I’m joining the conversation a few days late, but I was just perusing the thread of comments to the “BIW – Podcast 31” post, and was struck by some of the topics exchanged. On the one hand, there seems to be a war of the worlds—between the art of SL and of the material world. On the other, there is a call for “remediation” and “translation” between them.

Why can’t the art just stand on its own as art? Why must it be prefaced by the modifier “SL” or “material” at all?

A note of clarification: My discussion of “context” in a previous post (which was not my word, but was quoted from Jay’s comments in the Podcast) seems to have been conflated with my discussion of “antecedents.” By antecedent, I did not mean “precedent.” As my old philosophy professor used to argue, we are living in a world of infinite proliferation of signs; frankly, it would be hard to prove definitively any lack of precedents, that something had not been done before, or that no allusions were at stake.

In grammar, an antecedent is most often the noun (or phrase) that is referred to later on in a sentence by a pronoun. It has nothing to do with volition or creation; the antecedent did not somehow make room for the emergence of the pronoun which followed it. The pronoun is only as good as its antecedent. It (the pronoun) simply offers a way to limit redundancy, to increase linguistic efficiency; but in all accounts it should be able to be directly switched at any moment by its antecedent with no change in meaning at all. When people choose poor pronouns (think: “That One” in the debates) and this switch cannot be done without changing the meaning, problems can and do ensue. We count on the relationship between pronoun and antecedent in linguistics. By their nature pronouns can refer to so many things; it is through the relationship to a unique antecedent that the exact shape and definition of a pronoun can be discernible at all. 

With the use of “antecedent” and “referent,” I was not trying to make sweeping comments on the history of SL art, virtual art, or any art all. I was introducing the language of semiotics into this discussion because I think that a look at the “economy of signs” can play an important role in the understanding of what we see at BIW.

A reiteration of my first post: “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.”

I think perhaps this language of semiotics is most interesting because it can be used to describe and understand art in both the virtual and material worlds. As Venturi et. al. used the language of semiotics to put postmodern architecture onto the plane of discussion in the field (in their seminal Learning from Los Vegas), so too I think that an introduction of this language here could be helpful in eliminating the need to separate the “material” and “virtual” art of today.

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In my last post, I began a discussion of my view of the SL art that makes up the BIW project. In sum, it was an apology on the importance of medium. I started to look at how the interplay between the virtual and real worlds is changing the way art can be made, viewed, and understood. In one of the most cogent critiques to this post, amyfreelunch argued that I was ignoring the intent of the unique artist in this view. She praised the importance of content and intent, while I had focused more on the affect of the medium and the form.

A good point to launch this discussion in more focus might be through DanCoyote’s Grapes of Math, now on view at BIW hanging in the air not far from the tower.

The work is a series of floating purple and pink spheres, dangling off of each other in a formation that recalls a molecular structure. When approaching the piece, a little dialogue immediately pops up on the screen: “CAUTION: Grapes of Math is CUDDLY!” And it is quickly apparent why… the dangling “grapes” drop from their positions in the air to surround the viewer wherever he/she walks.

It is at first glance a structure that mimics the very strict configuration of molecules bound by the laws of physics; it morphs, however, into a structure that doesn’t seem to follow any laws of the material world at all the moment the viewer becomes involved in the piece. When the viewer enters the space, he/she affects the way that the piece hangs moves. What was once still comes to have motion, and what was once symmetrical and physical now bends at the presence of an audience.

This reading would fit well with DanCoyote’s philosophy, as understood through his symbol of “The Sixth Finger” (an image of a hand print with six fingers), which he describes as a symbol of “the computer cursor, or mankind’s intervention into the metaverse.”

The title of the work immediately brings to mind The Grapes of Wrath, a classic in the high school lit canon, which is a story of life and desperation during the Dust Bowl era. Tom Joad arrives back home after being released from prison only to find that his home town has been deserted. He sees a few handbills advertising hope in another land, California, and begins the sunset-chasing trek west in search of hope. Seeing on those roads all the others who have been seduced by the same handbills, he eventually realizes that the promise is not all that it was cut out to be.

(Interestingly, there is also story called the Grapes of Math, which is a spin-off parody that is part of the VeggieTales series. In a parable on forgiveness, a family of moody grapes comes to see the fruitlessness of their curmudgeonly ways, ending with the changing of their name to the “Grapes of Math.”)

DanCoyote’s work, however, seems to have little to do with either of these historical antecedents. In giving it a title that easily calls to mind the stories of the American Canon, and then not talking to that canon at all, I think that DanCoyote is reinforcing exactly my point of the last post: that SL is a land of no antecedents—or, what ultimately amounts to the same thing, a land where antecedents become relative and thus irrelevant.

The only theme maintained is, perhaps, an acceptance of the rejection of nostalgia. The globs are purple like grapes, but there the connection ends. The “math” is perhaps speaking to the molecular structure of the standing work, but this changes the minute that an avatar approaches. In the material world, we need to see in order to believe. But in SL, nothing is as it seems, and the promise of what is seen can always be broken. 

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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. 

RL, Virtual Worlds, theory | 21 Comments »