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.