It’s an open show in Second Life, set up by Jan Northoff. Art in virtual worlds’s is a bit like art in Denmark, where art in the last decade have been politicized as nationalist norm. In the series of talks under Boom Pearls Northoff talked about his work as building. He sort of stopped making art after leaving the american desert and began working in 3D simulations. Now he understands art as context. I think it’s a point that you can see practice in a vw as something particular but it is still part of reality.

The Boom Pearls talks about art online didn’t create a real dialogue with other digital artists who thinks presence online as participation in these places leave less space for critical work. The different points of view are nuanced and related to different art projects. Maybe it’s not the time to make a dialogue between these types of work, it’s  different categories sometimes.

My initiative with Boom Pearls was intended to point to how virtual worlds can be a platform for art, also for artists new to social real time simulations in 3D. It seems to be crucial that geographic limits can be even harder to deal with in virtual worlds. It’s is simply too hard for someone to make it into a virtual place. Their computer or the network infrastructure might not live up to the standards. Still, artists who do not stay in a vw can use it as a temporary play ground, and play with the new possibilities, based on their artworld experience. My work is then sort of supporting link’s between different contexts and the inworld driven economy of these server park playgrounds.

youtube version

This is a video from the installation, which was available until May 30, 2009, at Boom Pearls in Second Life. More information about the project boompearls.com/?page_id=493.

Documentation of the installation and a press release is available at Boom Pearls project homepage.

SL was thought dead by many after it had a big burst in the media starting two years ago. Its difficult for institutions like museums to be flexible and do projects initiated on their own. A lot of people still make art in there. Some are integrated as inhabitants while others more use it as a tool and tend to think more about how the project may work out in Real Life. Projects like New Berlin create a model of Berlin in 1:1. The last project in Boom Pearls by Tommy Støckel was an installation consisting of a large number of objects made by the inhabitants. This way he states that he does not make art in SL based on RL. While Boom Pearls invites artists new in SL it would be interesting to discus this starting point with others.

in Second Life as second part of the Boom Pearls series at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Phyllira/169/139/90

Opening online December 20th, 19:00 – 20:30 GMT +01.

With the invitation to exhibit in Second Life Tommy Støckel has seen the opportunity to work in a Land Art format that under normal circumstances would be difficult to do in Real Life. Støckel has for a long time been working with accumulating simple geometric shapes to form complex abstract sculptures, and he has always seen the computer generated 3D object as an important point of reference. From a distance his sculptures resemble virtual objects, but at a closer look these sculptures have an obviously handcrafted quality using materials such as paper and cardboard.

Second Life is a new frontier to Støckel – a world where certain restrictions in our normal world are non-existent, and where new opportunities for artwork come into existence. The artist’s usual, not very weather consistent, materials would under normal circumstances be impossible to work with outdoors, but in this parallel world the single avatar has quite another control over nature: Objects can be made out of nothing and the landscape can be manipulated to suit the owner’s individual taste.

With the project “Primitives Collection Field” Støckel has chosen to work with a sort of virtual Land Art – an otherwise problematic genre to him. He has covered Boom Pearl’s piece of land with geometric objects that have all been arranged in relation to the Second Life grid, which defines that entire world in metric measurements.

“Primitives Collection Field” consists of approximately 1,100 prims – or primitives – that have been made by disassembling a large number of freebies, and thereby reducing them to their simplest geometric parts. These are shapes, which one could call the building stones of Second Life, and which everything is build from. Freebies are free objects accessible to everyone that finds them, and Støckel prefers to use these free accessible objects in Second Life as his working material. Along with the Second Life grid, these modeled objects are an important part of the world, and Tommy Støckel thinks that a project in such a specific world demands that you relate to, and to work with, what is given in this particular world.

The installation can be seen until the 24th of February 2008.

Read more about Boom Pearls at www.boompearls.com

Best regards

Jon Paludan