Immersive and quasi-immersive gaming and online cultures have infiltrated our personalities. Dashing across the labyrinthine never-endingness of the www and the gaming culture, Eva and Franco aka 0100101110101101.org covet the many-ness of lives, opportunities and possibilities.
Traveling by Telephone is divvied into three smaller suites. The first sequence features the ‘Annoying Japanese Child Dinosaur’ avatar portraiture series. It stars online avatars, which can also be found moseying around in the Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), Second Life.
The second entails videos depicting three synthetic performances – ‘Reenactment of Imponderabilia by Marina Abramovic and Ulay’ (2007), ‘Reenactment of The Singing Sculpture by Gilbert & George’ (2007) and ‘Reenactment of Chris Burden’s Shoot’ (2007) – enacted by the online avatars of Eva and Franco. These synthetic performances of iconic works were staged by Eva and Franco within the precincts of Second Life – enabled by machinima (machine + cinema), a form of filmmaking made popular by its ability to capture activity / inactivity within video games.
The final leg is a suite of prints profiling topographies and interiorscapes. The seemingly placid landscapes and interiors are in fact moored in the ultra-violent first-person shooter (FPR) videogame Half-Life, captured in atypical moments of tranquility which surface pre- and post-massive amounts of bloodshed. In their deliberate manipulation of the ongoing narrative they replicate the scenario of the highly doctored image / reality. Ironically, these virtual topographies printed on canvas, call to mind the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840). ‘November (The tree of crows)’ is titled after the German Romantic painter’s ‘The Tree of Crows’ (1822), in which the belligerent virtual setup of Half-Life found an uncanny relation.
Gitanjali Dang
Bombay
