CONCEPT: Avatar Shit
Interesting virtual public art concept!
Patrick Lichty has written about the oddity of remediation. We might ask, who cares if a new medium, like Virtual Reality can repeat the same works that a previous medium has, don’t we want to see what the new medium can do that’s new!?
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In VB32 – Shit Happens we considered “shit” in the George Carlin sense of commodities and overconsumption. Now in this concept for Avatar Shit I’d like to think about it in the Piero Manzoni sense of some aspect or essence of the artist, or the avatar.
Quoted from: CONCEPT: Avatar Shit.
The Manzoni version of shit is the 90 tins of faeces that he had made and called art, because art is art if you only talk about it as art, right?
But this concept made me think about what kinds of by-products avatars create, or what kind of consumption we engage in online. I’m tempted to say there’s a lot of shit online – every aggressive or plain useless comment on Youtube, every inch of spam out there. I for one get a few chinchilla spam comments a day… about chinchilla beds, chinchilla fur, chinchilla food and pet keeping. It never ends, anything related to chinchillas, I’ve had a spam comment about it! And I wonder what asshole they are coming out of. Who’s sitting out there spewing chinchilla shit at me? (you! stopit!)
But what about the shit no one is purposefully making online, what about the shit we all just want to flush down the toilet? The sad residue of online existence. Or is it the things we do online in private, ’cause it’s unsightly yet unavoidable and so, so human to do this once a day. Everybody does it, but let’s not talk about it, lets pretend we’re all clean and tidy like avatars. Like dolls. Like Pandemonia.
Traveling the Multiverse 