Curator Leesa Fanning interviews China Tracy in RMB City:

http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/exhibitions/rmbcityopera/cyberdiscussion.cfm

Interactive Skimboard Game
Opening celebration
RMB City Hall, SL Time: Thursday January 13, 2011, 4pm
http://slurl.com/secondlife/RMB%20City%201/140/28/86

An intrepid meditating monk surfs amongst the remains of a once famous town.
He glides over the relics of a flooded RMB City, facing obstacles of all sorts.
In a post-disaster landscape, seemingly made from colour handwritings, this surfing journey is a thoroughly planned, fully conscious full-length drama with all the dramatic conflict pre-planned and built in, or an interactive movie where each player picks her own paths.
If what we are gliding over is not a wave but the remnants of this city, a building, or an event, or even if what we are gliding over is civilization itself, or ideology, then this surfing journey really is a slightly different, game version of RMB City itself.
The monk-avatar, his heart at ease, his board light, constantly overcomes the obstacles but never reaches anything resembling a final destination.
Similar to certain phenomena in life, throughout constant elevation of the soul through transmigration, RMB City Surfing Game guides the player through a journey of self-cultivation.

To play the game in Real Life, please visit Cao Fei’s installation in the exhibit “Real Virtuality” at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, opening January 15th, 2011. More information can be found here:
http://www.movingimage.us/exhibitions/2011/01/15/detail/real-virtuality/

Full speech of the 5th RMB City Mayor, Supernova Sibilant:

December 13, 2010, Second Life

Welcome to RMB City Playground. We gather to honor cycles.

First, we honor the cycle of a new mayoral term for RMB City. I believe our destiny will stretch our imaginations. In ancient China, imagination meant to take a journey in your mind – a play, a dream or the afterlife offered the cultural spaces for such journeys. Today, we honor RMB City as that site for our imagination to roam in its most delirious capacity.
Second, we honor the cycle of life and death. As mayor, I bring you a children’s playground and a place for the dying. Sites for eternal reivention. Sites for imagination.

Of course, you think there is no childhood and no death in Second Life. Is that so?
Finally, we honor the cycle of RMB City. This invention was originally conceived as a two-year experimental platform, a creative incubator of sorts. Though the RMB City artworks will of course live on, Cao Fei has always intended to close the city in Second Life in late spring/early summer 2011.
Now, I will show you a new way to tour RMB City. Come watch as I choose my destiny with the Tarot.

Tarot Card II The Popess Master Q The mystical repository of a secret and ancient world’s balance, she combines body and mind and through a silent and mysterious language, she guides you towards the right current

Tarot Card V The Pope Mao The supreme master of education and improvement, he guides his herd of believers towards progress through belief in sacrifice and a glorious common fate

A bunch of curious citizens met today in People’s Playground to welcome RMB city 5th Mayor Supernova Sibilant. Clad in her shining armor, this new dauntless heroine of the new millennium set the city off on its final journey.

As a tribute to the upcoming metamorphosis of the city, Supernova inspired a playground and a place for the dying as both ‘sites of eternal reinvention’.

“We gather to honor cycles, …I believe our destiny will stretch our imaginations. In ancient China, imagination meant to take a journey in your mind – a play, a dream or the afterlife offered the cultural spaces for such journeys. Today, we honor RMB City as that site for our imagination to roam in its most delirious capacity”.

The audience, intrigued by her insightful words, reacted in contrasting ways: some burst into ovations of excitement ♪♪♫♫♫APPPPLLLAAAUUSSSEEEE♪♪♪♫♫♫, some felt provoked by her words and left the stage, some chose to meditate in silence, floating in midair.

We then all moved to a magic tarot carpet, picked a card and scattered around the island in search of our destiny: whether teleported to the city’s graveyard or to the enigmatic half-moon dangling from the sky, all of us had to face our own fate and decipher the code of our SL existence.

We now invite you all to travel the island in search of your destiny and share your stories with us. A letter box will also be placed in RMB City to satisfy your insatiable curiosity and leave messages to the new mayor Supernova.

