From the recent archives vault #1 - Second Front at LIVE2007...

Here I am arriving on the scene just in time to switch from my curatorial role at the LIVE Biennial to that of an avatar performance artist... This performance was a direct cross between Hermann Nitsch's Orgies and Mysteries Theatre (including Hermann's organ soundtrack) combined with well...ummmm...Second Front's own retrospective legacy of mutual pan-narcissism ;-) For your info, the foxxy lady in the foreground is the Western Front's camera avatar, Westernfront Obscure.

Hey there LIVEly art-historians and pixel-dust collecting choreographers,

First of all, I would like to announce that yesterday was the 1-year anniversary of my blog (well, my very first posting was actually on November 20th, 2006 but there was no picture in that entry).

Ok, lets fast-forward to the present-day....

Some of you blog-readers may have attended two of Second Front's recent performances within the past month or two and might be wondering where all our recent archives are, right? Well, we have been too busy focusing on the next performance that is always looming in the near future to really reflect properly on our classic performances from the recent past.

For better of for worse, Second Life works on an extremely fast time scale and it can be exhausting to try and keep up with all the bloggings and such especially when one has a real life to maintain behind the scenes.

I actually have hardly any time to even blog these relatively moldy old performances tonight because quite frankly, I am premiering my new music composition "Riesenrad" with the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse for the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna this saturday and then on December 6th, I have to perform with Second Front yet again for the Art Basel Miami festival in Miami Beach - coordinated as part of the TELECULTURE festival via the Pace Digital Gallery. Oh, and I did mention that the Canadian representatives of Second Front just presented last week at the Interactive Futures Conference in Victoria, B.C. (my RL hometown)?

How can one be grounded in the "now" when the future is always in your face?

Anyways, Second Front are still in the process of digitizing some archived video-documentation and figuring out what to write. I should mention that I was also curating some performances for the LIVE Biennial (also known as the LIVE "Biennale" because I guess no one can agree on how to spell the festival's name) and only a few have been digitized so far because Tea Chenille's (my RL Wife) computer for editing video has stopped working (that is a long story in itself)...SIGH! I know... This is starting to sound like the classic "Dog Ate my Homework" excuse.

Ok, no more excuses, here is some (virtually) tangible evidence for you that Second Front did indeed perform for the LIVE 2007 Biennial of Performance Art in Vancouver. The date for this was October 20th, 2007. We projected our performance into the Western Front building in Vancouver. Our performance, "Theatre of the Subliminal Front" was co-curated by Rubaiyat Shatner (James Morgan) from Ars Virtua and former Second Front member, Loveless Finsbury (Natalie Loveless) as part of the Participatory Dissent event.

Some raw footage is available online at Google Video (as you will see below) and also, my Second Front colleague, AliseIborg Zhaoying (Penny Leong Browne) has posted some official reflections on our group's blog.

Below are 2 more measly pictures I took of us performing which are not really that exciting to look at because obviously, I was too busy performing to take quality photographs....sigh!

Here you can see some more of the stage and you can also see some additional members of Second Front (there are 9 of us in total).

In this picture, you can see more audience members arriving including such luminaries as Bibbe Oh and the Italian film director Finally Outlander.

Some friends of mine have submitted additional photos but I will have to go through them to make sure I have the photo-credits and hyperlinks assembled properly for a proper posting session.

In the meantime, here is a sneak preview of the raw video footage that I will be cross-blogging very shortly...



Here is another video from this performance that was documented by Maxxo Klaar. He recorded this footage during the time when Second Front crashed the entire sim (virtual property).... How about this for a piece of Film Noir, eh?


Find more videos like this on Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance


... stay tuned for blogged archives of Second Front's gig at PERFORMA in NYC ...

Blogged down with LIVE5 (2007)...

Yes, this is the official logo for Vancouver's LIVE Biennial of Performance Art 05 (2007). Since the theme was called "Public", I will probably never know who originally designed this logo...sigh! You are probably not used to seeing a non-SL image on my blog but do not worry, just scroll down to see some screenshots after my minor opus-ette of rambling text below...

Hey there avatar performance art fans, public exhibitionists and impatient historians!

Yes, it is true, I have not been very active on my blog lately and this is directly due to the fact that I have lots of documentation to prepare for the official LIVE05 archives for the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art website and blog.

Since this was a mega-project that literally took place last week, please do not expect immediate historicization of all the artists I have invited to participate in the event called Participatory Dissent co-curated in RL by a former member of Second Front, named Loveless Finsbury (a.k.a. Natalie Loveless).

Speaking of Second Front, Rubaiyat Shatner (a.k.a. James Morgan) was the curator for the Second Front performance at Second LIVE. The gallery he represents is called Ars Virtua.

Speaking of LIVE, Skawennati Tricia Fragnito was the event's official guest curator as she represents the Aboriginal Territories of Cyberspace (AbTec) network.

So, please stay tuned in the next week or two on either this blog, the Second Front blog and/or the official LIVE blog for a mythological mention of any one of these performance artists (in no particular order): Second Front, Fau Ferdinand, Tran Spire, Nyko Nakamura, Man Michinaga, Eba Hax, Bea Box, iHeart Kuri, and LadyJustice Beaumont.

In the meantime, I wanted to entertain you by showing some more gratuitous pictures of myself. ;-)

To try and perpetuate the illusion/delusion that my blog is not entirely devoted to myself and my smashing looks, these photos will also show me posing with some of the performance artists that I managed to help co-curate...

Photo by Jesse Scott. Here is a great pic of Bea Box and myself posing at Eba Hax's (a.k.a. Tagny Duff's) performance installation called Skin Relations. For a little bit of context, Bea's own performance consisted of living life as an edible gingerbread-man inside a Tee-Pee while wearing an Indian head-dress. So, once Bea's body parts had been entirely consumed by the hungry art-world masses, all that remained was a shadow of her former self with the exception of her symbolic head-dress. It is fortunate that I managed to bring her along to Eba's performance since Eba had lots of free skin to spare...phew! I must say that Bea's freshly skinned avatar looks alot like a bot I once created...
At any rate, I promise to blog Bea's original performance very soon!.

Photo by Jesse Scott.Here is another pic of Bea Box and myself at Eba Hax's opening. I had Westernfront Obscure (a.k.a. Jesse Scott on day #1)ensure that a couple of pix were taken to show off both the texture of Bea's new skin-graft as well as the Tron-like lines of my official LIVE jumpsuit.

Photo by Jesse Scott. Here I am with Maxxo Klaar of Maxxopic photography and Avatar Orchestra Metaverse fame. We are bemused by the cubed instructions for Eba Hax's Skin Relations performance.

Photo by Jesse Scott. Here is a side-profile of my co-curator, xox Voyager a.k.a. Skawennati Tricia Fragnito from the Aboriginal Territories of Cyberspace network (AbTec).

Ok, please scroll down for postings that have nothing to do with LIVE...phew!