Metaverse Artist AM Radio On the Ephemeral, Communal Nature of Digital Art

Great conversation around last week's interview with art critic Cristina García-Lasuén, on the nature of VR-based art, and the criterion required to call a VR installation "art" at all. (Which shows you just how smart and engaged NWN readers are!). One key comment came from someone imminently qualified to discuss this top: Jeff "AM Radio" Berg, whose Second Life-based installations are generally considered among the very best works of art created on the platform.

Responding to García-Lasuén's criteria that VR-based art "must respond to very elaborate intellectual criteria and not merely aesthetic ones", Berg (who graduated from an East Coast art college before going into technology) had this contrary thought:

"Having been formally trained, I understand the academic foundation of philosophical evolution desired in celebrated artists and their work. I'd qualify on paper maybe.

"Digital [art] however presents a new challenge...

"Digital genre, like the experiences it creates, is ephemeral, a reaction to the state of tech of the moment.

"There's a reason two things in this world describe their addicts as users. Drugs and online experiences will always maintain an underground super-relevance that the bourgeois may only be invited to and rarely on-time in the seedier underworld that would shame their neighbors and investors.

"Digital art relevance evaporates in weeks; artists log on elsewhere, waiting for you to catch up, like a digital Basquiat scrawling words on a wall and drifting away, or Banksy shredding his own work.  Even the concept of dwell time so coveted by virtual world creators is itself the manipulation of a temporary situation for the user.

"Waiting for someone to study it and validate it misses the point entirely. The act of seeing truly relevant digital art is not as a viewer but as an active, focal participant where the participants define, narrate and ultimately eulogize the digital experience. The avant garde is dead tonight, and tomorrow it will be reborn and so again."

Put that way, I tend to agree. Consider AM Radio's own works in Second Life, almost all of which have disappeared over the years, and were at their most profound when they were first instantiated, when there was an impromptu community that sprung up around them, creating stories and new forms of art (screenshots, machinima, writing) inspired by them. After that community dissolves and its members move, the works seem static, or dormant. 

But if that's right, that's also frustrating: If virtual/digital art is only great when it's ephemeral, will it never earn a rightful place within fine art?

Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

Is live theater art? It's ephemeral. There have been countless wonderful theatrical productions that only exist in someones memory and many more where no one is alive any longer to remember them.

Second Life art is like a theatrical production where we are all actors as well as the audience.

[Rimpulsa]

Also worth to mention that you can visit AM Radio his work in world here:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dreamworld%20North/214/104/22

[AM Radio]

I wish I had spelled garde correctly.

@amanda the point of theater is a wonderful parallel. As well,it brings to mind a troop that has since disbanded called To Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which utilized audience participation with similar result.

@rimpulsa, this was the first work, perhaps 2007 and hosted in 2008. Its preservation anomalous and due to the love and kindness of specific individuals. Visiting the work in 2019 will show its age but it may still have some stories to discover.

[Wagner James Au]

"Grade" has been garde-d!

[Lelani Carver]

Now you can take a stab at “eminently” (which I had to stop and check).