In gergo tecnico si tratta di un “grey goo”, espressione usata nell’ambito delle nanotecnologie e della fantascienza per descrivere un ipotetico scenario apocalittico in cui dei robot autoreplicanti consumano tutta la materia vivente sulla terra [1]. Anche se il cataclisma ha generato una certa preoccupazione, Gazira sembra più interessata a causare un corto circuito mentale che un vero collasso del sistema. Per questo popola l’universo tridimensionale e barocco di Second Life con l’icona per eccellenza dell’epoca 8bit. Questo processo è evidente nell’operazione Kaspar Goo (novembre 2006), in cui chiede a un attore di interpretare la parte del vagabondo di Caspar David Friedrich, estasiato di fronte agli spettacoli della natura. È l’alba, e il nostro viaggiatore, col suo copricapo a tesa larga, osserva il sole sorgere su uno scenario da favola. La mimesi sembra perfetta, ma a un certo punto i suoi interrogativi si concretizzano in una pioggia di punti di domanda che scendono a sporcare l’orizzonte. Un paio di giorni dopo, Gazira si presenta all’inaugurazione, in Ars Virtua (uno spazio espositivo fondato nel 2005 dagli studenti del Cadre)[2], della mostra di ritratti di avatar di Eva e Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org)[3]. A un certo punto, l’ambiente si riempie di banane: non banane qualsiasi, ma una replica di quella realizzata da Andy Warhol per la copertina del primo disco dei Velvet Underground. Difficile capire se si tratti di un commento all’operazione sviluppata dai Mattes (that’s all pop!) o piuttosto di una gara a chi è più pop. Ciò che è certo è che l’amore/odio per la pop art emerge in molte delle operazioni di Gazira Babeli. Come quando, sulla colonna sonora di O’ sole mio, si è divertita a infestare – senza autorizzazione – la stessa Ars Virtua con pizze e spruzzi di salsa di pomodoro (Singing Pizza, aprile 2006). Gazira gioca con la sua (presunta? reale?) italianità trasformando questo attributo di simpatia in una coloratissima installazione ambientale. In Second Soup (maggio 2006), invece, Gazira è alle prese con una lattina gigante di zuppa Campbell, altra icona della pop art. La sta osservando su un manifesto quando la lattina abbandona la sua cornice di carta e la imprigiona. Da quel momento, non c’è più verso di liberarsene. Gazira salta, vola, corre, ma la lattina la raggiunge sempre. Il pop come divinità fastidiosa, eredità ingombrante che non riusciamo a mettere da parte? La penetrabilità dei corpi in Second Life rende alcune scene esilaranti, ma Gazira non sembra divertirsi molto. “Ami la pop art, ma la pop art ti odia”, è l’ironico commento che fa da sottotitolo alla performance.
Un gioco che invece sembra piacerle molto consiste nel lanciare oggetti e persone a centinaia di metri di altezza. In Second Life esistono dei limiti precisi alla libertà individuale, a quello che un residente può fare alla proprietà altrui o agli altri avatar. Gazira si disfa di questi limiti con la forza del codice, e scatena piccoli terremoti e tornado. Gioca con la gravità. Nell’operazione COME.TO.HEAVEN (luglio 2006), che ha come riferimento ideale il salto nel vuoto di Yves Klein, scaglia se stessa a milioni di metri di altezza, ad altissima velocità. Il risultato cambia a seconda delle caratteristiche della scheda grafica installata sul computer utilizzato. In certi casi, i poligoni si sfracellano, e il risultato non ha più nulla di umano; in altri, il corpo è come immesso in una turbina, gli arti si moltiplicano e si scompongono, il corpo diventa un confuso ammasso di carne e capelli. Gazira sembra passare in rassegna, sfruttando le caratteristiche fisiche del suo ambiente, diverse possibilità dell’arte del Novecento: non a caso, descrive la sua azione come un atto di pittura sulla scheda grafica del computer.

