staff and students, citing much of the work Pat is talking about. I wish Pat
had written this email a week or so earlier.
Simon
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
simon@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
From: "Lichty, Patrick" <plichty@colum.edu>
Reply-To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2009 11:11:26 -0600
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] Orality, Communication, and the affective
impact of Virtuality
Hello, everyone...
I was asked to contribute on behalf of Wafa Bourkhis in response to her
workshop in Tunisia having to do with "noise ratio", or the effect of marine
noise on wildlife, especially cetaceans.
I've been asked several questions by Wafa for inclusion here:
1: Give a brief intro to Second Front.
2: Let us know what your participation in the Noise Ratio event was.
3: Does Second Life represent a new Oral culture
4: What do we call art made in virtual worlds? Is it new?
5: What is the beauty in Second Life? How does it relate to the
transmission of experience in traditional, or oral sense?
1: Second Front
We are (most likely) the oldest and largest ongoing performance art
collective in Second Life. We have had 7-9 members, and we range from San
Francisco to Milan, Italy. SF has a great cadre of established & emerging
artists, and whiel we began in a form of Dada theatre, we have embraced the
Cage/Kaprow/Hansen "Happening" model, while incorporating references to
contemporary performance artists like Gomez-Pena, Abramovic, Anderson, and
others.
So far, we have doen over 40 performances, 35 of which are unique, and we
have released our third DVD.
2: Noise Ratio
Wafa Asked us to collaborate in the symposium, where we decided to do a
piece we called "noise Ratio"
http://www.secondfront.org/blog/?p=161
We arrived with numerous dophins in tow, Second Front gamboling and
frolicking with them in the seas of the Mediterranean.
At one point, the subterranean noise caused the dolphins to go mad,
hemorrhage and die.
After the carnage, we were left to reflect on our feelings as a group.
Gazira Babeli, rampaged through the site with a wooden mallet, punishing all
that were complicit with the act; most of us merely took places to mourn the
dead.
Because the site was no carpeted in dead dolphins, we were forceably ejected
from the site.
We felt that the performance was highly successful in that in the beginning
it evoked the joy of the lives of our partners in the sea, but then the
severe affective reaction to the dead, eliciting out ejection.
3: In wondering about orality in Second Life, I refutrn to my thoughts on
the Internet as an oral culture. While much of the Net is relatively
stable, and the current net culture is merely a recapitulation of the
preexisting cultural pyramid (except in terms or power, which print on
demand circumvents), only a small amount of material is committed to the
"atomic" record of books and print. therefore Second Life, as a proprietary
platform in an ephemeral medium, is only preserved persistently by culture
in terms of writing, video, and less so in blogs. The average site in SL
(anecdotally) lasts perhaps 3=6 months. And because of the user-created
aspect of it, there is little static content, making it less stabel than the
larger Internet by far.
Therefore, I classify Second Life as a largely oral culture.
4: To call Second Life art anything specific is to conflate the container
with the content. there is virtual sculpture, interactive installation,
performance, spatial composition - all of which can be called "Virtual
Worlds Art" within the larger Genre of New Media and Emergent Practices. In
that I realize that curators, scholars and critics need mnemonics to quickly
work with genres, I woudl call is virtual worlds art that engages with a
given subject matter.
The importance of this classification is that it allows us to step aside
from the New Media classification and allow us to link art happening in
virtual worlds to contemporary art with the same criteria of rigor, craft,
criticality and affect of the physical work.
5: Beauty is a problem for me, being raised in Conceptualism and
Postmodernism. Beauty has been dealt severe blows by Duchamp by detaching
art from the retina, by Warhol in making beauty banal, and by Serrano and
Murakami in the ambivalence of horror and beauty. but perhaps this is an
artifact of our times.
Beauty, nevertheless, still resonates in the peeling away of paint in
Richter and Murakami's work, the affect of Tiravanija and July, and so on.
This can also translate to she screen, but environments like Second Life can
seem beautiful if we just allow ourselves to be seduced by the idealized
forms and the candy-colored light from the screen. My thought is that
perhaps if there is beauty, or I would prefer to call transcendentally
affective, I think that it comes from the relational nature of it and the
ability to realize forms with a theatricality unattainable in the physical
world. And we can congregate from across the world at the same time and
share it.
I realize there are access issues around the world, but neither do I feel
that this should disallow us from exploring these forms.
Thanks for your time, and I hope this is helpful.
_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In
the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and
password in the fields found further down the page.
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your
e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the
unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set
Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
HOW TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
