The following is a transcript from a talk I gave to the students of Simon Fraser University. The talk took place in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel as it exists on the popular virtual environment called Second Life.
[2011/10/03 14:56] Greetings: Teal Baxton Welcome to New York. Don’t forget to remove your weapons and stay dressed! Enjoy the sim!
[2011/11/23 11:12] Teal Baxton: Hello.
[2011/11/23 11:12] Cid Admiral: i just introduced you to the class…are you here with us?
[2011/11/23 11:12] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ FOR INFO ON UPCOMING SHOWS PLEASE CHECK THE MARQUEE NEXT TO THE STAGE !!!
[2011/11/23 11:13] Teal Baxton: oh ok. yes. I am. Hi.
[2011/11/23 11:13] Teal Baxton: I’m over here, just sitting behind you.
[2011/11/23 11:13] Teal Baxton: hangin out at the Chelsea Hotel.
[2011/11/23 11:13] Teal Baxton: I’ve been spending a lot of time here lately.
[2011/11/23 11:14] Teal Baxton: Have a seat….shall I begin?
[2011/11/23 11:15] Cid Admiral: would you like to be known as Teal Baxton?
[2011/11/23 11:16] Teal Baxton: ahh , no, it’s ok , I’m David Look. This is my avatar in Second Life. Second Life makes you choose a name based on a list of predetermined names that they provide you with. I hate the name Teal Baxton actually.
[2011/11/23 11:17] Teal Baxton: So. hello everyone…
[2011/11/23 11:17] Cid Admiral: hello… perhaps you can begin by telling the class a bit about how your art work relates to this SL environment
[2011/11/23 11:17] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ KEEP UP ON WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE HOTEL CHECK OUT THE BLOG! http://virtualhotelchelsea.blogspot.com/
[2011/11/23 11:18] Chelsea Hotel Donation Soup Can 2010: Thanks for being part of the Hotel Chelsea experience!
[2011/11/23 11:18] Teal Baxton: sure.
[2011/11/23 11:20] Teal Baxton: so yeah, I asked you to come here, as I thought it might be of interest to you all
[2011/11/23 11:20] Teal Baxton: We’re actually inside the Chelsea Hotel lobby right now, well as it exists on Second Life
[2011/11/23 11:20] Teal Baxton: I’ve been spending a lot of time here because I’ve been trying to shoot a movie inside the hotel…in Second Life
[2011/11/23 11:21] Teal Baxton: but it’s proving quite difficult, and honestly I’m not sure if i’ll ever finish it. but in the process I’ve been doing a lot of exploring here as well. i’m not sure what eventually might come of it
[2011/11/23 11:21] Teal Baxton: but I find the relationship between the real and the virtual pretty interesting, and Second Life offers all kinds of representations of real places in a virtual space. i guess thats one of the motives for my being here
[2011/11/23 11:21] Cid Admiral: can you tell us more about this movie?
[2011/11/23 11:22] Teal Baxton: Oh yes. the current concept is suicide. Avatar suicide. Basically I’ve been repeatedly throwing myself off the roof of the hotel and been trying to film it
[2011/11/23 11:22] Teal Baxton: then I want to edit the film into a constant loop of me, well my avatar, trying to kill itself.
[2011/11/23 11:22] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ NEW ART EXHIBIT IN GALLERY 23. CHECK IT OUT JUST NEXT DOOR TO THE HOTEL.
[2011/11/23 11:22] Teal Baxton: Which, is imposssible
[2011/11/23 11:23] Cid Admiral: what about your life in virtual NY? do you interact in other parts of the city?
[2011/11/23 11:24] Teal Baxton: I’ve done another project that took place at various other places in Second Life where I was making a subversive style of photography often referred to as “upskirtng”
[2011/11/23 11:25] Teal Baxton: where mostly men go around public places and try to capture views of women on escalators and whatnot, in the hopes that they’ll get a view of something that excites them.
