giovedì 15 gennaio 2009

ARENA: David "DC" Spensley aka DanCoyote Antonelli




uqbar. media art culture e Rinascimento Virtuale
Vi invitano all'apertura di /Invite you at the Opening of

David "DC" Spensley aka DanCoyote Antonelli

Thursday, January 15 - Saturday, January 17, 2009
(10 PM CET - 01 PM SLT)
ARENA EX.IT slurl: (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Experience%20Italy%20NW/128/128/37)


Bio:

DanCoyote Antonelli:

The avatar DanCoyote was created as the proxy for David “DC” Spensley in the virtual world of Second Life. The name DanCoyote is derived from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and in honor of a coyote that Joseph Beuys lived with for a time at the René Block Gallery in New York during his 1974 action, “I like America and America Likes Me”.

DanCoyote’s costume is intended to be simple and low bandwidth, placing the emphasis on work outside of the avatar. Each detail of DanCoyote’s garb, however, has significance. Yellow and black are high visibility colors and also the official colors of the City of San Francisco. The gold bands on his arms and legs symbolize a release from the bonds of gravity and physicality. The wand in the left hand is called a “caduceus”, which refers to the transformational nature of the Greek god Hermes. Caduceus .03 is also a one of a kind virtual tool, custom programmed to project commands to metamorphosize objects and installations from a distance.

DC Spensley:

An alumni of the San Francisco Art Institute, DC Spensley has lived and worked in Northern California since 1986. Spensley wears the hat of writer, director, cinematographer, composer, performance artist and most recently has appeared as the avatar DanCoyote Antonelli in the virtual reality simulation of Second Life. While most people jealously guard their pseudonymity inside this alternate reality, Spensley attempts parity in both worlds and has exhibited internationally at the ZeroOne/ISEA conference in 2006, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 2006 and Ars Electronica 2007.

About the work on exhibition at ARENA:

I call this grouping "Recent Retrospective" because it contains art from different bodies of my work done in the last three years as an artist in residence in the virtual world.

Most prominent is the nearly kilometer tall assembly entitled "Drawing". Drawing is neither a drawing or a sculpture, but is rather a conceptual tongue and cheek reference to both kinds of artifact that ironically cannot exist in simulated space. Drawing informs viewers about scale in the virtual world in a way unlike most constructions found in SL by negating the figurative context and pointing out the "avatar powers" of a viewer. This encourages a viewer to become more aware of their configuration options and invites the viewer realize a new level of proficiency in experiencing simulated space. The mute monoliths animate glacially, too slow for the eye to perceive and foreground a sense of the volume of space displaced by the work. Viewers take a chair conveyance available at the "Drawing" sign which carries them up to a vantage point high about the sim.

Also on display:

"Pixel Board", a binary feedback social sculpture. Viewers click squares on the smaller panel and this input appears as output on the larger display, which is then visible from a great distance. Pixel Board explores the social urge to leave graffiti, but in a one-bit, black and white icon format.

"Mutant Hossies". These three weird quasi-horse artworks are remediations of a classic sculptural form and displayed like bronze statues on marble platforms. They are a "mashup", or reworking of an original horse sculpture give away free by Second Life artist Nomasha Syaks. Mutant Hossies have embedded scripting that causes subtle animations to play that support the fanciful variation of horse depicted.

"Tomb Maze" Tomb Maze uses embedded reflexive scripting to create a tomb-like maze that people are encouraged to navigate their avatar through. The maze is possible. It does take some patience, so there is always the chance an impatient avatar might become trapped and need to find other means of escape!

"Very Silly Militude" is not what it seems. Very Silly Militude characterizes the quality of verissimilitude superficially. But when set to midnight, a viewer walking through will see light cast in unusual ways. The exterior layer of the work is a deliberate misdirection and while it appears to be about the movement of heavy objects in space, it is really about the way light is occluded by them.

Thanks for viewing!

David "DC" Spensley is DanCoyote in SL

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About the Sixth Finger...

The sixth finger symbolizes the computer cursor, or mankind's intervention into the metaverse (VR). The black hand itself attempts to make the connection between pre-historic artists who painted their own handprint on the walls of caves over 16,000 years ago and the similar efforts of artists today in the virtual world.


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