DSL Cyber MoCA is pleased to announce:

The museum of contemporary art in Second Life will be unveiled by the exhibition "TransForm," April 30th through July 20th. 2009, (closing reception date and location will be announced in June). As part of the 10th Boston Cyberarts Festival,the exhibition will be on view in both physical space, Design Gallery at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth,US,and the newly launched DSL Cyber MoCA located in the international artist community in Second Life. The exhibition is curated by DSL Cyber MoCA's founder and leading artists Lily & Honglei, and virtual reality philosopher Philip Zhai，sponsored by DSL Collection of Chinese contemporary art, and Visual Design Department of College of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Sun Yet-San University, Guangzhou China.

click for Press Release

Curatorial Statement

The exhibition focuses on the signification of "trans-" (transitional, transcending, translating, transforming, etc.) and "form" (traditional and emerging forms of art), examines the ever-changing meaning of aesthetics in the digital era over extensive areas: the social, cultural, or personal. It explores ways of using Online virtual world as the “agent” to transform traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, folk art, performance, into digital arts in Cyberspace, and therefore argues that virtual-world art, as a new language, is proceeding to continue the development and “transformation” of expressions that constitute the content of the history of art.

The exhibition also serves to introduce a culturally meaningful collection of contemporary Chinese art, DSL Collection,to the global artist communities connected by Second Life.

 

Participating Artists

Patrick Lichty (artist,writer,curator,educator. US) & Second Front

Cao Fei(artist. China)- RMB City (courtesy of DSL Collection)

Mark Millstein (artist, educator. US) - Kite Forms

John Craig Freeman (artist, educator. US) - Imaging Beijing

Lily & Honglei 杨熙瑛，李宏磊 (artist, blogger. US & China) - The Butterfly Lovers

Pamela See (artist, Australia) - Window

Constantin Severin (writer, artist. Romania) - Text & Time

Philip Zhai 翟振明 (philosopher, educator & artist. China) - Digital Paintings

 

Featured Projects

Patrick Lichty & Second Front

Figure 1

Featured Projects: Dream Umbrellas (Figure 1)
An interaction with Patrick Lichty, Gazira Babeli, and Second Front for RMB City’s “Play with Your Tiienniale” for the Yokohama Trienniale.
Second Life is a place for the realization of dreams. But what if we could take our dreams along with us in the virtual? … We feel that the sharing of dreams is one way to build a better world, and through these dream umbrellas, we hope to realize your hopes and dreams.

Figure 2

7 Up (Figure 2)
by Gazira Babeli & Patrick Lichty
7 Up is a series of 12 vignettes about the surreal lives of two avatars in a surreal space – Second Life. Each of the 12 loops are akin to the “station of hours” but for the days of two avatars. Lounging in hot chocolate, floating cats are all normal fare. A physical solo installation of 12 videos will be a solo show in Slovenia in Fall 2009.

8 Bits or Less

By Patrick Lichty
Brief Synopses: 8 Bits or Less (4:47, Q1 2002): An artist who has become blind (whether physically or ideologically) has resorted to viewing his world throught the prosthetic devices that constitute his sense, like cell phones, and wristcams. The result is a distored landscape that considers Sitationist theory, surveillance culture, identity, and alien abduction.[... ...]

Bios
Patrick Lichty is a New Media artist of over 18 years, Co-Founder of the virtual performance art group Second Front, and animator for the activist group, The Yes Men. He is also a Professor of Interactive Media Arts & Design at Columbia College, Chicago. http://www.voyd.com
Gazira Babeli is an artist and member for Second Front who lives and works in the virtual world of Second Life, where she was born on 31 March 2006. Like all inhabitants of virtual worlds, she is an identity construction known as an avatar, but unlike them, she does not acknowledge the presence of a “human” controlling her.
http://www.gazirababeli.com
Second Front is a pioneering performance art collective operating in virtual worlds, and primarily in Second Life. Spanning the globe from San Francisco to Milan, Italy, Second Front creates spectacles and actions which are in the spirit of Dada, Fluxus and late 20th Century Performance Art. Additional members include: Bibbe Hansen, Doug Jarvis, Yael Gilks, Liz Solo, Scott Kildall (a.k.a. Great Escape).

