Art Center

Established Nov 2006

Avignon (140,180,490) in Second Life

ABOUT

Art Center is a virtual exhibition space showing the work of selective contemporary artists, based in the metaverse Second Life. The Center is comprised of vast glass galleries gracefully floating in the sky. Guests can stroll around the sculpture park with its lush flower meadow, tranquil lake and majestic cliffs, all surrounded by minimalistic waterfall walls. They can also relax, enjoy the ocean view and take in a sunset just below the clouds at the visitor center.

Art Center's inaugural group show "you are here" set a precedent by showing top NY artists' work in Second Life for the first time. The roster includes those who have shown previously at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Alleged Galleries, Deitch Projects, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Creative Time's The Brooklyn Anchorage, Bronwyn Keenan, American Fine Arts, Thread Waxing Space, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery & many others worldwide. In May 2007, Art Center presented "Destroy Television", a mixed reality installation by futurist Jerry Paffendorf and metaverse architect Christian Westbrook, curated by and in collaboration with artist Annie Ok. This exhibition occurred simultaneously in Second Life at Art Center as well as in NYC at Fuse Gallery. In June 2007, Art Center presented the Second Life premiere of "77 Million Paintings" by Brian Eno, in partnership with The Long Now Foundation and blueair.tv. This exhibition happened concurrently with the real world one at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Please join the "Art Center" group in Second Life to be updated in-world on future shows and events.

Directors:
Annie Ok (Xantherus Halberd in SL)
Derek Lerner (Rhizome Szydlowska in SL)

Contact: artcentersl [at] gmail.com

Teleport directly to Art Center via SLurl Map

EVENTS

listen

Art Center presents:

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with DJ Astrud Sands

Sat 3.29.08
3-6pm PDT
Art Center Sculpture Park

EXHIBITIONS

Cheryl Dunn : "Lost Gold Earring" & "Sleeping Men"

2 Collections of Photographs by Cheryl Dunn

"Lost Gold Earring" & "Sleeping Men"

About the artist:

Cheryl Dunn is a New York-based photographer, filmmaker and sociologist. Upon graduating from Rutgers University with a degree in art history, Dunn moved to Europe to pursue fashion photography. After traveling and shooting extensively for two years, she moved back to New York where she became a successful photographer shooting for magazines such as Spin, Vogue, Elle, Harpers Bazaar and Dazed and Confused. In the mid 1990s, Dunn began to focus much more on filmmaking, first creating small pieces for herself and eventually shooting and directing some of the most classic films of this generation. Her first film, Sped (1997), was created as a series of vignettes on young artists from the worlds of skateboarding and graffiti. Produced originally as a promotional film for a snowboard company and for a very small audience, the film went on to be featured in film festivals worldwide. Her second film, Backworlds for Words (1999), is a documentation of a skateboard ballet, choreographed by artist/professional skateboarder Mark Gonzales for the Stadtisches Museum in Monchengladbach, Germany. The film includes footage of the actual performance as well as candid interviews and documentation of Gonzales performing poetry readings around Germany. In 2000, her photos were included in the Widely Unknown show at Deitch Projects in New York. Other projects with Deitch include co-curating shows entitled Starstruck and Session the Bowl in 2002 which featured her two-channel video installation Social Security. In 2002, she was awarded a residency at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, where she was commissioned to make a film in conjunction with the design exhibit, Mood River. Come Mute is an autobiographical fable representing the life of a young New Jersey girl as she tries to figure out how to bring creativity to her working class existence.

Cheryl Dunn was one of the original artists of the underground art movement which developed from Aaron Rose's influential Alleged Galleries in NYC and was included in Rose's book, "Young Sleek and Full of Hell". Her work has also toured with Rose's "Beautiful Losers" exhibition which showed in Cincinnati at the Contemporary Arts Center, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, and The Contemporary in Baltimore.

More info:
http://www.cheryldunn.net

"Destroy Television"

Art Center:

"Destroy Television"

Art Center presents "Destroy Television", a mixed reality interactive virtual installation by futurist Jerry Paffendorf and metaverse architect Christian Westbrook, curated by and in collaboration with artist Annie Ok. This exhibition occurred simultaneously in the metaverse Second Life at Art Center as well as in NYC at Fuse Gallery from May 23 - June 2, 2007.

About:

Destroy Television is an avatar (a virtual person) in an online virtual world called Second Life. Everything you see inside of Second Life is created by the hundreds of thousands of people who regularly go "inworld" to use and experience it. People own the things they create and can sell them to each other in a real economy run almost completely on imagination without physical scarcity. Some consider it a very early glimpse into an all-encompassing future internet that seamlessly mixes atoms and bits.

