In the spirit of BIW, a new voice is joining this space—mine. Like a piece of artwork that is mounted or placed on the Second Life island, I am posting my own virtual presence on this blog, holding up the words and sentences through the digital thumb tacks of punctuation… I’m going to be writing a few posts in the coming weeks, and I want to start at the beginning.
I want to think about what it is, exactly, that Brooklyn is watching.
We are living in a world that is layered in virtual images. They are perhaps most pervasive on the screens of our computers, where the “files” and “folders” store the digital documents of our lives, where the pages of amazon.com parallel the aisles of a bookstore, and where the conversations on Gchat roll out in front of our eyes at 75 words per minute. There is the appearance (the picture of the folder, the image of the book cover, the 350-line transcription), but there is also the reality nestled behind it (the documents stored in the folder that can be printed out at any time, the physical book that arrives at your doorstep, the person on the other side of the screen).
In these instances, we consider the images of the folder, the book cover, and the transcription to be as good as real; we recognize, however, the distinction. If we allow for the conflation of appearance and reality, it is only because there seems to be no need to separate them. The antecedent (the thing) is implied by the referent (the sign of the thing), and we usually choose to deal in the latter because it’s just more efficient to surf the web of signs than to wade through the muck of reality.
And then along comes brooklyniswatching.com. We are sitting at our computers, and we are looking at a blog. The blog is cataloging art, which is posted in virtual gallery space, which is on one small island in a whole (“second”) virtual world, which is viewable through a screen in a real physical space in Brooklyn, which is also a gallery…
Where is the antecedent and where is the referent in this case? BIW seems to be forcing us to ask ourselves what to do when we realize that the system of categorizing thing and its image, antecedent and its referent, doesn’t quite work anymore. Second Life parallels a “real life,” but images in the virtual space do not have to necessarily correspond to a tangible equivalent on the other side of the screen.
The sign is the thing, the referent its own antecedent.
It seems that in erasing not only the distinction between appearance and reality, but the need for such a distinction, a space is opened up where rules change. Things can happen that are not only “not possible in the real world,” but also not thinkable. Beth Harris has talked in this space on the changes in the “economy of attention” in the virtual world, but the economy of signs is also in flux. If a sign is no longer referring to a thing, what does it do?
In a recent podcast, Jay and Boris were talking about a new addition to BIW by artist ScotsgraymouserJanus. They describe it briefly as a “temple in the sky” and a “cacophonous creation.” It is a mishmash of religious imagery, thrown together in a single piece without any description from the artist on its meaning. Jay’s comment towards the end of the discussion speaks to exactly what I have been describing. He said:
“The thing is, if you saw it in the real world, in a real art gallery, in New York, you would expect that it was meant to be funny. That it was meant to be like a lampoon of spirituality, or something. But in a space like Second Life, you can never be quite sure… How do you do art criticism in a space where you really literally have almost no context at all? It’s really hard to make any assumptions. It’s hard to know what the artist knows, what they don’t know, what they’re referring to, what they’re not…”
In this space, a work made of religiously themed images may be speaking to spiritualism, or it may be making fun of it, and one interpretation is as valid as another. In the podcast, Jay encouraged the artist to post on the blog what he or she had been thinking when making the piece. But I wonder if, alternately, such an explanation would be secondary, unnecessary even.
BIW heightens the importance of the aesthetic: Artists post things in the SL gallery in hopes that they will be seen on the screen mounted on the walls of the Jack the Pelican gallery in Brooklyn. The art is visual, two-dimensional in a way that not even painting can be–it is projected to its audience through pixels, which are smaller than any paper or canvas. It has no existence outside of this flat reality, so that the image of the art becomes the self-conscious focus. Jay lamented the lack of context, but what is context in a world without antecedents?
So what is Brooklyn watching? It is watching the emergence of the virtual, the sign, the referent, and it is watching the disappearance for the physical real, the thing, the antecedent. In a time when our world seems to stream through to us in satire, Second Life is giving it to us deadpan.
I said, ‘Honey, I don’t feel so good, don’t feel justified
Come on put a little love here in my void,’
he said ‘It’s all in your head,’
and I said, ‘So’s everything’
But he didn’t get it I thought he was a man
But he was just a little boy
Paper Bag, Fiona Apple
Left by Dekka Raymaker on October 10th, 2008