 

John Craig Freeman
Featured Project: Imaging Beijing

Figure 3
Imaging Place is a place-based virtual reality art project created by Second Life citizen JC Fremont (John Craig Freeman, Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Real Life). This work was initially created as a user-navigated, interactive computer program that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and three-dimensional technologies in the form of installations at art museums, galleries, and other museums. The work is located in various locations throughout Second Life … With Freeman’s work, the emphasis is on the “reality” part of the phrase virtual reality. He invites us to remember that there is a real-world outside of Second Life, in which the problems that globalization (and the residual effects of its previous incarnation, colonialism) have caused are very real and demand our real-world attention and activism. - Abaris Brautigan, Techno-Grammatologist Collaborative, 29 October 2006.

Bio
Artist and educator John Craig Freeman uses digital technologies to produce place-based virtual reality installations made up of projected interactive environments that lead the audience from global satellite images to immersive, user navigated scenes on the ground. This work has been exhibited internationally. In 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure, as well as a chapter in the book Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. His work has been reviewed in Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper's and Der Spiegel. Lucy Lippard cites Freeman's work in her book The Lure of the Local, as does Margot Lovejoy in her book Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston.

Mark Millstein
Featured Project: Kite Forms

Artist Statement
These kites, kiteforms and sailforms are inkjet prints on a variety of Japanese mulberry papers (washi). Some kites use papers with ornamental fibers or watermarks. … In my most recent work, the shape of each form is born from a manipulation and morphing of a somewhat traditional shape, built and then observed in virtual space. Using software tools, the forms are divided into sails, then tilted, inflated, and skewed as if affected by flight and wind. The frozen form is further wrapped with imagery that suggests other perspectives on volume, construction or reflection, for example. Surface designs are derived from typography, photography and imaginary life forms. … My interest in the fusion of new technology with traditional materials has propelled my investigation of the kite form and non-traditional printing techniques. Most of these kites will fly with proper bridling, many of my newer works however, are designed for display only.

Bio
Mark Millstein is an artist and designer living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He is a Professor in the Design Department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he teaches Digital Media and special projects in video, interactive media, digital photography and printmaking. He received his BFA in video and photography from the Atlanta College of Art in 1982 and an MFA in interrelated media from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1986. In Spring 2008, Mark's work was selected for Top 40, at LACDA, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, and in Rochester, NY, at BookSmart Studio's Kunstler Gallery, Mark's work was included in the First Alternative Process Digital Printing Exhibition, juried by Massachusetts artist and author, Mary Taylor. Mark's artwork has been included in several SIGGRAPH Art Galleries, most recently SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston, and in prior years 2005, 2003, 2000 and 1995. Mark is included in the 2006 text Art of the Digital Age, edited by Bruce Wands. Mark has also received numerous research and creative grants, has been a reviewer for texts on digital imaging, and has curated several exhibitions regarding concepts in digital and hybrid process art and design. These include a UMass faculty show at the statehouse in Boston during the first Cyberarts Festival in 1999; Digital Insight at the Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA in 2001; and Hybrid Prints: Redefining Printmaking, at UMass Dartmouth in 2003, co-curated with professors Janine Wong and Marc St. Pierre.
Artist Website: http://www.markmillstein.com

 

Lily & Honglei
Featured Project: The Butterfly Lovers
Figure 4

Artist Statement
The Butterfly Lovers, a 5 minute animation piece composed with a series of oil paintings, is based on a Chinese folk story of the same title. In the film, the lovers who have passed through death, dressed in clothes of ancient times, roam in Manhattan’s night. The two protagonists repeat such scenarios as “seeing off for 18 miles” and “meeting at the balcony” in the original story. With the dreamlike dislocation the film depicts the segregation and homesickness in the heart of the characters. By employing the style of narrating a folk story the author reveals the fatigue and resistance of the Chinese culture in the west world.
The piece is intended to make social and cultural commentaries through reinterpreting themes in Chinese folklore. The work reflects on the impact of globalization, both upon the environment and the individual, that engender and reveal layered personal and cultural identity markers. It explores foreignness and displacement, focusing on the spiritually homeless who struggle to preserve traditional values. We therefore proposes solutions for preserving and re-evaluating cultural heritage with digital arts.

