PRESS RELEASE:
ROLLBOCKZWILLING, KREISEND
BY ANTONIA LOW
Opening Thursday 26. of march, 20-22 gmt+1,
at http://slurl.com/SecondLife/Phyllira/169/39/90 and at http://slurl.com/SecondLife/CAMPUSin3D%2002/160/160/23
Boom Pearls is proud to present the fifth project as part of the series inside Second Life (SL).
Antonia Low has an interest in temporary architectural beauty, such as scaffoldings on building sites. She uses scaffoldings as sculptures. Usually these are installed in different locations within an art context – the white cubes of art institutions in real life (RL).
In this project she has taken the chance of installing two scaffoldings in Second Life (SL), the virtual platform of everyday life. The two scaffoldings are clones, simultaneously moving around in circles on two different locations in SL.
In these two different areas – one is a typical SL domestic suburb and the other is a campus mainly representing institutions of RL – the scaffoldings have been located between other SL inhabitants’ private buildings, institutional venues and a virtual copy of Berlin’s RL Bar Babette.
Antonia Low’s RL scaffoldings have an unclear status and apparently seem to be placed on a wrong location or abandoned as some leftover of a former action, as Hilde Teerlinck suggests in the catalogue text “Contemporary Ruins” about Low’s work. “For the viewer they are intriguing artefacts, evoking a weird non-sense because of their unclear status”, she writes. For Antonia Low it was an obvious move to introduce the temporary architecture of scaffoldings into the virtual reality of SL, where changing creations offer short “site-specific” interventions in an online world with an endless range of fictional and non-fictional content.
The more than 700 m high scaffoldings simultaneously move around in circles, which adds to make them appear ambiguous: they are surprisingly realistic in their details such as their wheels and clamps – making them look very unusual compared to other objects in SL. Such prim-consuming details are usually seen as unnecessary obstacles in SL, whereas objects in RL are naturally detailed. On slow running computers the problem then becomes obvious: parts of the moving scaffoldings fall out of sync, because the multitude of prims that are used for programming these complex structures make it difficult for the computers’ hardware to follow up. These two sculptures are too realistic for SL and too fictional for RL.
The artists invited in Boom Pearls are generally new users of SL. As such Antonia Low’s constructions take on a new level with this project where the art objects created with materials from everyday life are simulated and animated in 3D. As a result the work draws references from different worlds: constructions with building materials, the making of architecture in RL and the opposing way of modeling within this simulated 3D social world. Following the social-networking idea of SL, the scaffolding was built and scripted by newBerlin and in exchange a motionless part of it will appear in their everyday “Berlin” in the future.
ROLLBOCKZWILLING, KREISEND can be seen until 24. Mayl 2009.
Boom Pearls is curated by Jon Paludan.
The project is supported by the Danish Arts Council.