Stay tuned for more information and welcome our new captain Supernova Sibilant!

“The Life & Death of RMB City: The 5th Mayor project”

Through this, endless, perpetual cycle we are thrown into a world, and eventually washed away by its eternal wave. Like water, we splash on the rocks in constantly shifting forms, and like foam we finally dissolve into air.

How many worlds are we expected to see? How many forms to assume? On the rise and fall of a lullaby we choose a tarot card to know our destiny in RMB City. We set out to conquer the space, then in a blink of an eye, the wave rolls back and we are bound to become something different, over and over again.

On the occasion of its 5th Mayor Inauguration, RMB City enters a new phase and begins to embark on its last journey. Guided by its new mayor, Alexandra Munroe (Supernova Sibilant), and in search of its final destiny, RMB City invites you to consult the tarot and face your own fate.

Tracing back the most eminent moments and figures of the city’s journey, we will play our last game and face our final destiny, waiting for a new world to stand out on the horizon.

http://www.alternativearchive.com/caofei/article.asp?id=479

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The 5th Mayor Ceremony in RMB City:
Tuesday December 14, 2010, 11am (Beijing Time)
Monday December 13, 2010, 7pm (SL time)
People’s Playground (RMB City 4 42, 217, 95)

RMB City Project is developed by Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy) and Vitamin Creative Space
Facilitator: Uli Sigg (SL: UliSigg Cisse)
Public Presenter: Serpentine Gallery (London)

Reel Asian International Film Festival

A Space Gallery, Toronto

Nov 5-Dec 11, 2010

i.Mirror

People's Limbo in RMB City

Live in RMB City

For more info see:

http://www.reelasian.com/index.php/2010-festival/full-festival-schedule/details/125-rmb-city

"Live in RMB City"

Cao Fei: RMB City

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. San Francisco, CA

Oct 14, 2010 – Jan 9, 2011

http://www.ybca.org/exhibitions/

” Child: “Mother, is life here lonely?”

Mother: “Do you know what lonely means?”

Child: “Lonely is when I am here but mother is not online.”

Child: “Mother, am I unique?”

Mother: “Each real being is one of a kind; they are each unique and cannot be substituted. But here, we can clone ourselves or allow others to manage our lives. Sometimes, we encounter the threat of hackers or even destruction. We are not in complete control of our own lives.”

Child: “Mother, mother, which one am I?” (“Live in RMB City”, 2009)

http://www.friezeartfair.com/

Preview Date: 13th Oct, 2010

Public Date: 11am-7pm, 14th Oct to 17th Oct, 2010

Location: Stand H5, Frieze Art Fair

Regent’s Park, London

“PinchukArtCentre announced 21 young artists nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2010.

The Future Generation Art Prize established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation is a major new international competition for artists up to 35 to discover and provide long-term support for a generation of emerging artists, wherever they may live and work [...] http://www.futuregenerationartprize.org/”

Next Autumn RMB City will take part in the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil.
“There is always a cup of sea to sail in” is the title of this year’s Biennale: a quotation from the Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s major work Invenção de Orfeu (1952). Exploring the inextricable interconnections between art and politics, the event aims at investigating the role of art in contemporary society and its constant power of reinventing new reality, or as Lima’s poem goes: “the power to sail on even without ships / even without waves and sand”.
What is this endless urge of poetry and art to express themselves in new forms? And what is their relation with politics and earthly contingencies?
RMB City and another approximately 160 artists from all around the world will disclose their positions from next September, so stay tuned for more information!

For more info see:  http://www.fbsp.org.br/29_bienal-en.html

Photo by George Shuba

Dear Molly,

following up your outstanding performance at RMB City “Naked Idol” event, we would like to ask you a few questions. Are you ready to undress your imagination once more?

1. What does nudity represent to you both in the real and the virtual dimension?

“Would you let me walk down your street
Naked if I want to?” – Moby Grape, 1967

I think of the soldier standing naked at the entrance to the asylum in the film Le Roi de Coeur. http://www.renesch.com/images/king_of_hearts%20poster.jpg

I think of Jim Morrison surrounded by police on stage after being suspected of exposing himself.

