Press release, two talks on Boom Pearls in Second Life
Saturday April 25, 16-18, two positions for understanding art in online spaces as Second Life (SL) will be presented to discuss how art practice in an online world is part of Real Life (RL) and the art world. The talks is part of the curated series Boom Pearls and can be visited online at Boom Pearls in Second Life, http://slurl.com/SecondLife/Phyllira/169/139/90.
Antonia Low participate with the art project, ROLLBOCKZWILLING, kreisend in Boom Pearls, she will give an artist talk. Sofie Marie Høegh Nielsen is an art historian and SL user. She will talk about the SL inhabitants relation to experiencing art and the art visitors experience with technical issues to experience the art work.
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).
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.
Sofie Marie Høegh Nielsen will talk about the experiences of art in a virtual world. She will disucuss the connection between the user and the art work as related to the users experiences with the media. The experience of an art work in a virtual world depends very much on use of the technology and how users manoeuvre in the world. As an inhabitant of SL you develop your skills to move around in world and thereby your exploration skills. Høegh Nielsen will talk about different skill-levels and user-abilities from a philosophical point of view. Literature: Merleaut-Ponty: Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945.
Høegh Nielsen will also comment on the work of Antonia Low, which is presented by the artist in the same event. With the work being a scaffold, she would like to shortly present Martin Heideggers Theory of the Ge-stell (german for scaffold). Literature: Martin Heidegger: Die Frage nach der Technik, 1954.
The discussions will make it possible to understand different takes on art, in relation to the transitions between an online world and how it is part of reality. Documentation will be available at BoomPearls.com
