Yesterday at Beijing's famed 798 art space, I stopped by the Long March gallery expecting to find an installation or two, and walked into a virtual world instead. Movement Field by Xu Zhen turns the entire warehouse-sized space into a virtual world, with hills covered in real grass and stone trails, topped by virtual fires, psychedelic Buddhas, and other strange sites, which are actually images taken from the Internet, blown up extra-large, and put on foam boards. So basically, it's a material version a virtual world that remains virtual all the same. Or as the program calls it, a "utopian space composed of multiple real movement-related itineraries... a memorial, which questions past and future commemorations... a place for infinite spiritual quests."
Interestingly, the reason I visited the Long March space was because it was recommended to me by my friend Cao Fei, the artist who created the famed RMB City in Second Life. So the creator of one virtual space brought me to another one, though this one was real (more or less).
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