Bio
Lily & Honglei, the new media artists from Beijing, currently live and work in MA and NY. Lily & Honglei have dedicated themselves to reinterpreting Chinese folklore traditions with new media arts that reflect on the current globalized culture and society from a unique angle. Lily & Honglei's recent net-art projects, video installations and multimedia work have been included in FILE Media Art - Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil; PFILMER LA MUSIQUE Festival, Paris, 2009; digital arts + new media exhibition at Emergence Gallery in Duo Multicultural Art Center, East Village NYC; Presentation DSL Cyber MoCA at New York University, Steinhardt School; "Navigating Cyberworlds: Creative Practice in Virtual Reality" panel discussion hosted by Boston Cyberarts 2009, Boston University; "@" Exhibition curated by New Media Caucus panel at the National CAA 2009, LA; PALAZZO BARBERINI SCREENING, Italy; FAD Festival de Arte Digital, Brazil; "Foreignness and Translation in New Media" in Media-N Spring Edition 2009 by New Media Caucus, IL; "Virtual Art" Exhibition invited by NY ARTS Magazine at Broadway Gallery NYC; "Friction Research - Investigating Ruptures in the Art Political Grid," Amsterdam, Netherlands; "Chinese Folklore in Digital Arts" at Upgrade! Boston, curated by Turbulence.org; SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in LA 2008; ElectroFringe Festival of Electronic Arts & Culture in Australia; Rencontres Internationales in France; Axiom New Media Gallery in Boston, among many others. Their media solo exhibitions have been held in Beijing, Germany, Australia and the States. Lily & Honglei are also active as cultural activists, bloggers and curators.
Artist Website:
http://lilyhonglei.com
http://lilyhonglei.wordpress.com

 

Constantin Severin
Featured Project: Text & Time

Figure 5
Media: oil paintings, mix media

''Constantin Severin is a theorist and practitioner of archetypal expressionism. His paintings restore the primitive, ingenuous and vitalist echoes of archaic cultural traditions (such as the Cucuteni culture and Scandinavian art) with an exceptional sense of exoticism and bookish decorativeness. Through this orientation, as well as through a lyricism and intellectual tension, Severin follows in the footsteps of illustrious Romanian artists such as Brancusi, Apostu, Tuculescu, Cotos and Maitec. The archetypal figures introduced into his paintings seem to be as haphazard and inexplicable as life itself; they appear on the canvas as quotations of polychrome and monochrome images. The organization of these canvasses by way of the repetition and variation of images and strong colors, as well as monochromatic technique, reminds us of musical rather than literary practice. These technical elements imitate a rhythm of direct perception, whereas the texts that accompany the visual images introduce an ineffable non-figurative figuration. This rhythm creates the impression of a plenitude, of an unusual accomplishment, of a movement and a sense of resurrection, which obey the geometrical laws of plane forms and loci, not the laws of space mimetically conventionalized by the rules of perspective. Line, circle and spiral are the elements through which the painter creates and gives rhythm to his world, which embodies light itself, beyond all forms, be they manifest or discrete, corpuscular or undulating (...)''. - Sabina FINARU, ''Crai Nou'', Suceava, March 2006

