Cao Fei, the creative mind behind SL fantasy world RMB City, and one of the nominee for the HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010, was commissioned to create the HUGO BOSS ArtPass 2011. Allowing free admission to many important museums and institutions all around the world, the card becomes an alternative peephole to discover RMB City world. A fantastic overview of the island encloses a hidden gem: the tiny little replica of a prismatic RMB City world: familiar and yet unpredictable, with its iconic recognizable landscape continuously shifting its form.

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

Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus

23 Jan-11 Apr 2010

RMB City takes part in a major exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.

Exhibiting an extensive range of works from different art currents and spanning 130 years of Art History, Utopia Matters investigates the representation of ideal society and alternative worlds in the works of various European and American artists and groups.

Among prominent works from Primitivism to the Nazarenes, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Neo-Impressionism, RMB City presents a unique and ‘cozy’ installation of its virtual space. Playing on the idea of ‘private utopias’ and the splitting between a ‘real’ and physical space and a virtual ideal world, RMB City takes the shape of an intimate room where visitors can actively experience its virtual existence. Through SL portals, videos, press material and old project installations visitors can actually enter Cao Fei’s utopian world as if they were in their own bedrooms.

As intimately suggested in RMB City exhibition slogan, If What We See And Touch are real, What We Breathe And Feel Are Virtual.

For more info:

http://www.guggenheim.org/berlin/exhibitions/utopia-matters

http://www.alternativearchive.com/caofei/article.asp?id=406

RMB City invites you to a special gathering on January 10th, 2010, at 12 am SL time, 4 pm Beijing time. The location? The brand new People’s Marketplace (RMB City 1 205, 53, 66 (Mature)). The occasion? RMB City’s first birthday, and the inauguration of its fourth mayor, Erica Dubach, aka E3a Digital. A special announcement about an exciting new mission, the RMB City Code, also awaits.

Come and join China Tracy and the newborn China Sun in the stalls of our new bazaar. Buy a new costume for your avatar. Watch the dancers of RMB City Opera perform their revolutionary choreography. Last but not least, come to hail E3a, our new captain in chief, as she speaks to us about the increasing relevance of our virtual world.

Erica Dubach E3A Digital, Fourth Mayor of RMB City:
Born in 1969 in Switzerland, Erica Dubach travels the digital world in search of the new and interesting, both professionally and personally. As E3a Digital in Second Life, she has connected the virtual world to the real world using RFID technology. RMB City is destined to achieve the same leap in the context of art. As Erica in Real Life, she is a PhD candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich) since February 2007, and a senior researcher in the Auto-ID Lab University of St. Gallen / ETH Zürich since February 2009.

RMB City Code, a SL decoding game, Coming Feb 2010

Announcing Mayor E3A Digital’s first project, RMB City code.
A series of codes have been planted in RMB City, where the mystery of an ancient story is waiting to be discovered. You may embark upon different experiences to try to crack them. The moment you unfurl the web, you will revel in an unexpected surprise…….

The ACA Gallery of SCAD in Atalanta presents ‘NO LAB on Tour’, Dec.14, 2009-Feb. 7, 2010

The original project by Cao Fei and MAP OFFICE has been amplified with new images from a ‘second line’ parade that marched through Savannah Sept.25:

http://www.acagallery.org/

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=34960

http://rmbcity.com/2008/10/no-lab-in-rmb-city-prospect1-new-orleans/

NAMOC (The National Art Museum of China in Beijing), in collaboration with Swiss CentrePasquArt, launches a new group exhibition featuring a dozen media artists from both China and Switzerland.

“Time-lapse” reflects on the concept of time in its various meanings, its ‘localization’ in space and its representation and use in modern digital media.

It is a reflection on the time and space of our virtual lives, as narrated in Cao Fei’s videos of RMB City or Jin Jianbo’s dummy, an exhausted human figure surrounded by dozens of monitors absorbing his vital energy.

It is the suspended time spent in the heterotopical space of airports, highways, shopping malls, un-historical and un-relational non-lieux, transit spaces where thousands of people gather without really ever connecting one another.

"Republic of International Airport" Qiu Zhijie

It is the untangible time and space created by sound in the subtle and engaging work by Arthur Clay, “Hörroom”, an interactive installation of points and lines that act as media pendulum: the interaction of these sound modulators with visitors defines the space of the work itself.

It is the internal time of memory and loss, the time of modern age, the old rhythm of cinema and the contemporary time of the digital or, quoting from the catalogue, the “’perpetual present’ cut off from its temporality”(G.Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement Image).

For more info

On the exhibition: http://www.namoc.org/en/Exhibitions/200911/t20091110_118544.html

On Marc Augé’s Non-places: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/28/non-places-marc-auge-review

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art presents its latest collective exhibition on the new ‘Chinese Art Generation’, Breaking Forecast, 8 key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists (http://www.ucca.org.cn/portal/exhibition/index.798?op=current&menuId=19).

