THIS IS TRULY CHINA TRACY

An international artist explores the metaverse from the inside

I first glimpsed her on a YouTube stream, a startlingly vivid avatar introducing herself in a machinima with Chinese subtitles.  At the time, I had no idea who the person behind China Tracy was, but in subsequent months, learned she was an accomplished multimedia artist, creator of "i.Mirror", a beautiful, three-part machinima of the Second Life experience-- and as such, perhaps the most world-renowned artist thus far to use SL as a medium.  For me to finally realize that, however, her real world analog had to fly out to San Francisco to meet mine.  (Then again, it would have hit me earlier, had I looked more closely at the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly sitting on my coffee table.)  China Tracy was in California to visit the Lindens, meet another Resident with a fascinating history, and luckily enough, chat with me over drinks at the Hotel Utah. Which led to this first for New World Notes: a mixed reality profile of a mixed reality artist.  (Embedded journalist meets embedded artist.)

China Tracy is Cao Fei, a Guangzhou artist who's "a key member of the vibrant new generation of Chinese artists emerging in the early twenty-first century" (by Art Forum's lights), and has been featured by the New York MOMA, among an intimidating roster of showings at galleries, museums, and biennials across the globe. Highlights in her portfolio include the insanely delightful "Hip Hop" (everyday Chinese get down with African-American freshness) and the virally acclaimed "Cosplayers" (playing videogame superheroes in a post-industrial cityscape where the demand for grand gestures no longer exists.) 

Earlier this year, Cao discovered Second Life, and embarked on a six month tour of Second Life, where all the usual activities accrued: "Fly, chat, build, teleport, buy, sex, add friends, snapshot..."  (Yes, she even tried virtual sex, though a prospective lover misplaced his equipment at the worst possible moment.) All the while, she captured video of her experiences, which went into "i.Mirror", a sad, dreamy, but ultimately optimistic thirty minute epic in three parts which first aired at the Venice Biennial:

View Part I here.
View Part II here.
View Part III here.

(Minor spoilers to the movie below.)

I offered my take on "i.Mirror" here, though of course, meeting Cao in person changed my perspective on the project considerably.  Where I assumed that Part II's romantic encounter with a handsome young man was scripted, Cao told me it was all shot quasi-documentary style, like the entirety of "i.Mirror."  In-world, she simply captured video as she interacted.  ("Part real, part role playing", as I remember her describing the aesthetic approach.)  So she really did meet her future SL swain playing the piano, and went on to form a virtual relationship with genuine feelings.

As it turned out, in real life he's a man in his 60s (as Cao's movie reveals), a member of the American far left in the 60s (which the movie doesn't mention.)  He it was who Cao met in person on her trip to Northern California, bringing together two of the unlikelier people to form a friendship, but for the metaverse: an elderly Marxist living in the capitalist US, and a young woman from formerly Communist, now hyper-capitalist China.

As it happens, it's hard not to notice recurring images of virtual land sales, a vision of capitalism at its most crass.  Did she think the world's free market libertarianism had overwhelmed its promise?

"I don't know more about SL's promise," Cao writes, just prior to her San Francisco visit. "For me, SL is a new world, but it's still surrounded by a old world system, it parallels and mirrors our RL. They're not what they originally are, and yet they remain unchanged. I'm not criticizing the Second Life world, because this world is created by us (international citizens).  Whether RL or SL, everywhere is full of consumerism/expansionism. SL is artificial/digital landscape, but totally human nature is behind that, you can see so real we are. But on the reality's end of this combined ultra-space, there is still love for simplicity and the pursuit of freedom, creativity and imagination, and only these possibilities made me treasure this SL world."

You say you want a revolution?  "Not at all. SL should be what it should be," Cao tells me. "SL is a lab, a world lab, but it consists in a huge global economic systems.  It bring us business and democracy, at the same time with feelings and culture. We can't avoid capitalism's wave; at the same time, we can't avoid Communist aspirations in our heart. This world is not only dualistic, we're inconsistent. Communism is our Utopia, Second Life is our E-topia... SL is our mirror, it tells us the truth."

With Schlink Lardner of Techsoup.org

China Tracy's illustrated account of her San Francisco visit is here.  Cao has another SL-based project in conceptual stage, something I'd truly love to see in-world.  For that matter, warm, and open, China Tracy is someone you are fortunate to meet in either reality.

Comments

[Young Geoffrion]

Thank you, Hamlet, for this introduction to a deeply moving look at the haunting loneliness of a Second Life sojourn. In many ways it reminded me of my first visit to China in 1988 to meet avant garde artists at the Zhejiang and Chongqing Academies of Fine Art. For a visitor, post-Mao China was also lonely, empty landscape filled with people trying to discover or recover their true selves. My Chinese friends describe North America in the same terms. Perhaps we are all strangers in Second Life, all immigrants, all searching.

[Connie Sec]

Fantastic to see Artists from the Larger world discovering SL and adding to its vibrancy and multiculturalism.

[lievre]

hello,

Itry to contact China Tracy for a french documentary film project t

tel: 33 6 12315533