Is Second Life the theatre of the absurd? Ask the Kool-Aid Man in SL

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Net Art/New Media artist Jon Rafman has been getting rave reviews and first-rate press coverage with the likes of Rhizome and other coveted art outlets as the Kool-Aid Man in Second Life®, offering free guided tours in-world. His dedicated website features a promo video that I guarantee will produce an emotion in Second Life residents, and invites folks to sign up. I first got wind of this video when Paddy Johnson of the art blog Art Fag City twittered “Best Link Ever! Kool Aid Man gives a guided tour of Second Life and it doesn't suck (like most SL art)!”

Unlike every other machinima I have seen that strives so hard to get past the technical challenges to convey the beauty, the love, the horror, the possibilities within, because of, and thanks to our virtual lives, Jon’s is a breezy, often hilarious tour that celebrates the absurdity of our immersiveness. Second Life users will recognize many favorite builds and installations.

WARNING: This video contains a lot of X-rated content.

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (.com) - Tour Promo from on Vimeo.

Jon rezzed in Second Life on 12/10/2006 but used it sporadically until recently. I’ve spent a couple of evenings this week in-world with him and I can tell you that he’s a pleasant, intensely curious, and intelligent fellow. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, and double majored in philosophy and English. I’d call him spontaneous, easily bored, and a fascinated yet detached explorer. I expect you’ll be as curious as I was to hear what he had to say about this. I sent him some rather open-ended questions via email to see what I’d get back.


Why did you elect to omit music to that video?

Jon Rafman: There is a tendency to use music as a crutch and let the soundtrack manipulate the tone of the work. I want the visual aspects of the video to speak for themselves. The formal qualities of the landscapes should dictate the mood of the piece rather than the soundtrack. Moreover, I always felt like the generic in-world sound effects, like the ominous low-pitched wind that blows across SL, creates a subtler emotional resonance than music.

Kool-Aid Man is on a quest for sublime kitsch in Second Life. Music used inappropriately corrupts the underlying mundanity of my avatar's search.

At certain points in the video there is music; however it's always what was streaming in that sim during the time of capture.

I don't want to assume anything so I have to ask: Are you really going to give guided tours?

Jon Rafman: I like this question. It forces me to ask myself: Where's the "Art" happening in this project? How important is the actual tour-giving process to the Kool-Aid Man in SL? Is the core of the artwork the video and photo collections? Or is it the process of the tour itself and the interaction with people in a virtual world that is the core of my project?

Yes, I'm giving tours. It is not a hoax!

But...

Even if the tours were a hoax and the project existed only conceptually, I'd be cool with that, too. I'm a big fan of work that walks the line between fake and real, ironic and tragic, fiction and documentary.

Do you intend to continue your work in Second Life?

Jon Rafman: I'm currently integrating some videos I've captured in SL into a larger documentary film about professional video gamers. I'm searching for ways to transcend the kitschiness inherent in the SL aesthetic and haven't decided yet on how significant of a role SL will have in the film yet.

I'm also toying with some story ideas for a few Kool-Aid Man in Second Life short video series. There's so much potential with Second Life machinima, but I have yet to see a work of machinima that's truly inspired me. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough though.

What do you want Second Life'rs to know about you most of all?

Jon Rafman: I found an analogy for surfing the web in the act of exploring Second Life as Kool-Aid Man. User-generated realms of Second Life can be viewed as a 3D virtual expression of the Internet’s anarchic psyche. Kool-Aid Man is my alter-ego, a secular icon that resonates with decades come and gone.

I see Kool-Aid Man as a self-conscious professional web surfer “breaking through walls” into various Second Life communities and subcultures. He never fully fits in, but he empathizes with whatever he passes. Like Baudelaire’s Flaneur, wandering the arcades of Fin-du-Siecle Paris, Kool-Aid Man keeps a cool and curious eye, strolling through the virtual world in search for the banal sublime. Kool-Aid Man's motto is best summed up by a line at the beginning of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil: "I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter."

I wondered as I read Jon's response if he was aware that French author, photographer and film director Chris Marker is very active in Second Life. Perhaps there are two bounty hunters then? It is unlikely we'll ever know, given that Marker famously does not take interviews.

Jon Rafman: The Kool-Aid Man in Second Life project is partly an attempt to investigate certain 'outdated' concepts from bygone eras and to reframe them or test them out in distinctly contemporary pop-cultural contexts. I am interested in the disjuncture between earlier uses and my own use and what this reveals about how consciousness has changed over the past decades. Whether a fundamental change has occurred is an open question as the forms of alienation that existed one hundred years ago are present today in mutated forms. But these subtle changes are revealing of what it means to be alive today. What are these subtle changes I mention?

