2007
my multiple hybrid spaces
A complete art exhibition held in-world in Second Life — vernissage, artist talks, a talk to Berlin and a finissage, performed by avatars and streamed live between Cologne and the grid.
2007
A complete art exhibition held in-world in Second Life — vernissage, artist talks, a talk to Berlin and a finissage, performed by avatars and streamed live between Cologne and the grid.
concept
"Ein Hybridraum, in dem sich technisch und nicht technisch
erzeugte Realität durchdringen, und der beides gleichzeitig ist …
global und lokal zugleich."
— Florian Kuhlmann, Cave goes
Popculture, 2007
In 2007, as the closing move of the diploma Cave goes Popculture at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Kuhlmann took the exhibition itself into Second Life. Where the Keenag Gallery show had shown the collages in-world for the first time, my multiple hybrid spaces makes the whole apparatus of the exhibition digital: the collages hang on white walls that no truck delivered, avatars walk the space, and the rituals of the art world — vernissage, two artist talks, a talk to Berlin, a finissage — are performed and streamed live between Cologne and the grid.
The gallery is code running on someone else's hardware, and it is a public space at the same time. First life and second life meet in one room that is global and local at once. The works on the walls are the digital collages of the gift: free to download, each original the basis of a multiple, each unique piece created not by the artist but by the market.
part of · cave goes popculture the gift · configuration no. 4
the exhibition
The collages hang as large prints on the white walls of a purpose-built gallery on Lance Kanno's estate — the artist's avatar and host of the show. A wall of the source material, the works themselves, the wall texts, the visitors: an art space assembled entirely from code.
artist talks & talk to berlin
Over the run of the show the gallery filled twice for artist talks and for a "talk to berlin": the artist appears on the video wall as a live webcam feed, the avatars gather in a circle on the floor, and the conversation runs across the boundary between the room in Cologne and the grid. The audience is part real, part avatar — raccoons, foxes and newcomers among the visitors.
finissage · 13 july 2007
The show closed back in first life: in Studio A of the Academy of Media Arts, Second Life was projected onto the stage while a presenter at a laptop lectern moved through the exhibition in-world, a camera crew filming the room. The digital exhibition, performed once more as a live event in physical space.
feldstärke · pact zollverein, essen
The same year the digital exhibition returned to physical space once more, at PACT Zeche Zollverein in Essen. It was staged as a physical–virtual hybrid: a projection opened the view into Second Life for the audience in the hall, while a camera fed the Essen space back in-world — two openings, one exhibition.
the gift · configuration no. 5
squeezing the digital
"das konzept der limitierten auflage … ist aber letztlich ein
anachronismus."
— from squeezing the digital, Keenag Gallery,
Second Life, 2007
The works on the walls follow a single rule set, shown in-world beside them. The digital original is free: downloadable in high resolution, released under a Creative Commons license on original.floriankuhlmann.com. Digital copying is loss-free, so the edition — the anachronism the art world still defends — is abandoned. In its place a formula: every original is the base of a multiple; a multiple is a series of unique pieces; the first carries serial number 1; the price of a unique piece is the base value times two to the power of its serial number. The unique piece is made in the act of buying, between buyer and artist (unikat.floriankuhlmann.com).
The collages themselves are remixes built entirely from material found on the net — the monitor is the canvas, the small images are the paint. This is the economics that the gift would carry, a decade later, all the way to the blockchain.
syntheticreality.com · 2010
A later return to the in-world space, three years after the diploma. On syntheticreality.com (2010) the exhibition is built as a platform floating in the Second Life sky — a pavilion of large framed panels hung in mid-air over a mirrored floor and a row of white pedestals. The panels carry the plain signs of the market: a blue dollar and a red question mark, flanked by banner motifs. The hybrid space is here reduced to its essentials — a horizon, a floor, and the signs themselves, shown to an avatar who walks among them.
the signs of the exchange · die neue ehrlichkeit
projects — floriankuhlmann.com