The Wrong Biennale, a new online art festival just featured in the New York Times, includes a collection of mixed media pieces in a pavilion called Life 2.0, inspired by Second Life and the acclaimed documentary of the same name. Using Second Life as a context for exploring identity as it's embodied (corrupted? denuded?) by digital reality, it's mainly a series of videos by numerous artists (like the one above, by Thea Lazar) presented on a website that's a hypnotic dreamscape of ambient music and animation, so you'll want to turn off other audio sources and go here to experience the whole thing.
Another video in the show (shot in SL to surreal effect), by Alice Rout, after the break, along with excerpts of an interview with the curator, Bob Bicknell-Knight:
We are still fetishizing the digital spaces of Second Life, over ten years after the virtual world was created; or, alternatively, building on them with more sophisticated and intricate procedurally generated worlds. It’s that idea of nostalgia again, for the gamers who inhabit the worlds and the developers who create them. Deviating from the norm in any industry is difficult, especially in the gaming industry where budgets are incredibly tight and jobs are scarce. Why make something new when the next Call of Duty will sell millions of copies? Each of the artists in Life 2.0 are coming at this idea of the avatar or online persona through the lens of the cultural moment that we are currently witnessing.
Much more here. Kudos to the curators of The Wrong, which includes Patrick Lichty, a well-known conceptual artist in his own right who's also done interactive art projects in Second Life.
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