Bio
Constantin Severin was born in Baia de Arama, Romania. He is a visual artist, member of European Artists e.V. Group, Germany and a writer, member of the Romanian Writers' Union (represented by Bodtker Yuniku Agency, Oslo). Free art studies. From 1991 to 2004 he worked as a journalist for different Romanian publications, but also for BBC and Free Europe radio. He has published over 800 articles, essays and interviews on culture, art theory and criticism, as well as on other issues of Romanian and international interest. He has introduced into our current vocabulary two new concepts: archetypal expressionism and post–literature. The first essay concerns contemporary art, the latter, an original philosophy of culture. His solo exhibitions: ''Text and Time'', September 2004, The Bucovina Museum Complex, Suceava, Romania, (included on the EuroNews Agenda of major European cultural events); ''The Signs of the Time'', November 2004, The NahVision Art Gallery in Stuttgart, Germany(also included on the EuroNews Agenda). ''Time's Metaphors'', February 2006, The Velea (TransArt) Art Gallery in Bacau, Romania. ''Matrioshka Identities'', February 2007, Art Gallery of the ''Stephen the Great'' University, Suceava, Romania. ''The Alchemical City'', January 2009, Lascar Vorel Art Gallery of the Romanian Artists Union, Piatra Neamt, Romania.

 

Cao Fei
Featured Project: RMB City (courtesy of DSL Collection)

Artist Statement
… In RMB City, we will be able to cruise the digital ocean, witnessing a Ferris wheel rotating on top of the Monument to the People's Heroes; looking down from the sky on the water of the Three Gorges reservoir gushing out of the Tian'anmen rostrum; passing the giant new totem symbolizing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai; hopping over the Feilai Temple marooned in a raging torrent; walking across a vast, desolate state-owned factory area in Northeast China; and finally hovering over the Grand National Theatre in Beijing. Also in our view will be gigantic planes gliding over terraces in the crevices of the central business district, and aerial super-malls. We will see water flowing into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta area before traveling through the sewage system into an ocean with floating statues of Mao Zedong. The rusted steel structure of the Olympic Stadium aka "Bird's Nest" will be washed in splashes of ocean spray, while an aerial band on a floating sheet of the national flag filled with five-pointed stars makes a deafening noise that shakes Rem Koolhaas' CCTV building, causing it to collapse....

About Cao Fei
Born into a family of artists during the early years of opening and reform, Cao Fei belongs to the first generation who grew up entirely under the conditions of permanent social change, rapid spread of electronic media and the impact of international popular culture. This upbringing is clearly reflected in her artistic vitae. As early as in middle school, Cao Fei engaged in experimental theatre and gained first attention for her video Maladjustment 257 in the year 2000 even before graduating from her native Guangzhou’s academy of art. Working in a wide variety of media like video, conceptual photography, installation, text, documentary as well as fictional film, works appeared in quick succession. Her art is informed by the digital experiences of her generation, not shaped by the collective memory of the Mao-era. Unlike other artists Cao is not concerned with the social hardships of modernization from a general perspective but with it’s impact on the lives of middle-class urban youth. Cosplayer may yet be her best-known work. Depicting young people dressed as manga and anime characters, staging scenes from their favourite albums before the bizarre background of urban wastelands, the video is an artistic stylization of a popular past time of East-Asian young people who temporarily withdraw into a private world of fantasy role-play.
Although Cao Fei’s work may appear superficial and playful, it has a deep-rooted sense of reality and constitutes a coherent body of work - if that much can be said of such a young artist. Her latest piece, the avatar Chinatracy, a character of the worldwide online interactive cyber-community Second Life which she created for the 2007 Venice Bienniale, may in visual terms constitute a 180° antagonism to the pre-war aesthetic of Give me a kiss and yet constitutes a logical development of her œuvre so far." - Christoff Buettner
Artist Website: http://www.caofei.com/

 

Philip Zhai (see curators’ Bios), featured project: Digital Paintings (Figure 6); DSL Cyber MoCA theme music.

Figure 6

 

Pamela Mei-Leng See
Featured Project: Window

Figure 7

Media: paper cut, animation (collaborating with Lily & Honglei)

Pamela Mei-Leng See is an Australian artist born of Chinese descent. She
practices a contemporary form of papercutting. Since graduating from the
Queensland College of Art in 1999, she has contributed several to
exhibitions in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. In 2007 , she made her first
appearance in the Beijing art scene, featuring in exhibitions at 798 Red
Gate Gallery, NY Arts and the Pickled Art Centre.

