CIAC’s Electronic Magazine, no 31/2008

by Patrick Lichty

Excerpt:

THE NEW CITIZEN/ARCHITECT: CAO FEI/RMB CITY

Another metatect in online worlds is Chinese artist Cao Fei, whose iMirror and RMB City touch on the socially constructive nature of virtual worlds, especially Second Life. iMirror 23, her romantic odyssey across Second Life, follows from her previous work, CosPlayers, that crosses cultures by exploring Chinese youth engaging in the Japanese pop practice of “Cosplay” who dress as anime and other characters (a practice which is also common in North America.) In iMirror, her avatar, China Tracy, a Chinese girl in synthetic skin (another form of Cosplay?) travels about the synthetic “Global Village” of SL in playful innocence with her virtual confidante, named “Hug Yue”. They travel the virtual world, feelings, identity, and wondering about “forgetting the real darkness” of the physical. What is significant is that China, romantic cosplayer, does not unlink her “object self” from the artist Cao Fei (like Babeli). iMirror is a documentary with relational components as China searches in an innocent Calle-like quest for the person behind “Hug”, but does retains the form of the document, retaining the formal component, and I would argue, a sort of objecthood.

In RMB City, Cao Fei plays with (dys/ut)opia in assuming the role of a virtual developer for an interpretation of Olympic Beijing. The city contains virtual analogues of the Koolhaas’ CCTV headquarters, pandas on construction cranes, a Duchampian (Ferris) wheel and many other signifiers of emergent Beijing. In addition, Cao Fei, reflecting the opening real estate sales scenes of iMirror doubles the speculative aspect of the signified city by offering development opportunities in RMB. These are offered at rates analogous to those in Beijing, but translated into the fractional currency of Linden Dollars. At Art Basel, Cao Fei sold a building unit in RMB, taking her exploration of the impact of the virtual upon the real, and then linking it to very real references to real estate, in contrast to Babeli’s “object-oriented” practice. This is more in line with Bourriaud’s model than Babeli, albeit slightly, but this also highlights the different perspectives through which artists are shaping relational spaces in virtual worlds.

Excerpt above; read full article here.

Metaversal City, interviewing RMB City curator Samantha Culp

The Beijinger, November 1st, 2008

interviewed by Venus Lau

After working for HK art organizations such as Para/Site and Videotage, 26-year-old American Samantha Culp came to Beijing earlier this year. As the project manager of RMB City – an online art community created by China Tracy (the avatar of Chinese artist Cao Fei) in the popular 3-D virtual world Second Life, Culp talked to the Beijinger about metaverses, the media and the state of Chinese art.

The Beijinger: RMB City is a new-media art piece. Innovations in media are often “driven by the desire to overcome mediation” – does RMB City work towards that end?

Samantha Culp: RMB City engages many forms of media at once. It exists in Second Life, which could be called the primary “medium” for the piece, but also encompasses video, writings, performance, social interaction and research. It acts as a bridge between “First” and “Second” lives, and is very much about confusing/connecting these divides. Obviously virtual worlds or metaverses like Second Life are a fairly new medium for art and cultural production, but I think they have a particularly interesting potential to challenge the typical “mediation” of more standard media.

TBJ: What interested you in the RMB City project?

SC: From the first time I heard about the project, I thought it was fascinating – it touched on so many things that interest me, from film and architecture to the blurred line between fiction and reality. It’s probably safe to say that no artist has ever done a project quite like this before, and therefore it seemed like a uniquely challenging yet exciting process to be a part of. It’s not every day you get the chance to help build a city in the clouds, so it seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up.

TBJ: How would you describe the Chinese art world?

SC: DIY energy with an establishment twist.

TBJ: Are there any conditions in Beijing that you have to consider before making curatorial decisions?

SC: RMB City is a very international project, with partners and networks spanning from Asia to Europe, and [more] importantly, the nature of Second Life hopefully creates conditions to skip over national boundaries. So in a way, it has its own distinct curatorial approach that is influenced by the various cultural contexts it touches, but doesn’t really belong to any one in particular.