[2011/11/23 11:25] Teal Baxton: I found the concept of treating an avatar, well violating an avatar’s privacy kind of interest to me. Again, the issue of real/virtual is at play here. I would never even think of doing such a thing to a real person. But an avatar isn’t a real person, but it’s still a representation of a real person. it brings up all kinds of questions.
[2011/11/23 11:26] Teal Baxton: Many users in Second Life take their “second” life super seriously.
[2011/11/23 11:26] Teal Baxton: and would be right pissed if they new I was doing that. I’ve even run into a bit of trouble here at the Chelsea with my art making activities
[2011/11/23 11:26] Cid Admiral: can you speak further about your practice and digital spaces? have you done other work that relates to the virtual?
[2011/11/23 11:27] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ PUBLIC NUDITY, SOLICITATIONS AND ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
[2011/11/23 11:28] Teal Baxton: sure. My work is a bit all over the place, which I think is a good thing. Not all of it deals with just virtual worlds. but I think using existing/everyday technologies and forcing them into things they weren’t intended to do (like making art) is something that interests me a great deal. The internet is an obvious venue for such things
[2011/11/23 11:28] And representing myself on the internet conjures up identity play that I think is similar in many respects to performance art.
[2011/11/23 11:28] I also like to make things that are remnants of these manipulations – from forcing technology to make art, screen shots, audio, video, whatever…
[2011/11/23 11:28] Teal Baxton: for example, well I have 2 examples.
[2011/11/23 11:29] Teal Baxton: awhile ago i happened up the Urban Outfitters website. it’s a clothing/housewares store. and they sell bikes. in fact you can customize a bike and paint it the way you like it and they’ll ship it to you just like you made it. and I thought this was great. [2011/11/23 11:29] Teal Baxton: it made me think of Greg Curnoe, one of my favourite canadian artists. He was really into cycling and did many paintings of his bicycles
[2011/11/23 11:30] Teal Baxton: So I used the urban outfitters website to paint something like 30 bikes, each different and i took screen shots of them all. A website designed to sell things instead , for me became an easel on which to paint
[2011/11/23 11:31] Teal Baxton: here’s one of the bikes: http://superseriousart.davidlook.net/some-urban-outfitter-bicycles/?pg=2
[2011/11/23 11:32] Cid Admiral: how do you think through ‘exhibiting’ your work when its so tied to the virtual[
[2011/11/23 11:32] Teal Baxton: if the situation arises in which i am to exhibit in a gallery then i simply work with the constraints of screen resolution to print quality (or video, audio, whatever the medium) and try to get the biggest and best representaion of what I can get. Second Life is great for this as you can export any resolution you require. Google Sketch Up offers the ability to export at any size too and video can be enlarged quite easily via digital projectors and widescreen monitors. i guess my bikes, at 72dpi wouldn’t print that big, but then i might consider making them into a video
[2011/11/23 11:33] Teal Baxton: A more conceptual answer to the question is that a physical representation of virtual space is just that – a represention. regardless of what medium it is, it still acts as a representation of something, someone, or some place. i don’t think the question was ever posed to a studio based artist? how they approached work so tied to the studio? they simply moved it to wherever it could be shown and presented it in a manner that made sense to the idea concept or whatever. where the work is made shouldn’t govern how or where its shown
[2011/11/23 11:35] Teal Baxton: both venues real/virtual are related to each other in a very complex way but its becomming increasingly hard to discern between the two spac
[2011/11/23 11:38] Teal Baxton: Xbox Kinect is a perfect example of where things are going
[2011/11/23 11:39] Teal Baxton: gaming is moving away from a rather passive experience that to me was not unlike twiddling your thumbs, to a more physical one
[2011/11/23 11:39] Teal Baxton: but you’re still just looking at a tv