Crazy things happen in Second Life (an often frustrating but creatively empowering Wild West where Fortune 500 companies mingle with robots, elves, and furries) and you have to remember that every avatar you see is controlled by a real person somewhere in the real world all coming together in the same psychological space. Destroy Television is a creature of this condition. She was "born" in a kitchen cabinet in Brooklyn stuffed full of computers as a household side-project for Jerry and Christian who live together and work professionally on virtual worlds. They playfully wanted to make an avatar that would surrender to the network, that anyone could watch and control, perform for and assume. They also wanted to stream and record her unique experience to share with other people.

Her presence in the house as an always-on gateway into the metaverse and her constant need to be moved, reset, updated, repurposed, and re-explained, pulled Jerry and Christian into the kitchen cabinet with her, making life in the virtual world an un-ignorable extension of everyday real life living, and, if Destroy has a point-of-view, vice versa. Documentation of this inspiration, experience and history was on display in Fuse Gallery in NYC as well as at Art Center in Second Life. The virtual exhibition at Art Center, created by Annie Ok, allows visitors from all over the world to experience it from wherever they may be, whenever they want.

For the 10 day duration, Destroy Television toured all over Second Life and her explorations were projected into Fuse gallery at the same time that they were projected virtually into Art Center. Destroy was programmed to take a screenshot every 5 seconds and every 30 seconds, the screenshot was also sent to Destroy's Flickr along with information about where she was, who was nearby, what was being said, and how many viewers were watching via destroytv.com. Viewers of destroytv.com could not only watch along on the live stream but also chat to whomever Destroy was near in Second Life via the site. All location SLurls, parcel names, avatar names, and chat history were automated to become Flickr tags and are searchable on her tag cloud. Shooting continuously in the virtual world for 10 days at ~17,280 shots a day resulted in 240,558 images, which were then turned into high speed time lapse videos, forming the most comprehensive documentary of Second Life to date. The raw, unedited high res footage can be found here. The low res versions of the videos can be seen on Destroy Television's YouTube. Current work in progress: an edited, slowed-down high res DVD of Destroy Television's lifelogging/lifecasting odyssey with artists' commentary.

"Destroy Television" exhibition - see all 160

Art Center: "Destroy Television" exhibition invite

Art Center: "Destroy Television" exhibition

Art Center: "Destroy Television" opening @ Fuse Gallery in NYC

"you are here"

Art Center:

"you are here"

Art Center's inaugural exhibition, "you are here" features the artwork of New York's brightest talent: Andre Razo, Bryan Collins, Cameron Martin, Cheryl Dunn, David Merten, Erik Foss, Ivory Serra, J Penry, John Minh Nguyen, Kim Bennett, Kimberly Stillman, Martina Hoogland-Ivanow, Patrick O'Dell, Peter Rentz, Rostarr, Ryan Coleman, Sadek Bazaraa, and Shelter Serra.

The roster includes those who have shown previously at such prestigious institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Alleged Galleries, Deitch Projects, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Creative Time's The Brooklyn Anchorage, Bronwyn Keenan, American Fine Arts, Thread Waxing Space, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and many others worldwide.

"you are here" sets a monumental precedent, enabling Second Life residents from all over the globe to experience the best that the contemporary New York art movement has to offer in an immersive online 3D medium. It is just the beginning of many more exciting exhibitions at Art Center.

"you are here" exhibition - see all 24

Art Center: "you are here" exhibition invite

PAST EXHIBITIONS

Brian Eno : "77 MIllion Paintings"

Art Center presents the Second Life premiere of 77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, in partnership with The Long Now Foundation and blueair.tv. This exhibition will be happening concurrently with the real world one at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and take place throughout various locations in Second Life, each with their own unique installation, as well as a different 77 Million Paintings collectible gift at each spot.

Conceived by Brian Eno as "visual music", his latest artwork, 77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape which continues his exploration into light as an artist's medium and the aesthetic possibilities of "generative software".

He first created 77 Million Paintings to bring art to the increasing number of flat panel TV's and monitors that often sit darkened and underutilized. Now Eno is also showing large installations of this work, recently at the Venice Bienniale and Milan Triennale, and in Tokyo, London and South Africa. The installation will be the Second Life premiere of his work to dovetail the North American premiere in San Francisco.

77 Million Paintings installation in Second Life developed by Annabeth Robinson, known virtually as AngryBeth Shortbread.

Brian Eno's avatar sculpture created by Annie Ok (Xantherus Halberd in SL).

Runs: Fri 6/29 - Sun 7/1

More info:

http://www.longnow.org/77m
http://www.blueair.tv