Imaging Place SL: U.S./Mexico Border

This article will attempt to filter (interpret?) for you a performance and installation in Second Life. The event was ‘a realtime interpretive and site-specific performance’ based on and for the opening of JC Fremont’s installation on borders: ‘Imaging Place SL: U.S./Mexico Border’. Second Front conceived and performed a wild experience on Friday 5th Jan at Ars Virtua (Gallery 2)…

…As I have considered before, art in SL and a virtual world cannot be executed or experienced in the same manner as our first life. An example of the discontinuity (or emergence of a new form of experience) is the avatar representation of ourselves in the art space. When in a gallery or at a performance purely in our first life, we can have some control over our expression. Our body expresses how we are feeling or what we are thinking. In a virtual world we have to script that expression. But when experiencing a piece of art we are usually quite immersed, putting all our concentration into that experience. To script a reaction feels like a performance. Indeed, I’m not saying that people who experience art in real life do not perform their experience of it, but what I find interesting in pieces of artwork like Fremont’s, is that I immediately feel terribly over-dressed and that I am acting inappropriately. For instance, this image is of a grandmother crying because she is seeing her grand-daughter for the first time through the border fence. And there I am (Lythe is), suddenly present in their world thanks to Fremont’s 360 nodes, with my bling and pretty smile…” From Border Art by Lythe Witte.