By Nina Poulsen / Nitte Alter

I am an anthropologist currently working on a PhD project concerned with contemporary art exhibitions. Here is a list of some of the questions I am interested in, if anyone should have any interesting thoughts that they would like to share with me on some of these themes and issues, you should be more than welcome to get in touch: How can we study, analyze and represent the material processes of cultural change within the global system? How does the global traffic in culture happen? How do artistic objects change their meaning and value and which are the actors and institutions involved in these processes of (ex)change? What is the meaning of time in contemporary art? How is the notion of art appropriated by emerging art markets/ new art communities? (virtually, geographically, politically, economically, aesthetically speaking)

What is a piece of art compared to the feeling of being able to fly?

My first day at the exhibition as well as first day in SL, so I didn’t have much of a head start compared to the visitors in SMK. Not underestimating the quality and value of both Sachiko Hayashi and Mogens Jacobsens works which both caused great excitement, surprise and discussions, I did find, though, that the many newcomers in SL- like myself were so very exited by the introduction to SL and the possibilites of this environment that the exhibition project was of less importance to many of them. If you only just discovered that you are able to fly or can be teleported to anywhere you like, then even the most interesting art exhibition experience might fade a bit in comparison. Not yet fully integrated into this brave new world I found it quite hard to be present in 1. and 2nd life at the same time so I was not able to fully exploit the possibilites of interacting with the visitors in SL while at the same time describing to 1. life visitors what was going on. So I payed more attention to the physically present visitors at SMK, though I would have liked to know from the point of view of the already fully integrated SL users what they thought of the project as I assume that they will be more focused on the art experience than how they got there.

One Comment

  1. Nis Peter Nissen added these pithy words on 26. januar 2008 | Permalink

    I just read about the Second Life exhibition Virtual Moves – in a Danish newspaper (Politiken). Last year Brandts Klædefabrik in Odense also made an exhibition in Second Life and proclamed, that they where the first professional artist performing in Second Life. Jesper Rasmussen made a virtual piece of art and named it “New Steps”.

    I don’t know if the exhibition by Brandts is still performing in Second Life, but I made an animated piece of artstepping – Walking on the new steps – a video in which the avartar Nis 2.0 (that is his artistname) interact with the New Steps. You can see the video at my website – http://www.nissenbonde.dk/arstepping.htm

    When I visited Virtuel Moves I instantly knew that I hade to make another animated piece of artstepping. I called the new video “Tagging the art of Virtuel Moves.”

    I hope you will enyou the happening at http://www.nissenbonde.dk/artstepping.htm

    Best regards
    Nis 2.0

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