An exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, will feature a blog based on an artist’s experience in Second Life. The exhibition entitled Open Call – Web Based Art, will run from August 21st to September 13th.
The exhibition is described as :
For the 2015 edition of Open Call, ICA Miami invited artists to submit original and engaging works of digital and web-based art. Digital art circumvents the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering new forms of aesthetic experience while inquiring into contemporary systems of vision and distribution. The works selected for Open Call examine the structures and operations inherent to digital mediums, exploring the continued importance of traditionally interactive and de-materialized work.
Two hundred and seventy submissions worldwide were made for the exhibition and a jury have picked a final ten to be part of the exhibition. One piece of art will be selected by the ICA to be part of its permanent collection.
The art based on Second Life is by AdrienneRose Gionta, who hails from Brooklyn New York but now resides in South Florida. The work is a blog, which was published in 2013 and covers 58 days of AdrienneRose’s experience in Second Life. However I do have to say at this point that the subject matter and title of the blog may lead to some raised eyebrows, to say the least. The work is entitled; My Big Fat Summer As A Skinny Hot Chick in Second Life. The linked blog contains adult themes so please proceed with caution.
Indeed the title made me pause before even writing this blog post, there’s a lot of potential here for this work to be patronising, insulting and shabbily done. However what made me publish this post was reading AdrienneRose’s words and thoughts about the project. The About page on the blog tells us more :
The MY BIG FAT SUMMER AS A SKINNY HOT CHICK in SECOND LIFE project begins on Friday, June 28 2013 as a documentative performance of a BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) on a self imposed super inexpensive summer vacation in virtual reality as a Hot Skinny Chick with major swagger. As a sexy confident BBW in the “”real”“ world. It gets exhausting while hoping for the world to just accept & love us as we are no matter how damn AWESOME we may be. Of course I wonder how different life would be without all of this extra weight on my body… but I’m not sure I am ready for all that action. Second Life provides the perfect opportunity to play out these thoughts as a visual mapping for a future me that could be, while exploring what it’s like to be there already with a brand new body, hair & attitude.
Being someone or something else is a use case for virtual worlds, many people do this.
Eddie Arroyo had a conversation with AdrienneRose back in 2013 for Art is About and in that article we get deeper inside AdrienneRose’s experience as an avatar :
I began to dream in both worlds toward the end of the series. They were intertwined and seamless, effortlessly existing simultaneously, further emphasizing my desire to create with this dynamic IRL with my art. The physiological responses during game play were surprisingly strong yet not completely or fully the same: I felt attached, empathetic & responsible for my avatar. There were times I/she elated and floating on cloud nine and times where I regretted and felt bad for decisions I had made that she then would have to endure. Of course I am braver with letting her do the more daring and adventurous things that I may like to explore IRL but probably never will… the risk is of course not the same.
Most importantly perhaps it has brought awareness of my own body/ mind disconnect. Many of us live in our mind, steering our bodies according to thought but without feeling…on auto pilot. When I am reconnected with my body. Frustrated with it & myself for not being able to look, do and feel the way I wish it would. Operating within the virtual world alleviates some of this frustration while also feeding the disconnect further.
There are some interesting concepts there, how virtual worlds can be used for exploration, how they differ from the physical world, how people can look and feel the way they want in a virtual world, but also how people can feel empathy inside those virtual world spaces too.
The ICA exhibition has caught the attention of The Wall Street Journal. Ellen Gamerman’s article, Selfies and Auto Dialing as Art in Miami, highlights some of the other work at the exhibition, but the article also talks about AdrienneRose’s work :
Virtual happiness is at the center of AdrienneRose Gionta’s “My Big Fat Summer as a Skinny Hot Chick in Second Life,” a blog chronicling 58 days the artist spent in an interactive virtual fantasy world. The 2013 work, which she treated as both a performance and an online travel journal, explored the opportunities that come with being thin. Ms. Gionta found that her online romances were better than those in her real life. “I’m generally interested in trying to create the perfect life for myself virtually and hoping to manifest it physically—like if you build it, it will happen,” said the south Florida artist, who plans to put a large woman into the same virtual scenarios to see how the experience differs.
The plan to put a larger avatar into the same virtual scenarios is fraught with similar dangers to the first experience, there’s a chance that it could end up being patronising, insulting and shabbily done. However it is an interesting experiment and I’ll keep an eye out for the results, I would hope that the experience won’t be too different from the first experience, after all, in a virtual world, we’re all painting pictures of who we are with the available tools, the real person is behind the avatar.
In my opinion her experience as a BBW in-world would be somewhat different from her first experience because the same biases and prejudices that exist in the real world are carried into SL on the backs of every avatar. There are some things that just don’t get left at the door. Assuming she uses the same profile, visits the same places, and conducts herself in the same way she did previously, with the only difference being the avatar she wears, I think she will receive markedly different results. Now, that’s not to say that a BBW avi can’t get respect – in certain places and with certain people she can find acceptance, absolutely! – but I’d bet my Linden balance she won’t find that Secondlife residents have transcended the last acceptable form of discrimination in our society.
I think the virtual world potentially carries new biases and prejudices and some that are of the ilk whereby people should know better.
I can envisage a BBW avatar being shunned because people think the person behind it is trolling, rather than trying to represent themself.
The project, both ways, is fraught with potential to offend, that’s why I paused for thought before writing about this, it’s an area that really could cause offence.