Brooklyn is Watching, conceived of by Jay Van Buren, executed as a collaboration with Boris Kizelshteyn and the Popcha! development team in February 2008, is a breakthrough relational art project that invites interaction between the two thriving art communities of Second Life and Williamsburg, Brooklyn accentuating the power relations between and among them. It consists of a series of inter-related spaces for artists, audiences, and participants. The primary spaces are a square parcel of land (sim) in Second Life where artists are invited to leave their work for one week (when it is automatically returned), and an alcove in the Williamsburg art gallery–Jack the Pelican Presents where the sim can be viewed on a large monitor and entered via an avatar. In addition, there are two online forums for discussion, a blog which chronicles and comments on the work recently installed, and weekly podcasts where artists, art historians, gallerists and critics discuss the art and the issues it raises.
However, the most important aspects of Brooklyn is Watching are not found on the sim, in the gallery or within the critical discourses Van Buren enabled, but rather in the fraught relationships between the groups that inhabit these places. These interactions, or in certain cases, lack of interaction, starkly highlight the relative power of each group and their zones of influence. There are many distinctions within the art communities in Second Life, but there is a generally pervasive desire for art there to acquire the status accorded to “real” art and its attendant discourses, market, and press. This desire is made explicit and even exaggerated by the structures of Brooklyn is Watching which places artwork directly before a varied public, unmediated by gallery, curator or collector. Because all of the art has been placed on the sim within the past week, there is a heightened sense of immediacy. Clearly, artists who display their work on the Brooklyn is Watching sim, explicitly seek critical attention. These tensions are implicit in the name van Buren gave this relational work–”Brooklyn is Watching.” It is also inscribed in its architecture, with its high tower and wide-eyed resident avatar. Van Buren’s project enacts these natural antagonisms by offering artists the following instructions:
Welcome to Brooklyn is Watching. “Here” you will be able to be seen by visitors to Jack the Pelican Presents, an art gallery in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Do something “here” and “you” will be watched, thought about and commented upon…whatever…leave “something” “here” and it will be chronicled on our blog and talked about on the Brooklyn is Watching podcast or…possibly…ignored…or possibly…mocked.
The heart of Brooklyn is Watching is this open invitation to artists to install (rez) their work on a sim, an uncurated space surrounded by water on all four sides. Artists and visitors find a flat astroturf-green field where art is scattered both at eye-level, sea level, and often at altitudes well above the viewer. In the center of the sim sits an imposing watchtower. Its sole occupant is Monet Destiny, a large eyeball-shaped avatar (with additional protruding eyes), ironically sporting a trucker’s cap, his name a reference to Cezanne’s quip about the french Impressionist; “Monet is only an eye; but good God what an eye!” Over the course of the year, more than one hundred artists have left approximately four hundred works of art on the sim. This dynamic, uncurated exhibition space creates constantly changing relations between works of art that sometimes inter-relate or even intentionally intersect. Because so much of the art native to second life is concerned with defining space, the art itself shapes and reshapes the sim’s geography.
Brooklyn is Watching’s only physical installation is an alcove in the gallery, Jack the Pelican Presents, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an epicenter for new art outside of Manhattan. The installation consists of a couch, a coffee table, a computer, and a fifty-two inch monitor that continuously presents the avatar Monet’s view to gallery visitors. When Monet emerges from his watchtower, his motion and communication can be controlled by visitors, or if left to his own devices, he automatically shadows any avatar visiting the sim.
Brooklyn is Watching incorporates a blog and a weekly podcast. The blog allows individual contributors to chronicle and discuss specific works of art or broader issues and allows images and other materials to be sent via the “Tell us What to Watch” form. Posts regularly provoke or invite responses and this often leads to discussions between constituencies. In contrast, the weekly podcasts call on a core group of “regulars” (with rotating guests) that Van Buren assembled for compelling, no-holds-barred conversations about the meaning and quality of the most recent art installed on the sim. In this way, Van Buren relinquishes his authority replacing it with a salon-like discussion where meaning is constructed from the collision of multiple perspectives. Ideas are vetted and elaborated upon or summarily discarded, artists praised or dismissed.
Second Life has increased the opportunity for non-experts to make art. As a user-created virtual world, Second Life has built-in tools that facilitate the act of creation. Every avatar is therefore a potential artist having the means of creation at her disposal. Like many other “web 2.0″ technologies, Second Life is both a platform and tool for content creation and just as the general public is invited to comment on the Brooklyn is Watching blog and non-experts participate in the podcasts, the spectrum of art makers in Second Life range from the theory-saavy Yale MFA to the amateur builder.
Brooklyn is Watching seeks to witness and participate in the new broad wave of producers of culture that technology has empowered, producers with the potential to create more and more varied art than has ever been possible before (in contrast to the twentieth-century model of passive consumers of mass culture). Even the vocabulary that has arisen in Second Life is indicative of this shift away from an elite–in Second Life the word creator often replaces artist, and build is used instead of installation.
In part, Brooklyn is Watching asks the same question that Len Manovich asked in the last essay of “The Art of Participation,” an exhibition at SFMoMA, “can professional art survive the extreme democratization of media production and access?” When reformation Europe, aided by the printing press, realized that the Roman Church was not the sole path to God, the implications were enormous. Similarly, Brooklyn is Watching questions the apparatus and prejudices of the art market in the digital era and is perhaps the first Second Life project to explicitly focus on the juncture between real and virtual art practices and in doing so may point to critical issues that loom on the horizon.