Posts Tagged ‘Portrait Island’

Virtual exhibitions in Second Life: Gillian Raymond

National Portrait Gallery online manager Gillian Raymond has curated a series of virtual exhibitions in Second Life – exploring the possibilities of making and exhibiting art online. Doppelganger will launch next month and looks at the concepts of constructed self, identity, truth and illusion in the digital realm. The NPGs first virtual exhibiton in Second Life was held in 2007, focusing on animated self-portraits. Gillian talks how web-based exhibitions are not necessarily about attracting new audiences but allowing existing audiences to be challenged in different ways.




Doppelganger, online exhibition, 23 October 2009 – 23 March 2010

Transcript
We are developing online exhibitions. We had one in 2007 – animated self-portraits. That sat as an exhibition only on the website. It didn’t actually have a physical presence in the gallery. We commissioned 12 animators to develop self-portraits for that particular exhibition and built it together into the website.

The next one is going to be launched in October, and that’s based in Second Life. That’s an exhibition called Doppelganger, that’s dealing with our concepts of identity in a digital realm and the idea of self-construction and self-presentation in those realms.

We’ve got five artists, from around the world, who are building artworks on Portrait Island. That’s a pretty exciting project for us.


A scene from Portrait Island

You set up Portrait Island in Second Life?
Yes, I got someone to design it. Again, I don’t have the skills. I barely have these skills to walk around, but I’m getting there.

Is there a move to be developing more virtual exhibitions and have things to attract your audiences into the website such as the picture shows you’ve been doing?
We are developing some really interesting online things actually. What’s on in the physical space doesn’t always work with the opportunities that the online environment presents.

The online environment is not a substitute for a face-to-face experience with an artwork, in my opinion. I think there are some things, for example: the type of crops that we have on our express pages of the artworks may tell you something else, will tell you something further about the artwork if they are designed in a particular way.

I really think that there is no real substitute for actually experiencing that artwork in the flesh. You’re always going to be just seeing a reproduction on the website. But if galleries start moving toward curating online exhibitions, I think they can really work with the opportunities that it presents. Give a different slant on things, and take people into different directions. Try things that they won’t experience in the physical space.

That’s the philosophy that’s behind Second Life and the Second Life exhibition, is that we didn’t want to reproduce the National Portrait Gallery in Second Life. What’s the point? You can come to the real thing.

We wanted to take what Second Life can do. I mean, people can fly for a start; that presents all kinds of opportunities in itself. So we wanted to take that concept. And you can’t, in Second Life, expect visitors to sit there and read reams of a catalogue essay or a wall-text, which they may do in a physical space.

So they’re just little examples of the opportunities that can be presented if people think more about the medium that they’re operating in.

You must be building a very different audience in Second Life audience compared with in the physical space.
I don’t know if they’re necessarily different audiences. They may be people that would never have the opportunity to come to Canberra and see the National Portrait Gallery. There are communities in Second Life which are fascinating groups of others who are really thinking, in very interesting ways, about all the things that we’re primarily interested in — in terms of identity or digital media artworks, those kind of things.

I think roughly they may not necessarily be a different audience in terms of demographics either. There is an idea that Second Life is a younger audience, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think there’s a lot of middle-aged and older people who are engaging the digital environments now and spend quite a lot of time in there and don’t find it threatening or scary, which seems to be the message that the media tries to portray anyway.

If you curate an exhibition in Second Life on Portrait Island and you ask different artists to get involved, do you both have shared copyright use of those images for future marketing or do they own them? How does that work?
We entered into a contract with the artists. The artwork’s copyright is always retained by the artists. In this particular, we’re not talking about an acquisitional exhibition. So, we pay the artists a production fee for the artworks, and we pay them an artist’s fee for the duration of the exhibition.

So from October to March, we can display the exhibition on our island. We can use stills or machinenama or video to advertise the works and advertise the exhibition. But once we get to March next year, that relationship ends and the artworks are retained by the artists.

Email Gillian to learn more about virtual exhibitions.

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