Thematically, her artworks enjoy a duality of readings in China and
Australia. In China, her artwork is largely read for its commentary on
cultural and commercial colonialism – or essentially as part of Beijing's
pop/kitsch school. In Australia, migration is the primary context applied
to her artwork. By and large, the same artworks have received contrasting
interpretations across the two countries.

In her recent work Window (Figure 7), she experiments combining cutpaper, the traditional art form with film lauguage by collaborating with new media art collective Lily & Honglei. The piece uses 'window' as a metaphor to reveal the relationship between social and individual's inner world, or tradition and a transforming surrounding in today's China.

 

Exhibition Venue & Time

In Second Life: DSL Cyber MoCA. (Teleport Now, or read Instruction). Group exhibition will be on view from April 30th to June 30th.2009. Permanent display: DSL Collection of Chinese contemporary art.

In University of Massachusetts Dartmouth: Design Gallery, Group 6 Room 154, College of Visual & Performing Arts (CVPA)(see map). April 24 - May 10. 2009. Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday, 10AM - 6PM

 

More Information

About the Curators:
Lily & Honglei(杨熙瑛，李宏磊）: new media artists from Beijing, currently based in MA and NY. They dedicate themselves for creating new artistic expressions with digital media as well as enhancing cultural exchanges between the Chinese and global artist community. Lily & Honglei founded “Land of Illusion” project in Second Life in 2007, a platform generating virtual-world performance and exhibitions for contemporary art and cultural studies through cross-continent collaborations on the Internet. In 2008, they founded NY Arts New Media & Net-Art platform affiliated with NY Arts Magazine. In 2009, collaborating with DSL Collection of contemporary Chinese art, they launched DSL Cyber MoCA in Second Life. Their creativity and activities aim to use new media and Internet-art to maintain cultural sustainability and diversity in a globalized world.
Website:http://lilyhonglei.com

 

Philip Zhai(翟振明）: Philip Zhai， also known as Zhai Zhenming, is a philosopher, artist and professor currently teaching at Sun Yet-sen University, China. Zhai is the author of Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality (1998: Rowman & Littlefield), in which he argues that the logical extreme of virtual reality is ontologically equivalent to actual reality. Zhai also writes about cyberspace in light of its connection to virtual reality. He is recognized as one of the major cyber-philosophers who heralded the emergence of Second Life (Donald E. Jones, "Avatar: Constructions of Self and Place in Second Life and the Technological Imagination " ) and other virtual worlds. He also composes music and does digital painting.

About Boston Cyberarts: The first Boston Cyberarts Festival took place ten years ago, in 1999, and since that time the biennial event has become an eagerly-anticipated part of the Boston-area arts and technology scene. George Fifield, Director of Boston Cyberarts, noted: “The Boston area has been a center of art and technology for decades, since the pioneering work done by institutions like WGBH, Polaroid, and the MIT Media Lab. We’re proud that for the past decade we have been able to shine a spotlight on both the rich history of art and technology, and on the visions for the future.”
Website: http://bostoncyberarts.org/

About Design Gallery at UMass Dartmouth: Design Gallery 154, on the first floor of UMD’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) is a specialized space for digital media presentation: theater-style projections of animation, time-based works, participatory virtual events, hands-on interactive design presentations, exhibitions of digital prints, sound art, and a continuous web presence with links for virtual access. FIND ON MAP!

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Related Topics:

‘Transcending Media’ and the Role of Contemporary Art Practices in China, www.dslcollection.org

Presentation of DSL Cyber MoCA,Interrelated Media Studio, MassArt.

CIAC’S Electronic Magazine No 31, Fall 2008, Second Life / Art.

http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/oeuvre16.htm

http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2008/11/04/why-art-in-virtual-worlds/