LaTurbo Avedon is waiting for me in the heart of Orbital, an almost empty ecstasy nightclub. The shock light brightened their platinum hair as they walked alone under a purple orb hovering over the vast dance floor. Our encounter is in Second Life, so finding this space-themed disco has nothing to do with clapping on a laptop keyboard. Yet I was late. A newbie, I’m still figuring out how to navigate this vast virtual space; Avedon stood politely as my avatar circled them in monstrous circles. Unlike me, Avedon is an old pro in the second life carousel. They look at the house here. For more than a decade, they have operated as an exclusive internet artist, making avatars. The virtual world is their constant obsession.
The deal with Avedon is this: They don’t exist offline, simply describing themselves as “from the internet”. They are a digital native creature, building art on online worlds like Second Life, Fortniteand Star Citizen, and exhibiting the aforementioned artworks in prestigious galleries throughout the United States and Europe. (A recent exhibit is going digital through the Whitney Museum.) Nothing separates artwork from artist, because artist To be art project, a nimble, extraordinary look virtual entity untethered from the human body. You can call them highly artistic versions of representative influencers like Lil Miquela, though the most relevant feature might be a cross between Japanese pop hologram idol Hatsune Miku and British street artist under the pseudonym Banksy — the show of personality is part of the project. judgment. Like the ethereal Hatsune Miku, Avedon is represented by an avatar. But despite publicizing that Miku is a software-based collaboration between groups of people, Avedon doesn’t admit that there is a person or group of people behind the curtain, crouching over the keyboard. Like Banksy (or, in the literary world, Elena Ferrante), they admit to having no identity other than what they claim to be public-facing artists.
This makes talking to Avedon a bit of a hassle. No personality breaks, even if all you really want to talk about is how hard it must be not to break personality. For example, when I asked Avedon when they were born, they veered off course, saying that things started “making sense” in 1995 while playing Chrono Activator, an RPG for SuperNintendo. When asked how it feels when works are displayed in real life without being able to walk through them — which one might think would be a major drawback of not having physical forms — they objected. that it’s no different in the way that players don’t have access to every part of the game world they’re playing within.
Kelani Nichole, founder of experimental art gallery Transfer, has worked with Avedon for over eight years; like me, she met the friendly avatar in Second Life, where they were working on an installation that was eventually included in a physical exhibit in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nichole sees Avedon as a particularly trendy figure in the art world, one who has taken the identity-refining character of an artist like Cindy Sherman and deftly applied it to the virtual world. “They were very predictable,” she said. Dealing with collaborators like Nichole by inviting them into cyberspace, Avedon has built a career entirely within the confines of the Internet. They’ve been doing this for over a decade, long before “reverse“Has become the buzzword of Silicon Valley or the world that has put its work meetings on Zoom. At the time, digital art had exploded from a niche pursuit into the epicenter of an economic bubble.
And Avedon is still ahead of the curve. Most of all, they understand the real creative potential of swaps, how rich online spaces can help bring communities together and allow people to discover who they are and who they want to be. . For example, their work in Fortnite, where last year they created Your progress will be saved, a color arrangement for the Manchester International Festival. By choosing such a super-popular digital destination, Avedon wanted to show that they can extend the purpose of the gaming world. Instead of playing by its battle-royale haywire logic, they create a playful, contemplative harbor in which to wander. Discover Your progress will be saved from a laptop, it feels like exploring online the equivalent of a large long-abandoned subway station, a vast and unused urban landscape that is at the same time very peaceful and eerie . “Sometimes we have to create safe rooms inside these simulations to overcome the problems they also cause,” they explain. “I can only do my part, and that is to hold a mirror for the metaverse and its possibilities.”