Potremmo chiederci, a questo punto, in cosa consista l’arte di Gazira. Dire che è performance risolve molte cose, ma non basta. Gazira scrive dei codici, li esegue in prima persona, documenta le proprie performance con scatti fotografici e video. Esattamente come Marina Abramovic o Vanessa Beecroft. Il che impone prima considerazione: Gazira non è il progetto di un artista che, attraverso un avatar, lavora su Second Life, ma È un artista, con un nome e un corpo, che vive e opera in Second Life. Non importa chi ci stia dietro, se sia un individuo o un collettivo, se sia un uomo o una donna. L’identità virtuale prende il sopravvento sull’identità reale.
In secondo luogo, le performance di Gazira sono codice informatico, che l’artista mette a disposizione sul suo sito sotto licenza Creative Commons affinché chiunque possa utilizzarlo. Opera in un ambiente di rete (net art?). Scrive codici (software art?). Si serve di miti e icone della cultura pop (pop art?). In realtà, il lavoro di Gazira si pone al di là di queste categorie, o meglio vive in un contesto che le dà per superate. Il confronto con la software art appare, in questo caso, decisivo. In un testo del 2004, la critica tedesca Inke Arns introduce, a proposito della software art, il concetto di “performatività del codice” mutuandolo dalla teoria dell’atto linguistico di John L. Austin. [4] Scrive Arns:

“… questa performatività non deve essere intesa come una performatività puramente tecnica [...] ma influenza i regni dell’estetico, del politico e del sociale. Il codice di programmazione è caratterizzato dal fatto che in esso dire e fare coincidono… Il codice diventa Legge.”

Arns conclude notando che la “software art ci mostra che il nostro ambiente (mediatico) si affida sempre di più a strutture programmate.” Gazira Babeli non si limita a operare all’interno del nostro ambiente mediatico. Ci vive. Vive in un mondo fatto di strutture programmate. Il codice che scrive trasforma il suo ambiente, perché il suo ambiente è fatto di codice. In altre parole, dal codice performativo qui passiamo alla performance. Un software artist, scrivendo codice, manipola l’ambiente dei media. Gazira Babeli, scrivendo codice, manipola il mondo in cui vive, e in questo modo mina l’illusione su cui il suo mondo si basa, quell’illusione che tutti i residenti (artisti compresi) si sforzano di mantenere in vita. Svela il segreto delle bambole Perky Pat [5], e ci induce a riflettere sul perché questa casa di bambole ci sembri così attraente.

II

Se Gazira Babeli rivela, operando dal suo interno, il particolare statuto di realtà del mondo in cui vive, l’italiano Damiano Colacito lavora sullo stesso tema in modo radicalmente diverso, trasportando nel mondo reale oggetti pescati nei mondi virtuali che frequenta. Secondo Colacito, la Seconda guerra mondiale non è mai finita. Lo dimostra il fatto che lui, nato ad Atri nel 1973, l’abbia vissuta. Certo, l’ha fatto giocando a Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001), ma che differenza fa? I reduci di guerra che vedono gli oggetti da lui esportati dagli ambienti di gioco, e riprodotti nei minimi particolari, li riconoscono e ne hanno paura. Colacito condivide con loro le stesse ansie, la stessa paura di non farcela, le stesse scariche di adrenalina.
Al telefono, Colacito mi racconta emozionato il ritrovamento, durante un’immersione nel lago di Garda, di un pezzo d’artiglieria della seconda guerra mondiale: “Il mio primo pensiero è stato lo stesso che faccio quando sono soddisfatto del mio lavoro: allora è successo davvero – ne ho la prova.” Mi torna in mente una storiella di Coleridge letta tanto tempo fa. Diceva più o meno: “Se un uomo in sogno attraversasse il paradiso e gli dessero un fiore come prova di esserci stato, e al ritorno si trovasse con quel fiore in mano… e allora?” Allora non importa che una storia sia reale, simulata o sognata: quella storia è successa, quando c’è un oggetto a dimostrarcelo.

Ma le sculture di Colacito non hanno solo la funzione di testimoniare la realtà di una esperienza vissuta dentro le pareti virtuali di un videogame. Servono anche per generare uno scarto semiotico che spiazza tanto il videogiocatore quanto chi di videogiochi non ha una esperienza diretta. Il primo, che nei videogiochi trascorre buona parte della sua vita, ha un soprassalto quando si trova di fronte a una riproduzione assolutamente fedele di un’arma, un power up o un med kit. Spiega Colacito in una recente intervista:

“Hanno reazioni estetiche improvvise e infatuazioni impulsive quando riconoscono quello che espongo, perché l’opera fa parte del loro – privato – palco degli oggetti mentali. È come se avvenisse in loro un corto circuito percettivo… Alcune volte sono irruenti, come quando ricollocai nel reale per la prima volta un power-up all’interno di una esposizione collettiva: un’artista che non conoscevo in quel periodo stava giocando allo stesso game dal quale il medicamento era stato desunto. Io non ero presente ma, dopo avermi trovato, egli mi raccontò entusiasticamente che quando lo vide vi si avvicinò con veemenza per afferrarlo come se fosse nel gioco, e che ci si fermò davanti alcuni secondi – quelli che gli servirono per capire dove si trovasse – e che infine si sentì quasi preso in giro: come ti dicevo prima, una parte del suo intimo mondo era esposta in pubblico senza che lui ne sapesse nulla…” [6]

