
Selavy Oh put a cube under the water at BIW that sucked avatars over to it and wouldn’t let them go. This piece is one of the ones that I talk about when i want something fast to get people to realize the potential of art in SL.

Selavy Oh put a cube under the water at BIW that sucked avatars over to it and wouldn’t let them go. This piece is one of the ones that I talk about when i want something fast to get people to realize the potential of art in SL.
It was really hard to pick my pick for the people’s choice award but this one had to be it. My reason is that it was so very site-specific – a work explicitly about attention and looking within a space that is all about attention and looking. Also it was a violation of the expected social norms within that space- the piece FORCED you to look at it, in way that I thought was playfully transgressive — playful rather than harmful because it is a virtual space and its only your avatar that it grabs and moves.
That difference points out the difference between RL and SL in a really elegant way. The fact that in its original installation it was quickly surrounded by other artists work taking advantage of the fact that Selavy had yanked everyone’s virtual eyeballs to this one location kinda clinched it for me. My runners up (this was very tough) are Ichibot Nishi’s Episodic.atomized and Nebulosus Severine’s Bunnykin in La-La Land which i’ll make additional comments on later.
I’m voting for Attractive Art because there’s something about a piece that inexorably tugs you in a literal sense that is a metaphor for what happens when you’re drawn inexplicably toward anything in the physical world. It evokes questions of hunger, longing, significance, meaning, destiny, drive, subjection- do we or do we not have autonomy? Free will? Is there or is there not a categorical imperative? The unassuming white cube composed merely of code mysteriously draws us close and whispers our name, plays with us, teases, and ultimately releases us.
The deceptive simplicity of Selavy Oh’s conceptual field turns inside out the notion that art must be elaborate in order to be forceful.
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Left by Brooklyn is Watching » Blog Archive » Voting finished: The 30 best list on July 6th, 2009