VB31 - Demo Days - I Rez, Therefore I Am

VB31 – Demo Days

Gallery Xue / Palestine
21 January 2012

Are avatars “real?” What about the text-only MUDs of yesterday? What about the Star Trek “Holodeck?” For some, climbing a mountain in a “holodeck” is “fake” and therefore meaningless. For others the text-only world of a MUD was as fully immersive as, well, the “text only” world of the novel. For 400 years the novel has given us access to other lives, and works like Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa have accompanied The Enlightenment, The Rise of the Middle Class, and Western Liberal Democracies. The Novel has always had a unique consciousness of its own artificiality, and in Demo Days we avatars playfully consider our own artificiality.

In a recent blog post, I Wore a Mesh Dress & I Liked It, I asked whether a more realistic world is more real, or whether the immersion of a more participatory world is more “real.” In VB31 participants dove in and literally pulled at the seams of their own bodies. Even though you can make your own clothes in the virtual world, most of us don’t, we let “professionals” create them for us. In Demo Days Agnes Sharple leads us on a DIY dumpster dive of virtual fashion as we celebrate the reality of fake and consider the fakeness of “real.”

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Agnes Sharple
Demo
Demo Ho
Eos Akina
Gina Broono
Ichigo (Court Chronometrist)
Kara Trapdoor
Kikas Babenco
Martha Graham
Monerda Skute
Padmavati
Pennyroyal Calamity
Pixel Reanimator
Sledge Roffo
Sofiane Dasmijn
Tess Gears
Tinka Bondar
Trilby Minotaur
Waterair
Ze Moo
Zsophia Innovia
[21]

For VB31 our gallerist Xue Faith asked light & space sculptor Sledge Roffo to install a series of kinetic works at Gallery Xue / Palestine to serve as a landscape / environment for our tableaux vivant. Thanks to Xue’s vision and the sublime presence of Roffo’s sculptures, not only was VB31 dramatically enhanced, but I have been further inspired to collaborate with another light & space master, Betty Tureaud, for our upcoming performance of VB34 – Net / Work, which will mark the opening of an exciting new artspace, Gallery Xue / Kandahar, a collaborative effort by Xue Faith and Trill Zapatero.

• Gallery Xue

• Sledge Roffo

• Betty Tureaud

• Trill Zapatero