Opening next Thursday in New York is a show titled Notes on a New Nature where I’ll be exhibiting Netscapes (image above) for the first time. This all happened very quickly about a week after the work was completed and if I had set out to target an exhibition or festival with Netscapes I couldn’t have matched the work more appropriately than Nicholas, the curator, did.

The exhibition is not a new media exhibition per se, it’s a post-new media exhibition – new media is no longer a defining characteristic but artists and works are informed by it. The exhibition bridges the transition from analogue to digital media and uses a very traditional subject, the landscape, to understand how the digital changes/reconfigures that subject. All the artists works participating in the show do this in different ways, for my part it is how a network (collapsing time and space) has a knock on effect on what a landscape can be, how networks allow us to see other places in combination from a distance.

Above: Depth Mapping (The Mountain) by Kate Steciw

The exhibition forms part of the ongoing research of the curator Nicholas O’Brien. It:

critically examines and compares the relationships that contemporary artists working with digital media have to practices started in Modernist Painting – specifically the pursuit of capturing the virtual qualities of what constitutes a landscape. How does an artist depict a space faithfully enough to show its affect on a subject? Can art capture the space between the viewer and the horizon, and where does that horizon reside now that we can digitally circumnavigate the globe? Can the digital reconcile the physical?

One way that we know how to understand the natural is through the domestic spaces of our daily lives. The interior shelter allows for reflection on what is “outside,” and as a result positions civilization away from the natural. However, as various digital and virtual landscape permeate the domestic space, our notion of what constitutes the natural has become more complicated than a simple inside/outside dichotomy. We use all forms of digital and analog technologies to simulate the natural world daily, and artists in this show point to how these tools affect the ways in which the “realness” of the natural is no longer as simple as locating it outside your window.

This newfound complication highlights the central argument of Notes on a New Nature: our varied notion of what constitutes the natural is shaped by technology, which is a narrative that can be traced all the way back to the advent of agriculture and the dawn of civilization. Through employment of various digital approaches, artists in this exhibition reference this long-standing problem we face when attempting to represent landscape and acknowledge the ways in which digital technology has forever changed our understanding of nature.

Above: Antlers Wifi by Rick Silva

Participating artists include: Duncan Alexander, Mark Beasley, Chris Collins, Petra Cortright, Theo Darst, Marjolijn Dijkman, Paul Flannery, Joe Hamilton (aka Hypergeography), Jan Robert Leegte, Sara Ludy, Garrett Lynch, Michael Ray-Vaughn, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, Pascual Sisto, Kate Steciw, Wes W Wilson, and Krist Wood.

319 Scholes Brooklyn, NY
November 10 – November 20, 2011
Opening: November 10, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment

Above: Hypergeography by Joe Hamilton

Above: Strange Situation by Chris Collins

I’ll be presenting my Second Life work tonight, 14/07/11, at Dorkbot Cardiff which takes place at Milgi’s bar (top floor room), 213 City Road, Cardiff CF243JD. Doors open at 7.30 and is free to all so if your in the area pop along. I’ll also have catalogs of my Yoshikaze “Up-in-the-air” Second Life Residency for sale at a reduced price.

REFF – Remix the world! Reinvent reality! opened last Friday (25/02/11) at Furtherfield Gallery in London and runs until Saturday 26th of March 2011 (images below). I performed Trav—erse at the opening (image above of setup) to a packed gallery (don’t be fooled by the empty photos taken before the opening). Good to perform somewhere where both the audience and myself are in the same location (lots of mixed reality work recently) – feedback seemed positive.

The REFF show is part of the launch/publicity/awareness raising of the book published last November and forms part of a whole series of events in London this month – see the Art is Open Source website for more details.

To celebrate the completion of my Yoshikaze’s “Up-in-the-air” Second Life Residency and the launch of my exhibition, an artists book has been published which documents all works produced during the residency.

The book is €10.84 / US $13.60 / £9 (+P&P) and published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. To purchase simply click on the Buy Now button below.