I think of the covers of “nudist” magazines on city newsstands years ago. They always seemed to be playing volleyball.

Considering Second Life nudity the first thing I think of is the inevitable noob walking around naked.

I have seen nude beaches in Second Life where no one is naked. Nudity in Second Life is I think something that every resident has thought about. We are simply pixels yet nearly no one would allow themselves to be seen without clothing.

I remember logging on once. Many sims were down. People were rezzing in welcome areas instead of their normal locations. 40 people in one place. Lag making it impossible to move or teleport away. Nearly nothing was rezzing. I snapped some pictures and posted one on the SL Flickr group. My photo was removed by a moderator for violating the no nudity rule in spite of the fact that those there looked like dozens of grey, featureless mannequins piled into a closet.

My own first experience with public nudity in Second Life occurred while I was setting up a snapshot. I was making an avatar parody photo of Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. I was adjusting poses in the set I had built for the photo when I thought I had crashed. Actually the sim had gone down. I restarted and rezzed naked in the Ahern Welcome Area rather than my previous location. I quickly flew up 300 meters and put on some clothes.

2. How would you describe your Naked Tour through RMB City and what do you think is the true and bare nature of the island?

I have been interested in RMB City since it was first announced. It’s cosmopolitan mixture of old and new and of east and west is exciting. Still emerging from the time of Mao yet facing the future. This is the sense I have of RMB City and it influenced my choice of avatar I used for the naked idol event.

3. What do you think a ‘Naked Idol’ is or should be? A moment of transgression, embarrassment, freedom or what more?

I approached the event as a “fun” event. I wanted to participate and I wanted to see what others would do. I had planned to have a Guan Yin like avatar riding on a bed of swirling clouds and carrying auspicious objects. The event was for me a challenge rather than a contest. I was disappointed that I didn’t finish what I had planned. I instead arrived to see what the others had done.

I feel the event did allow the participants to explore the idea of what does it really mean to be naked in a pixelated world.

-Molly Montale

Dear Vivienne,

following up your outstanding performance at RMB City “Naked Idol” event, we would like to ask you a few questions. Are you ready to undress your imagination once more?

1. What does nudity represent to you both in the real and the virtual dimension?

In the real world it represents vulnerability and lack of pretence; in a virtual environment, there’s something more of artifice about it (as there is with all of our self-representations in virtual space); nudity in a virtual space is in some ways less vulnerable and yet possibly more exposed (as we appear here not as we are but as we would like to be).

2. How would you describe your Naked Tour through RMB City and what do you think is the true and bare nature of the island?

As a collective expression of fantasy and imagination given reality in pixels.

3. What do you think a ‘Naked Idol’ is or should be? A moment of transgression, embarrassment, freedom or what more?

Not transgression nor embarrassment; freedom, yes…and in a virtual context a visible challenge to preconceived bourgeois ideas of nudity as necessarily a sexual rather than creative or individualistic expression.

Thank you very much, see you!

Gianna, RMB City

June 16-20, 2010

Intrigued glances, embarrassed remarks on the absurdity of virtual love, enthusiastic reactions from the technology pros and an amazing response from the dazed younger audience. This is how “RMB City Opera” went on stage on one of the most prominent international modern art events of the world, the scary bogeyman ‘Basel Art Fair’.

It certainly provoked some reactions and it left a mark among the thousands of works by more than 2,500 different artists. In a constant dialogue with its booth comrades (ranging from disparate art expressions, from Ming Wong’s ‘world cinema’ to Duan Jianyu’s ineffable daily life oil paintings) the “Opera” charmed the public with its unique conjugation of entertaining aspects and more serious and intense comments on society and individuals.

If you sat down for a while and just listened to the music, you could almost feel surrounded by these glorious Red Army soldiers of the old Chinese ballets and fly over Basel skyline hand in hand with a charming black costumed Neo.

Look up to the sky next time you’re in Switzerland, you may see me flying with China Tracy and a bunch of awesome dancers from our second world!

see full article at http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/06/live-nude-avatars.html#more