RMB CITY fake mountain at UCCA

SL fake mountain in RMB City

Among important names and notable voices of the young Chinese art scene, Cao Fei’s RMB City is also exhibited with a massive installation of our SL ‘fake mountain’. Inspired by artist JianJun’s original ideas on reality vs virtuality/fake/hyper-reality, RMB City erects itself in the shape of a huge fake mountain in the main hall of UCCA.
Like in a magic box, THE REAL is first represented in THE VIRTUAL world of SL (we quite obviously tend to represent what is already in our mind, what we already know and is part of our experience) and finally this new object repossesses THE REAL space of the gallery.
The work is multilayered and plays on different conceptual meanings but one thing that immediately crossed my mind while exploring new RMBCity piece is Calderón de la Barca’s play La Vida Es Sueño (http://www.enotes.com/life-dream).

What is real? Does it actually make sense to distinguish real and ‘virtual’ lives? Can human mind really perceive the limits between reality and illusion, or is maybe our life a blurred and unknowable dreamlike experience?
The idea of ‘life as a dream’ goes back to old platonic and Hindu theories of reality as illusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(Hinduism). And quite interesting this coincidence adds to the list of recurring connections between Hinduism and SL world (we’ve already discussed the Sanskrit meaning of the term ‘avatar’ in a previous post http://rmbcity.com/2009/05/virtual-reincarnations/).
Has virtuality become our modern way of representing an unknowable and mysterious world?

“What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest profit is small;
For all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are nothing but dreams.”

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida Es Sueño, Segismundo’s soliloquy

‘Fashions of China Tracy‘, the photo shoot recently commissioned by Modern Weekly magazine becomes part of  ‘Dress Codes’, the third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video in New York:

http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.5394877/k.97DE/Dress_Codes.htm

http://rmbcity.com/2009/03/fashionable-china-tracy-modern-weekly/

This year New York major exhibition focuses on the theme of FASHION and presents a wide range of projects relating to this ‘minor art’ and its connection with other artistic media and cultural phenomena.

Exhibiting over 100 recent works by 34 artists from 18 countries, ‘Dress Codes’ explores the realm of fashion as an artistic expression and a sociological manifestation.
As a multilayered language, infused with cultural, anthropological, historical and social meanings, clothes, apparels and accessories define one’s external identity and contribute to the construction of one’s social self.

ICP created its own charming avatar for the show, a beautiful and intriguing ICP Seda, who, through in-gallery computer stations, presents China’s Tracy costumes in the world or RMB City.

The event, and specifically China Tracy’s project, even received some attention by one of the most preeminent US cultural magazine, The New Yorker, and appeared in the ‘Talk of the Town’ section of last October 12 issue:

Imagine that you could be reincarnated into a new life, that you could go back to birth and take your first steps in a new world…

A fantastic, exciting and unpredictable journey, the video ‘Live in RMB City’ follows the first breaths, fears and curiosities of newly born China Sun, the baby of China Tracy, in Second Life. The camera follows baby China Sun’s wanderings and explorations in a revived RMB City, inspired by brand new additions created by a team of artist, writer, architect, and philosopher collaborators, and infused with a fresh stream of life.

Commissioned by Tokyo’s Shiseido Gallery for a 2009 Cao Fei solo exhibition, ‘Live in RMB City’ is a dreamy children’s tale on the mysteries of (real and virtual) life. Accompanied and instructed by the attentive guidance of an extravagant cyber-mother, RMB City’s newest born baby wonders through old and new buildings, weaving the net of an articulated journey between past, present and future.

The secrets of virtual existence are slowly unveiled in RMB City, a world where mothers never grow old and buildings can become ice-creams, and yet the deeper meanings of life remain unanswered because, as China Sun starts to learn, there is only one way of explaining it, and that is through poetry and imagination:
“If my little boat sinks, it has gone to another sea.”

From Cao Fei’s blog:

http://www.alternativearchive.com/caofei/article.asp?id=387

RMB City is ready to sail to Italy for the upcoming ARTISSIMA FAIR 2009 in Turin, next November (6-8 Nov 2009)  http://www.artissima.it/?lang=_en

As a new stage of its ever-changing life, RMB City takes part in Artissima 2009 with an experimental theatrical play inspired by the ‘Eight Models Drama’ theatre, typical of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
On the borderline between past and future, between classic and contemporary realities, the performance will explore the connections of real and virtual identities, using both physical and virtual spaces as a stage for interaction between actors and ‘avatars’.

Reflecting on the new meanings of the term ‘model’ in contemporary society, ‘RMB City Opera’ will present itself as a reflection on current forms of urbanization and new millenium’s identities.

Citizens of the old and new worlds, you are warmly welcome to join the show!

November 7th at 11.00 a.m. and 17.00 p.m.
Teatro Astra, via Rosolino Pilo 6, Turin, Italy