This is a collaborative project, with Isabella Ng, to create a piece for our thesis show at Gallery 2, part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The project is a bit of a summarization of both of our projects up until this point, which have been involved with sculptural, performative, and digital mediums. The piece(s) deal with various levels of reality. There is a performer wearing a mountain-man costume, who is watching the projection of a Second Life mountain-man. The performer is trying to see the SL mountain-man fly, which happens every half an hour on the 12th and 42nd minute of the hour. The real life mountain-man, who wants to be a mountain-man, and also wants to fly - continuously and longingly watches the SL version of a mountain-man as they mirror/perform off each-other.
The second piece is a chair made completely out of paper. The wood grain is hand-drawn as well as the bolts and other elements. It hangs within the space, next to mountain-man. There is a second projection across the gallery with two Second Life characters trying to reach the chair. They recite texts and perform/glitch as they look to the chair. Their performance is driven by raw data generated from separate python scripts and formatted in valid animation format, so that they tweak and contort in unnatural and hyper-real forms. They continuously speak to each other lines of text about the chair.
Both installations have elements grounded in non-reality. The space where the projections are is covered in fake wood paneling, and the space with mountain-man and the chair has fake marble tiles on the floor.