City by PatriciaAnne Daviau
Apparently a response to BIW’s request for art that fits into tighter spaces, City illustrates just how much can be fit onto a tiny space in SL. Tiny graffiti details, as well as paintball splatters lend character to the painstakingly dilapidated little space. It even has a little suburb under construction that has wonderfully textured insulation packaging.
City asks the timely and important question as to what role scale should play in a digital world. By requiring the viewer to go through the unpleasant chore of switching around with view modes to view the piece, the audience is confronted by the arbitrary limitations of Second Life based on conventions for how big an avatar should “be”, and how objects around it should be rendered.
The limitations of the Metaverse are imposed in order to create an artificially level playing field, so communication and commerce can occur using existing paradigms. However, once we see the whimsical detail of a piece like City, we struggle against these constraints.
Beautiful work.
Usually I find remediation of material space to be somewhat uninspiring. What’s the point of recreating things inside a space that has so much more potential for exploration? This strikes me as very old fashioned and part of the ongoing Hyperformalist quest for a native virtual artform.
However what I find compelling about this work are both the question of context brought up about the brillo box critique and the questions of scale brought up in the text by camb416 above.
Context:
Second Life, like the BiW space itself is somewhat of a junkyard of styles and qualities. The diversity is astounding and rich juxtapositions abound. The other side of this coin is that all this clutter can be distracting and downright unsightly at times.
The artist is now REQUIRED to create their own context. This is a total wet dream for an artist who can now situate their artwork in the optimal viewing environment instead of putting up with multipurpose spaces that often serve all artworks equally badly. The artist now becomes architect, interior designer and lighting designer depending on the level of intervention they choose. This changes everything. It shuffles roles, blurs lines between gallerist, curator, architect, designer and exhibiting artist in ways that have (in my opinion) reinvigorated the display of art.
Scale:
This work would be much less interesting if it was made in avatar scale. The novelty of “tiny” is critical to the success of the work (as well as the expert craftsmanship).
Scale is one of the MOST important and exciting challenges an artist faces in Second Life and the principle difference between virtual worlds and material worlds.
Here it is:
Just because the convention of the figurative avatar is the dominant form in Second Life DOES NOT MEAN the corresponding architectural scale of everything else makes sense too. It is a very big mistake to make this assumption.
The way we view things as material people and how we experience the virtual world are TOTALLY different. Totally. For instance, the common mistake that virtual gallerists make is to scale pictures meant to be viewed in SL relative to the figurative avatar. While this makes sense in the material world, it is simply wrong in the virtual world.
Architecture in the virtual world is user interface. There is no need to stack rocks to keep the saber tooth out anymore. There’s no rain and privacy is impossible when any schmo can move through your walls and peek at you any time they want. Architectural conventions in the virtual world are as different from the material world as architecture on the moon might be.
Scale is a big part of this difference. Since the art viewer in SL is really a person sitting in a room staring at a desktop computer screen, and NOT a person actually walking around a space, pictures sized in proportion to the avatar are way too small by a few orders of magnitude.
Desktop City is intentionally small and this artist not only conjured up a good metaphor for Second Life (SL IS a desktop city) they also dodged the bullet that befuddles so many other in SL, the scale issue.
Your desert doggie,
DC
Left by DC Spensley on March 24th, 2008