Yoshikaze “Up-In-The-Air” Second Life Residency Presents

GARRETT LYNCH

8-14 February, 2011
at HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden
Opening Hours : 8am-4pm (Weekdays)
Opening : 8 February Between 2pm-4pm

Mixed Reality Performance by the Artist at the Opening at 3pm (CET) 8th February
Open to SL Audience at 6am (SLT) 8th February
Live Streaming of the Performance: http://www.asquare.org/work/yoshikaze

Yoshikaze Second Life Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/HUMlab/95/215/351

During December 2010 and January 2011 Garrett Lynch has produced a number of remarkable works at the Humlab island in Second Life as the resident Yoshikaze’s “Up-in-the-air” artist. Yoshikaze is proud to present these works in an exhibition at HUMlab, Umeå University, between 8-14 February 2011. In conjunction with the HUMlab exhibition, the Yoshikaze studio in Second Life will be open to the public. Please visit Second Life to experience Garrett Lynch’s work.

[Curator's Statement]

If Eva and Franco Mattes, Adam Nash and Gazira Babeli represent the first generation of Second Life artists who in the midst of its golden age heralded SL art, Garrett Lynch belongs to SL’s second generation artists, for whom the shift in focus from novelty in the virtual to a deepened sense of the virtual has come to emerge as a natural progression.

Captured in avatar reality, the subject of identity is an inescapable topic in Second Life.  The Gracie Kendal Project by Kristine Schomaker and the documentary film Life 2.0 by Jason Spingarn-Koff both address interconnections between the parallel worlds of RL/first life and SL/virtual life.  Garrett Lynch pursues a similar path by making his avatar Garrett Lynch (IRL) an ongoing project.  However, whereas the aforementioned works by Schomaker and Spingarn-Koff straightforwardly documents psychological impact of virtual experience, Garrett Lynch employs another, more subtle, approach to investigating virtual identity.

Stripped of any relation to other humans/avatars, Garrett Lynch (IRL) is an entity, almost an essence, whose existence is formed purely in relation to RL artist Garrett Lynch and to the environments his creator carefully selects.  By consciously examining the two worlds through various reference points, Garrett Lynch (IRL)’s unique performances delicately yet deliberately reveal the enigmatic intersection between the real and the virtual.  Beneath his tech savviness that expands Second Life’s boundary into several external devices lies the core of his exploration into the nature of representation in the era of virtuality, the unknown territory of multiple realities which even encompasses several layers of virtualities.

It is not surprising then that amongst his last works during Yoshikaze residency is Une Région, mais pas Centrale, a work inspired by Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale which agnises the interplay among place, perspectives and perceptual recognition of familiarity-unfamiliarity.

Sachiko Hayashi
Yoshikaze Curator

[Artist's Statement]

Identity is the basis of my practice in Second Life, a practice which forms a part of my larger networked practice that deals with networks as a site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse. Within a network the significance of identity becomes even more problematic than it is outside of the networked arts. While being distributed and in many ways omnipresent it also frequently imitates and results in a stereotype.

Online worlds such as Second Life however move identity beyond the codified online usernames or static visual iconography that we have until now employed. They are a step closer to our interpretation of identities in other media forms. The visualness of the place, the representation of a world within Second Life, is in no small way a factor in this. We see a place, framed from a point of view as we might in a film or told in a story, this helps to place us there however now combined with a choice of movement the delineation between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘virtual’, the differences between the here and there, becomes difficult to establish.

As a starting point for a ‘virtual’ world residency, identity and place offer a wealth of opportunities to explore. The exploration of a networked site, opportunity for example to re-interpret what is a site-specific work, and its context, opportunity to create with the specific form of the ‘virtual’ world. What becomes immediately evident in this exploration is that language is of utmost importance and yet can not sufficiently articulate its complexities. Words such as site, place, world, here, there all relate back to what is ‘real’ and what is ‘virtual’, two inescapable words that are wholly inadequate.

This is however no surprise. Language has always played a key role here, I refer to my avatar as my representation and not I, it is never seen without its sandwich board stating that “I am Garrett Lynch (IRL)” (in real life) so to be artist in residence through a representation within a representative space the artist must question and challenge all preconceptions of that space, their own identity and the place of residency.

Garrett Lynch
Artist in residence