[2011/11/23 11:39] Teal Baxton: eventually the two “worlds” will blend, and we’ll be able to move inside digital space, virtual worlds… and that is going to be a huge shift in perception of “real”
[2011/11/23 11:40] Cid Admiral: Can you talk a bit about Paul’s Motor Inn
[2011/11/23 11:40] Teal Baxton: Sure. Paul’s is a pretty cool project, but I’m kind of starting to hate it. ahah I mean the idea is great, it’s just the videos didnt quite end up being what i had hoped. really i should do it again. we were quite drunk, and did them very off the cuff. my outfit was entirely found at Value Village about an hour before we began shooting and I had this wig and stuff on and I wound up looking like a character in a the beasty boys’ Sabotage video. i just wanted to look like a typical business travelor
[2011/11/23 11:41] Teal Baxton: but let me describe the concept, because i think in that respect its very important work
[2011/11/23 11:42] Teal Baxton: so. I kind of became obsesssed with trip adivsor
[2011/11/23 11:42] Teal Baxton: sorry TripAdvisor,. the travel review website
[2011/11/23 11:42] Teal Baxton: and the way in which digital cameras and video, user generated content was able to really form an idea of what a place was like, without having been there. Google Street view included, we’re in an age that allows us incredible insight into spaces on the other side of the earth without leaving our living rooms
[2011/11/23 11:42] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ JOIN US ON FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_193485884011401&ap=1
[2011/11/23 11:43] Teal Baxton: that is really interesting to me
[2011/11/23 11:43] Teal Baxton: another fact was the text descriptions of people’s experiences at hotels
[2011/11/23 11:44] Teal Baxton: and how they were subjective to all kinds of things.
[2011/11/23 11:44] Teal Baxton: but they, to me, were stories
[2011/11/23 11:44] Teal Baxton: so i wanted to take this a step further
[2011/11/23 11:44] Teal Baxton: and book into a hotel
[2011/11/23 11:44] Teal Baxton: and stay there overnight and make content, all for my “review” of that hotel. it was user generated content as performance. social media is huge in the world of online right now, and its’ all about authenticity . well, i wanted to do something different. to create a ficticious description of a stay at a hotel in a space that relies on authenticity
[2011/11/23 11:45] Teal Baxton: http://superseriousart.davidlook.net/pauls-motor-inn/?pg=9
[2011/11/23 11:45] Teal Baxton: the videos and photos were to be uploaded as part of all the content that would have been added by other users as well so it would have been all mixed together
[2011/11/23 11:46] Teal Baxton: my hope was that when a person came looking for information about Paul’s Motor Inn they would have gotten .. my stuff. Which in my opinion is an interpretation of my stay there. it really is.. i stayed there, and i documented it. that’s what TripAdvisor wants you to do? i thought
[2011/11/23 11:46] Teal Baxton: well
[2011/11/23 11:47] Teal Baxton: tripadvisor didn’t see it that way
[2011/11/23 11:47] Teal Baxton: and unfortuneately it was all removed from the site within hours
[2011/11/23 11:47] Cid Admiral: hey i’m going to move to your website to show the work and we can finnish up in gchat
[2011/11/23 11:47] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ TO JOIN OUR GROUP CLICK THIS LINK IN CHAT secondlife:///app/group/523bf3b7-d88a-fcfa-bfc0-58959dba88f1/about
[2011/11/23 11:47] Teal Baxton: oh i thought yhou were clikcing the links right from the chat window
[2011/11/23 11:48] Cid Admiral: we were it’s just on a delay
[2011/11/23 11:48] Chelsea Hotel Donation Soup Can 2010: Thanks for being part of the Hotel Chelsea experience!
[2011/11/23 11:48] Teal Baxton: weird ok, lets finish up on gchat
[2011/11/23 11:48] Chelsea Hotel Donation Soup Can 2010: Thanks for being part of the Hotel Chelsea experience!
[2011/11/23 11:48] Teal Baxton: yeah SECOND LIFE SUCKS (sorry, I kind of frustrated with it lately)
[2011/11/23 11:52] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ FOR INFO ON UPCOMING SHOWS PLEASE CHECK THE MARQUEE NEXT TO THE STAGE !!!
[2011/11/23 11:57] Hotel Chelsea: ++++++++ KEEP UP ON WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE HOTEL CHECK OUT THE BLOG! http://virtualhotelchelsea.blogspot.com/