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
A very interesting post which contains an excerpt from the translated final chapter of Media, New Media, Postmedia by Domenico Quaranta has just been posted at Rhizome.
From 01/12/2010 to the 31/01/2011, I will be artist in residence at Humlabs, Yoshikaze Up in the Air Residency in Second Life (teleport there). Please feel free to drop in and see work in progress. What follows are details of what the residency will entail.
Since January 2007 I have created performances and installations in Second Life. The basis of all my work has been identity. Creating an avatar that is not an alter-ego, what is usually an artists opportunity to start afresh and explore new practices, methods or even themselves being new, my avatar is instead a projection of my ‘real’ world identity into a ‘virtual’ world. It looks, dresses, acts and even bears the same name as me, yet my avatar is not me. It is a representation of how I am In Real Life (IRL).
My residency at Humlab’s Yoshikaze space will continue to explore these ideas of identity as they relate to Second Life and its relation to or representation of ‘real’ place. As such emphasis will for the duration of the residency focus particularly on the specifics of place and how it can inform/influence identity. How does place, our ‘real’ location and our ability to simultaneously represent ourselves within a ‘virtual’ world, define what becomes a new facet of our total identity? How can a singular dispersed identity (as opposed to a dualistic identity) enhance our cumulative experience of both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ places?
A series of works will be produced during the residency that respond to these ideas and the location of the residency at Yoshikaze. These will, due to their subject matter, investigate a number of mixed and augmented reality techniques and entail outcomes including objects, devices and environments. On completion of the residency these will be intended for display and use in an exhibition and may form the basis of a performance.
LPDT2 (all images and video in this post) is more than a reincarnation of Roy Ascott’s 1983 work La Plissure du Texte (The Pleating of the Text), it is a reworking, a version 2, of said works ideas within the space of Second Life.
The full original title of the work La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale:
alludes to Roland Barthes’s book Le Plaisir du Texte, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation ‘distributed authorship’, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a number of human storytellers positioned around the globe; in the three dimensionally embodied metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: An emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous ‘bot’ avatars which dwell inside this bizarre, literary landscape are pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale: The persistent distributed authorship is now accomplished by many writers throughout the ages: A text generator telling a non-linear, multi-faceted, often times poetic, story harvested from the famous online Gutenberg Project is now distributing its output amongst architecture and its inhabitants, generating dialogues and iterations taking their trajectories from masterworks of classical literature. The pleating resembles musical sampling, the connection between the sentences fades, text becomes noise, from which the audience generates meaning. The structure on the simulator adds yet another layer of pleating by visually mixing the different sources of text, while yet another layer of textual input will be provided through a contribution by i-DAT.org from the University of Plymouth, UK, by means of which Real Life visitors will be able to contact the LPDT2 by sending SMS messages. Thus all pleated text – the generated, the contributed, and the stored – is simultaneously visible as a massive, ever evolving literary conglomeration.
In La Plissure du Texte, version 1, the network allowed performers from distant locations to share a networked ‘space’ where they could collaborate. Authorship was live and originated from distributed locations. Within this new version, distributed authorship has undergone dramatic changes. The network itself becomes the principle performer. Authorship is distributed across both distant spaces/places and times as text for the space is retrieved from digitised copies of classic works from the whole of documented English language.
The work is open to the public from today, September 1st. It has been co-authored in Second Life by Selavy Oh (programming and architecture), MosMax Hax, aka. Max Moswitzer (architecture and terrain) and Alpha Auer, aka. Elif Ayiter (avatar design). Further associates are Frigg Ragu, aka. Heidi Dahlsveen (avatar animations) and i-DAT from the University of Plymouth, UK (Real Life SMS input).
More images of the installation can be seen here.
