[spectre] Yoshikaze “Up-In-The-Air” Second Life Residency

[Garrett Lynch]

Yoshikaze “Up-In-The-Air” Second Life Residency Presents

GARRETT LYNCH

8-14 February, 2011
at HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden

Opening Hours : 8am-4pm (Weekdays)

Opening : 8 February Between 2pm-4pm

Mixed Reality Performance by the Artist at the Opening at 3pm (CET) 8th February

Open to SL Audience at 6am (SLT) 8th February

Live Streaming of the Performance:http://www.asquare.org/work/yoshikaze

Yoshikaze Second Life Location:http://slurl.com/secondlife/HUMlab/95/215/351

During December 2010 and January 2011 Garrett Lynch has produced a number of remarkable works at the Humlab island in Second Life as the resident Yoshikaze’s “Up-in-the-air” artist. Yoshikaze is proud to present these works in an exhibition at HUMlab, Umeå University, between 8-14 February 2011. In conjunction with the HUMlab exhibition, the Yoshikaze studio in Second Life will be open to the public. Please visit Second Life to experience Garrett Lynch’s work.


[Curator’s Statement]

If Eva and Franco Mattes, Adam Nash and Gazira Babeli represent the first generation of Second Life artists who in the midst of its golden age heralded SL art, Garrett Lynch belongs to SL’s second generation artists, for whom the shift in focus from novelty in the virtual to a deepened sense of the virtual has come to emerge as a natural progression.

Captured in avatar reality, the subject of identity is an inescapable topic in Second Life.  The Gracie Kendal Project by Kristine Schomaker and the documentary film Life 2.0 by Jason Spingarn-Koff both address interconnections between the parallel worlds of RL/first life and SL/virtual life.  Garrett Lynch pursues a similar path by making his avatar Garrett Lynch (IRL) an ongoing project.  However, whereas the aforementioned works by Schomaker and Spingarn-Koff straightforwardly documents psychological impact of virtual experience, Garrett Lynch employs another, more subtle, approach to investigating virtual identity.

Stripped of any relation to other humans/avatars, Garrett Lynch (IRL) is an entity, almost an essence, whose existence is formed purely in relation to RL artist Garrett Lynch and to the environments his creator carefully selects.  By consciously examining the two worlds through various reference points, Garrett Lynch (IRL)’s unique performances delicately yet deliberately reveal the enigmatic intersection between the real and the virtual.  Beneath his tech savviness that expands Second Life’s boundary into several external devices lies the core of his exploration into the nature of representation in the era of virtuality, the unknown territory of multiple realities which even encompasses several layers of virtualities.

It is not surprising then that amongst his last works during Yoshikaze residency is Une Région, mais pas Centrale, a work inspired by Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale which agnises the interplay among place, perspectives and perceptual recognition of familiarity-unfamiliarity.

Sachiko Hayashi
Yoshikaze Curator


[Artist’s Statement]

Identity is the basis of my practice in Second Life, a practice which forms a part of my larger networked practice that deals with networks as a site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse. Within a network the significance of identity becomes even more problematic than it is outside of the networked arts. While being distributed and in many ways omnipresent it also frequently imitates and results in a stereotype.

Online worlds such as Second Life however move identity beyond the codified online usernames or static visual iconography that we have until now employed. They are a step closer to our interpretation of identities in other media forms. The visualness of the place, the representation of a world within Second Life, is in no small way a factor in this. We see a place, framed from a point of view as we might in a film or told in a story, this helps to place us there however now combined with a choice of movement the delineation between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘virtual’, the differences between the here and there, becomes difficult to establish.

As a starting point for a ‘virtual’ world residency, identity and place offer a wealth of opportunities to explore. The exploration of a networked site, opportunity for example to re-interpret what is a site-specific work, and its context, opportunity to create with the specific form of the ‘virtual’ world. What becomes immediately evident in this exploration is that language is of utmost importance and yet can not sufficiently articulate its complexities. Words such as site, place, world, here, there all relate back to what is ‘real’ and what is ‘virtual’, two inescapable words that are wholly inadequate.

This is however no surprise. Language has always played a key role here, I refer to my avatar as my representation and not I, it is never seen without its sandwich board stating that “I am Garrett Lynch (IRL)” (in real life) so to be artist in residence through a representation within a representative space the artist must question and challenge all preconceptions of that space, their own identity and the place of residency.

Garrett Lynch
Artist in residence
_________________

http://www.asquare.org/
http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch/
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