Potrebbe sembrare una variazione sul tema della celebre storiella del cavallo dipinto da Apelle, che ricevette l’omaggio di un nitrito da un vero cavallo. Tuttavia, Colacito non la usa per esaltare la propria capacità mimetica, ma per sottolineare la virulenza dell’esperienza di gioco, che lascia tracce profonde nella nostra vita quotidiana. “Di alcuni game – spiega ancora l’artista – ricordo anche l’odore.” [7]

Quanto ai non videogiocatori, l’esperienza delle opere di Colacito risulta per loro ugualmente straniante. L’impressione è quella di trovarsi di fronte a oggetti provenienti da un altro mondo, agli artefatti prodotti da una civiltà scomparsa ma con molte tangenze con la nostra. Prendiamo ad esempio Health Bag (2005), l’opera che ha indotto il nostro amico artista a comportarsi in un modo che poco si addice al contesto di una mostra. Si tratta di una scultura in polistirolo rivestita di una pellicola di Scotchprint su cui è stata fedelmente riprodotta la texture dell’oggetto virtuale originario. Per il giocatore, le caratteristiche stilistiche di questo oggetto non sono elementi su cui soffermarsi, servono solo a collocarlo in un contesto (una determinata situazione di Return to Castle Wolfenstein) e ad attribuirgli una funzione (se lo afferro, acquisto dei punti vita). Chi non condivide quest’esperienza si trova invece di fronte a un bizzarro oggetto poligonale, con una superficie stranamente sfocata, stirata e vagamente pixellosa. Questi elementi di estraneità avviluppano però un oggetto che ha già trovato uno spazio negli archivi della nostra memoria, o per esperienza diretta (i reduci di guerra) o per esperienza mediata (cinema e documentari): la seconda guerra mondiale, cui rimandano il verde mimetico, la croce rossa e la scritta in tedesco. È come se un frammento della nostra storia tragica ritornasse a noi attraverso la mediazione di un filtro culturale e linguistico che non comprendiamo. In modo diverso, anche noi ci sentiamo presi in giro…

III

Nel corso dell’ultimo decennio, i mondi virtuali in 3D hanno aperto nuovi, avvincenti spazi di vita e di azione. Ci hanno offerto la possibilità di teletrasportarci un un altro luogo e in un altro tempo, sia esso passato o futuro; e di costruirci una seconda vita, più o meno simile alla nostra vita reale. Chi sostiene che questa esperienza di traslazione sia solo parziale perché passa ancora attraverso lo schermo di un computer, perché il realismo è solo parziale e i poligoni sono ancora evidenti, non ha capito molto del mondo in cui viviamo. Non ha capito, per esempio, che la bottiglia di Coca Cola o di birra appoggiata vicino al portatile, per un videogiocatore, non è per nulla diversa dal power-up che consuma velocemente tra un livello e l’altro: serve per farlo arrivare fino alla fine, per mantenerlo in vita. Poco importa che la prima sia fatta di atomi e il secondo di bit.
I lavori di Gazira Babeli e di Damiano Colacito dimostrano, adottando strategie artistiche agli antipodi, lo statuto di realtà di questa esperienza. Ci mostrano come, oggi, concetti come quelli di vita e di morte, di reale e virtuale, di passato e futuro debbano essere totalmente ripensati. A noi il compito di prenderne atto, prima che sia troppo tardi.

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ARTISTI

GAZIRA BABELI – http://www.gazirababeli.com/

DAMIANO COLACITO – http://www.videoludica.com/news.php?news=434

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NOTE

[1] Cfr. la definizione di “Grey Goo” in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
[2] http://arsvirtua.com/
[3] 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, a cura di Marisa Olson. Cfr. http://www.0100101110101101.org/
[4] 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 Århus (DK) 2004, pp. 176-193. Reperibile online qui (pdf).
[5] Cfr. Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1964. Ed. It. Le tre stimmate di Palmer Eldritch, Fanucci 2006. Nel romanzo, le bambole Perky Pat sono dei simulacri che – se associati all’assunzione di una droga allucinogena, il Can-D – offrono ai terrestri deportati su Marte una esperienza temporanea di traslazione in un mondo immaginario in cui vivere una vita molto simile a quella che conducevano sulla terra.
[6] Matteo Bittanti, “Intervista: Damiano Colacito”, in Videoludica.gameculture, 16 novembre 2006, reperibile online qui