The fragmentation that started with the emergence of mass culture has only intensified. Decentralized global society is epitomized in the World Wide Web. This is not to say that the power of centralized authority has declined or that a new genuine techno-democracy has been achieved. This is far from the case; I’m interested in the ways that self-regulating authority manifests itself from the ground up.

I do think that the task of grasping the present clearly has become more difficult because so much now obscures us from seeing it. I frame my quest for the banal sublime as doomed from the beginning because I am trying to highlight the loss of a certain type of consciousness.

Am I nostalgic for Fin-du-Siècle Paris?:

Yes, my project is a somewhat melancholic attempt at pointing towards the importance of understanding the historical context in the digital age. I can’t deny my nostalgia for earlier modern periods; however I am also aware that the image of the past that I yearn for reveals less about the past and more about an acute lack that exists in the present. And it is this “lack” that I want to point towards.


Jon moved to Montreal from Brooklyn, NY recently. He prefers that I not reveal his in-world name. So what do you think, Second Life residents?

Exhibiting Art in Virtual Spaces

Posted by Alpha Auer, with a very big thank you to the curator of Avatrait, Stephen Venkman who alerted us to the opening of Avatrait Island.

The new island of Avatrait was launched back at the end of November, so I am somewhat late in posting this piece. However, I wanted to give the matter some thought prior to doing so. I also co-authored a paper for an academic conference on virtual architecture in the interim, and that too has made me hold off and gather all of my thoughts on the subject. I also have to add a disclaimer here and state that I am not an architect but an artist/designer/Second Life® builder, so all of what I write on the subject is based upon mere gut instinct and a general knowledge of architectural concerns as far as they touch upon the basic design considerations common to all visual art and design practices.





What I saw at Avatrait is extremely well conceived, well designed, meticulously modeled and textured; tasteful, functional, user friendly Real Life architecture, which in many ways reminded me of the work of Eero Saarinen (particularly the convex white pavilion shown above), who is possibly my favorite architect of the 20th century. Thus, likening architectural output to Saarinen's is not a compliment I pay lightly and here I do so. Indeed I cannot find fault with the work and were these buildings to be found anywhere in Real Life they would doubtless be the pride of whichever municipality it was that they were constructed in. In fact so pristine are they, that they gave me a strong sense of being in a walkthrough presentation modeled in AutoCad, which a high caliber architectural firm had prepared for a high budget, high maintenance client. So the architects Corbett Howard and Prad Prathivi have done the project proud in many ways.



Then, why am I not completely won over? I believe the answer is already concealed in the word "Real Life" stated twice in the paragraph above. The fact that the structures are rezzed upon huge flipped sculpty rock cones may be an attempt at taking into account the affordances of the virtual, but it is not enough: I am of the tendency to believe that what constitutes the manifestation of the "virtual" in architecture has more to do with imagination than material. Thus, the sculpty rocks may not be possible in Real Life as such, however I suspect that the intention behind them is. While the peripheral pavilions have been rezed by Corbett Howard, the spheroid main exhibition hall is a build by Prad Prathivi - and it is particularly this central edifice that for me is problematic in terms of its virtual attributes. But all in all, none of these buildings seem to leave much to the imagination, do not carry concealed surprises, nothing about them is unexpected. They are very much what they are: Beautiful and functional constructs; built out of brick, mortar and marble, rezzed upon a mini archipelago of islets. The fact that the islands themselves are floating rocks is then neither here nor there.
...

Ouvroir, the Second Life annex of the Gestaltungsmuseum Zurich, dedicated to the work of Chris Marker, was built by MosMax Hax in the spring of 2008. Avatrait island has propelled me towards a comparative examination between Ouvroir and Avatrait: It is not only the fact that both sims are dedicated to the display of (predominantly 2 dimensional) art work or that at both places the central constructs are spherical, which are leading me to this comparison. Indeed it is not the similarities but the differences that seem to me to be decisive here: While Ouvroir is every bit as well conceived, well designed and well built as Avatrait Island (much to his credit Mr. Hax has refrained from using Real Life building textures, thereby greatly heightening the virtual "feel" of the construct); the huge addition that the artist/architect has managed to bring into his work at Ouvroir is the usage of the imaginative element as a design component, particularly in the navigation system of the building.



While at Avatrait you walk up and down highly predictable staircases complete with banisters around the stairwell, at Ouvroir your only way of seeing the exhibit, which is spread out over a number of floors is by "falling down" to the next level through the designated phantom segments marked out in a semi transparent red. And to come back to the banisters at Avatrait: Why? Are the directors of Avatrait concerned about falling avatars creating liability issues? Health and safety regulations? Really, why?



