Say bye bye to the tired old year…
…AND TOAST TO A PROSPEROUS 2010 !!!!!!!!!!
Our City is yours…see you next year!
Avatar escapes from SL!
This is the story of Siddharta Marabana, a charming, Indian avatar from the magical virtual lands of RMB City, 1 151, 34, 127 (Mature), Second Life Grid.
Born in 2008, Siddharta, now 32 years old, spent his own life in the grid and most of his hours sitting and praying in front of the Buddha statue in RMB City.
Two weeks ago he ‘quitted’ SL and never logged in back. He left life with this note:
“Dear Father Linden, dear Marx, China and affectionate friends of this life, I suddenly had some blurred memories of my previous lives. Of stations, loudspeakers and flowery valleys framed in train windows, long journeys, long waitings, shaking hands and mixed smells. I hope you will forgive me for my extreme decision but I’ve chosen to cut the rope and never come back. After a few days musing I finally realized what these dreamy flashbacks were about and I felt an irresistible desire to TRAVEL…and I don’t mean teleporting or flying, I felt an uncontrollable urge to cover distances in time, to venture into unknown places, touch the freezing wooden arms of Indian trains and smell their dusty, stale air. You’ve been everything to me, you gave me birth, love, freebies and much more but I want to step beyond…I would DIE in this new world, suffer sicknesses, have food indigestions and probably sneeze all the time but I’ll be free, free from constrictions and free to roam the world…this time I won’t knock against your invisible walls, Father, this time I’ll simply walk wherever I want. Love, S.”
‘Travelling projects’: new pictures of “NO LAB on Tour”
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.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=34960
http://rmbcity.com/2008/10/no-lab-in-rmb-city-prospect1-new-orleans/
The Longest Poem
“Going to pick up my hubby and take him to work. His car won’t start 🙁
Honest to God I’ll break your heart, rip you to pieces and tear you apart.
Going to take a long and relaxing shower
Shit, rolled over and my exam is in an hour. […]
Handel’s Messiah was awesome! (and long)
New new york: I’m singing J and a keys song!!
and more » She visited Living Healthy Community …
accepting and understanding comes before unity……..
I got my life and its my only one…
So this is Christmas and what have you done.
white Bitches and black men the world may never know
still gorgeous and ahead of its time, though!
Fire trucks and police cars on prospect st
I’m new and this is my first tweet – tweet!”
A Dadaist poem? An awkward ‘google’ translation of some Beat verses? A satire
of Futurist ‘parole in libertá‘?
None of this sort. The extract is in fact part of what has been deemed the longest poem in the world (ATTOW 752,748 verses), a weird and ‘public’ experiment using the well-known Twitter social network as a ‘composing’ platform.
Imagined by Andrei Gheorghe, a Romanian website programmer, the poem is composed by matching real time twitter messages with previous rhyming posts: the result, being the whole process completely random, is sometimes surreal, sometimes amusingly coherent, sometimes even ‘poetic’.
Hoping Andrei won’t have a grudge against me, I’ve also tried to compose our first chaotic and public ‘RMB City’ poem following a similar mechanism of copying and pasting lines of SL chats I had with avatars in the past few months. Feel free to add your contribution!
“Drop me on the ground, don’t attach me to your body.
It looks like Rolig is coming
I am afraid I have been a bit absent.
no worries, rmbcity is a very relaxed context
are we supposed to take UFO togeher with these beauties?
what’s china sun’s reaction on yanjun’s music?
can I play his piano?
Thanks, i like watermelon~
I like the cloud !
what about?
t seems the lighting wants to burn the little house from this sight!!
Marx is quite happy though, wangguowei, you should try
I can’t type, but I can do other things reasonably well. ㋡
I want to be a christmas bell
How’s the first day going, cherie?
do you wanna play with me?
the hand position looks wrong?
it reminds me of that song…
bye bye Mayo (your name always makes me feel hungry)
this thing is getting me angry
that road will be filled with vendor carts on both sides
China Tracy is Offline”
For more info:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6067114/Longest-poem-in-the-world-written-on-Twitter.html
http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com/what-is-this/
Doppelgänger Exhibit, The National Portrait Gallery, Second Life
Andrew Burrell, "Temporary self portrait, in preparation for the singularity"
Exhibitiona main hall
Gazira Babeli, "iGods"
Cao Fei, "iMirror"
Nash-Dodds-Clemens, "Autoscopia"
Patrick Lichty, "CodePortraits"
What better place for presenting the theme of doubles and replicas than the heterotopic (namely ‘other place’) world of SL?
Inaugurated last October and running through the 23rd March 2010, Doppelgänger features works from seven SL and media artists, from Cao Fei to Gazira Babeli, from Patrick Lichty (aka Man Michinaga) to Andrew Burrell (aka Nonnatus Korhonen) to the trio Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (aka Christo Kayo), and Justin Clemens (aka Jack Shoreland).
Exploring the theme of multiple identities, the exhibition is a voyage into the realm of digital online spaces as an escapist and mirroring image of our reality. Every artist represents his personal ‘portrait’ of the contemporary Doppelgänger figures in our digitalized era, virtual doubles reflecting a slightly distorted image of our ‘real selves’.
On these spaces and on these alternative lives we project dreams, expectations, insecurities and desires, exaggerated, surreal or fantastic versions of ourselves that don’t ultimately depart so much from our ‘real’ identity(-ies).
Utopia of a world where you never grow old, your skin is always bright and smooth, your jobs interesting and adventurous, I wonder how many of you would sell their souls to make their avatars ageing instead of them…
For more info on exhibition and artists:
http://www.portrait.gov.au/exhibit/doppelganger/
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Portrait%20Island/223/60/32
Gazira Babeli (http://www.gazirababeli.com/index.php)
Patrick Lichty (http://www.voyd.com/)
Andrew Burrell (http://miscellanea.com/)
Pictures from ‘Dress Codes’ exhibition
Some pictures from the third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video in New York (http://rmbcity.com/2009/10/%E2%80%98fashions-of-china-tracy%E2%80%99-in-new-york-for-icp/):
TIMELAPSE exhibition at NAMOC, Beijing (Nov25-Dec19)
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