The Australian National Portrait Gallery in Canberra is presenting an exhibition on portraiture in a virtual setting. I spent over an hour on Portrait Island viewing the “doppelganger” exhibition; that’s all the time I had, but it wasn’t enough. There are just five exhibits, but each one takes a lot of time to explore. I really recommend it, especially if you are working on identity and self-representation in Second Life.
I started with Patrick Lichty’s Code Portraits, which reference Andy Warhol’s “screentests” in the 1960’s. Lichty made short machinima of friends and acquaintances who visited his Factory in Second Life, and catalogued them as a record of his Second Life, demonstrating how the lives of others intersect to form our own reality. I was quite absorbed by this exhibit, although I would have preferred to see the videos within SL. However, there were quite a number of them, and perhaps that wasn’t possible in the space available.
Cao Fei (SL China Tracy) presented her machinima exploration of Second Life, “iMirror,” both within SL and on a linked website. I really liked the video, and would use it in my class, either as a field trip assignment or as a linked video for viewing outside of SL. The video is a calm, reflective and somewhat moody montage of SL scenes that combine to form a portrait of Second Life society.
The iGods exhibit by Gazira Babeli was fun. I don’t want to spoil it for you by telling you why, but if you are interested in the Seven Deadly Sins, DNA as code, or if you just have an inflated view of your own importance, you should see it.
The Autoscope exhibit is a collaborative project by Adam Nash, Christopher Dodds and Justin Clemens. You are asked to type in a name on channel 1 and the programme then does some technological hocus-pocus, tracking that name in a number of databases, and presenting a completed link portrait of that person. I would have liked to see that portrait within SL, but it is actually presented on the Autoscope page. (See Adam Nash’s thoughtful response to this passage, below.)
I did a search for Ellie Brewster, my avatar name, and sure enough, she gets a lot of hits. But what was more interesting to me was to look at the archive of searches. It seemed to me that people who used the Autoscope programme through the web searched for famous people: James Cameron, Barak Obama, etc. However, people who searched from within Second Life seemed to be using avatar names — perhaps their own name, like I did? If my observation is true, could SL people be more self-centered? Are we more limited to our virtual space? What does this say about Second Life and identity?
The last exhibit I saw was by Andrew Burrell (SL Nonnatus Korhonen), “temporary self portrait in preparation for the singularity.” It was by far the most immersive of the exhibits, and I had the strongest reaction to it. I definitely had the feeling of being “inside someone’s head.” This can be an uncomfortable feeling. It would be interesting to ask students to compare this exhibit with “iGods,” which has exactly the opposite effect on an avatar; “self-portrait” invites us to look within the other, and “iGods” playfully asks us to see ourselves from another’s point of view.
This exhibition runs until March 23, and they are proposing to use a section of the island as an open platform for work identity and portraiture, so this island promises to be an excellent space for research and study; however, if you are thinking of bringing students to this exhibit, I’d be very careful with newbies, as there are a number of architectural jokes that will be frustrating for beginners, and there is very little signage to direct them in their explorations.
Hi Ellie, thanks for the post. I just wanted to let you know that in fact the Autoscopia portrait does occur in Second Life – a giant, emergent, green-cyan animated audiovisual sculpture that builds itself using parameters based on the individual search results. Each sculpture is totally unique to the individual search, and once spawned begins to move around the island whilst simultaneously slowly deconstructing, all the parts drifting away from each other and gradually ‘dying’ until there is nothing left. You can see some examples of these sculptures on the autoscopia.net ‘media’ page, or if you search YouTube for ‘autoscopia’.
Your point about SL users being self centred is an interesting one. We consciously built Autoscopia to be cross-platform, ie, in SL, web pages, Twitter feeds, and composite videos physically installed in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, in order to invite SL users to question the context of SL within the broader context of the Internet. Thus, we send data in and out of SL to and from all manner of search engines on the web (all the usual sources like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, along with many other less known but far more intrusive search services such as public records etc). In this way, we hope that the solipsistic walled garden of SL can be re-examined.
This raises the question of identity in SL. There is no point in doing a search on an avatar name in SL because all avatar names are unique, thus the only results one gets will be entirely predictable. To create a work that searched within SL for an avatar name would be trivial and very budgie-and-mirror, not to mention redundant since that functionality already exists within the SL interface. However, real-name-based identity works in a different way. A name in the ‘real world’ (and I as an SL artist entirely reject the notion that SL is separate from the real world) is a highly contestable signifier. This interpretive nature of names is brought into sharp focus in the context of the Internet. And this is what we were hoping to explore and question with Autoscopia, given that we were dealing with the National Portrait Gallery, and the notion of portraiture.
Thanks again for the post and review, I do hope you will have a chance to return inworld to Autoscopia and manipulate your own sculptures.
Kind regards,
Adam Nash (Adam Ramona)
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I should have mentioned the self-constructing sculpture, Adam, I am sorry. What I meant was that I expected to see something on the sculpture itself, something I recognized — references, words, etc. I did watch it for a while (although I should have spent more time). I think I’ll go back and have another look.
And as for the point on identity, I think the sculpture does communicate to the avatar that the borders of a virtual world are permeable — rather than a “budgie” experience, I felt it as a hall of mirrors, reflecting my sometimes problematic relationship with Ellie Brewster.
Thanks for your post, it will help me give a more nuanced interpretation of your sculpture when I bring students to Portrait Island.
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