While at Avatrait all that is there to see is plainly visible almost at first sight, Ouvroir is concealed, revealing itself bit by bit to its visitors. While Avatrait is complete as it is (I cannot for the life of me imagine how a single prim could be rezzed next to what is already there without becoming a major disruption of the whole system); Ouvroir allows for emergence and indeed seems to steadily be growing through the interventions of the members of its group who are continuously rezzing additions to the sim. And such is the mastery of the core red sphere which houses the actual Chris Marker collection at Ouvroir, that every addition seems to fit in, seems to be able to weave its way into the overall design tapestry. In short, while Avatrait is an endeavor to be admired respectfully and from a distance, Ouvroir invites you to be imaginative, to become involved and to play. Both are 3D, you can walk into both of them to an equal degree, but in a very bizarre kind of way Ouvroir is immersive while Avatrait remains aloof.



Keystone Bouchard needs to be taken very much to heart when he states that "architectural fabric created is still largely driven by very literal parallels to the physical world. This happens for good reason, as we have learned to visually organize the world around us, real or virtual, based on familiar cues and patterns. A roof may not need to protect us from the elements in virtual space, but it organizes a space. Even though you can fly, a ramp is still a strong way finding mechanism. While we import these visual cues from physical reality with good cause, I think we also need to consider the native, inherent characteristics of this environment and build a new language of virtual architecture based on those characteristics". Bouchard, is of course, referring to the dynamic element in virtual architecture in this text, to what he continues in the next line to describe as "virtual architecture has the capacity to become far more dynamic; behaving more like a liquid than a static and passive artifact".

I am going to do something quite improper here and use this quote out of the original context in which Bouchard has intended it. In other words, I will make it suit my own needs. Does a building need to be coded and dynamic to become virtual? Or is it more the underlying intention of usage, the very spirit in which it has been conceived of that really makes the difference between what is possible and not possible in Real Life?


Emergent interventions at Ouvroir: This infovis-like structure featuring a selection of photographs by Chris Marker was rezed in close proximity to the red sphere by Ouvroir group member Lucien Bookmite. Photograph courtesy of Barbara Binder.

Both buildings make usage of Real Life architectural metaphor, such as floors and ceilings and ramps, for the purposes of way finding. And as a construct Ouvroir is as static as Avatrait is. And yet as far as I can see, there is a huge difference and to me that difference lies in the ultimate approach of the architect, the spirit in which the whole enterprise has been undertaken: The one that emphasizes imagination and play over realism. Involvement over spectatorship. Intervention over consumption. Making a noteworthy immersive virtual experience out of Ouvroir and a beautiful receptacle for art work out of Avatrait Island. Thus, to each his due...

You can teleport to Avatrait Island from here, and to Ouvroir from here. You can see a collection of larger sized photographs of Ouvroir here and Avatrait Island here.

Chris Marker and his presence in Second Life, via the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Chris Marker is a much celebrated and admired French author, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentarist. His "La Jetée" - a masterpiece which inspired the 1995 Academy Award-nominated science fiction film "Twelve Monkeys" - and "Sans Soleil," among other seminal works, made cinematic history in voice, text and associative media practices.


This is part one of La Jetée, by Chris Marker (1963). Both La Jetée and Sans Soleil have been re-released via restored high-definition digital transfers and are available through the Criterion Collection

Born in 1921, Chris is one of the most profiled figures in media history, and yet, he does not grant interviews or allow himself to be photographed. In fact, when he is asked for a photograph, he provides an image of a cat, instead. This legendary denial would suggest that he was destined to become an avatar. Indeed... this Tuesday, that is exactly what will happen.



On Tuesday, March 11th, at 11am SLT / 19:00 CET, and in conjunction with a Real Life exhibtion in Zurich, Switzerland at the Museum für Gestaltung, Chris will be present at an "ouvroir" that was commissioned by the museum, and created by MosMax Hax (teleport directly from here). Chris will play with his own work, in the company of his longtime guide, Monsieur Guillame, a cat and a furry entity in Second Life.


Monsieur Guillame

If you do not know Chris Marker's works, I heartily recommend that you conduct a bit of research and learn more about this man's artistic legacy. You might then agree that this is an event of great import, and understand, too, the presence of the whale on the sim, as well as numerous other objects.

In addition to his films, the exhibit also showcases several of Chris' powerful portraits of Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa, Salvador Dalí and Fidel Castro... further evidence of his obsession for staring back at his subejcts.

Curators: Chris Marker, Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer

In Real Life:
Chris Marker. A Farewell to Movies
March 12, 2008 - June 29,2008
at the at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich