STATEMENT

Artist, Lynne Heller and her intrepid Second Life avatar, Nar Duell, will construct a mixed reality installation at Redhead Gallery, Toronto, ON, Canada concurrently showing at The Heldscalla Foundation, Buttemere, Second Life. Second Life (SL), the three dimensional, animated online world will face-off with First Life (FL, aka real reality).

Download this statement as a pdf.

Mixed Realities

 “Second Life now runs on more than 3,000 servers and has close to a million registered users*, but the fundamental idea of the world hasn’t changed: it’s a place where you can turn the pictures in your head into a kind of pixilated reality. It’s a venue for self-expression that’s among the richest and most satisfying out there.”

Philip Rosedale
CEO and Founder, Linden Lab

* 9 million as of 09/07

There are no toilets in Second Life (SL). It is a somewhat weird and flat world, with a decidedly photoshopped, airbrushed aesthetic. Most of the time you are alone in huge shopping malls full of sex-crazed clothing options and body parts. Often the place feels like a deserted ghost town rather than a world teeming with 9 million members. One of the most unnerving of SL characteristics is its unpredictable spirit. Internet speed lags result in strange, glitchy motion, slow communication and bizarre physics. A feeling of ambivalence and superficiality permeates. At any time you can quit / log-off / teleport with a button click. Unlike First Life (FL), you can just leave. 

The fuel that SL adds to our to our real life culture of consumerism and discontent is both fascinating and disconcerting. Much has been written about the commerce of this brave, new world. Not surprisingly, it looks mostly like the commerce of our old world. Sex, fashion, cars, perfected body parts and weapons sell. But what SL has in abundance is ‘promise’, the allure of thinking that anything is possible – and that very much trumps reality, FL. 

For the last number of years my work has occupied an awkward space – dreaming gone awry, missed or mismatched opportunities and the overreaching nature of human ambition. Falling short is much more interesting than succeeding. My enduring interest in exploring disparity is captured in a mixed reality installation.

 “On the one hand, there are our desires and yearnings; on the other, reality. And in between there is a wide gap filled with our very human day-to-day struggles while we live, work and play. Dreams and reality bumping up against each other manifest in odd juxtapositions, quirky coincidence, and endearing fumbles. My current work reflects my interest in exploring our adaptation as we wander around—mostly lost—improvising in this rocky terrain. I love contemplating our humanity and finding beauty amongst the modest, overfamiliar artifacts of our culture.”

Lynne Heller, Artist Statement

Garden Metaphor

 The first thing you notice when entering SL is the computer aesthetic. 3D in SL is built from prims, basic geometric shapes made of flat planes, creating a distinctively blocky visual arena. Flying through trees is the epitome of that model as they are made up of 2D. real life images that zoom past your peripheral vision. 

The garden, an age-old metaphor for promise, is made uniform and surface in SL. The dense, richness of FL nature thumbs its nose at virtual reproduction. On the other hand SL nature is lovable in all its ambition. It just doesn’t cut it but it gamely tries to compete with the real. It is clumsy and bizarre but endearing. The question is, do you impose or submit to a computer aesthetic? What wins? Texture, grime and molecules or the squeaky-clean 0’s and 1’s of the digital prims? By confusing the real and the virtual, overlapping them as they project in and out of each other, the question is posed and confounded. 

Iteration 

A key component of ‘really [this show is rented]’ is the iterative loop - streaming video of the Redhead gallery space into the SL gallery, The Heldscalla Foundation. The completion of the loop occurs by projecting SL onto the wall of the FL gallery. In effect you are watching yourself doing things. The inevitable narcissism of a SL existence (and perhaps even a real one) is mirrored by the technology. 

Presence 

I will sit the show during the galleries’ hours (EST). Ironically technology needs more tending than a real garden. On a practical level if my avatar, Nar Duell, isn’t actively ‘doing things’ in SL then she gets logged off and the whole exhibition goes AFK - away from keyboard.

On a personal level, I enjoy installing shows and feel bereft when I walk away from a gallery after the installation process is finished. It often feels like the work should just be starting. Gardens don’t stop growing and always need nourishing. I will continue to build my First and Second pieces, find new ways to see what I have assembled, meet the people / avatars who visit and have time to talk and listen.   

Renting as Artmaking

As much as possible, I’ve rented all the components for this installation – lights, projectors, streaming server, classic office-accessory rubber-plants and space. I intend for all these ‘by the week’ artifacts to underline the transitory nature of virtual existence. 

Rented plants are a particularly critical part of this work. Redhead will be filled with tropical plants usually found in office lobbies. Rentable landscaping plays a largely unnoticed role in filling our daily lives with a vague semblance of the outdoors - a marker of our idealization of nature. This flora is the stand-in for nature in our everyday lives and will become even more so situated within the hermetic world of the art gallery. 

The piece will be ‘returned to owner’ come December 15 / 07.

Abbreviated Bio 

Lynne Heller, Toronto based artist and designer, works in a variety of disciplines. Principally known for her work in fibre, she also has created new media pieces, sound, websites and installations. Heller completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Group exhibitions include, The Stray Show, (Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA), Wide Borders, Heller, Roy & Thiessen, (Burlington Art Centre, Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Cambridge Library & Gallery).  Her solo exhibitions have been shown both nationally and internationally (Havana, Cuba; Chicago, USA; Santa Fe, USA). She is currently a member of Redhead Gallery, Toronto. 

http://lynneheller.com 

Nar Duell hasn’t done much in her short life but she does own a great wardrobe.

Oh hang on - Abaris Brautigan just reminded me that Nar also attended an epic quest to the edge of the world and thereby participated in an allegorical act of electrate thinking!