Bullshitting About Collaborative Virtual Environments

You can bullshit a lot on paper when you over and over describe the works of zero significance of the usual suspects as Bryn Oh, Eupalinos Ugajin, Rose Borchovski and Alpha Auer. But it would be fairer to say just in the open: I want to promote my own work, which is, although rather hippie, not bad at all.

And what can promote your work better than name a few times the name of the only existing artist in the virtual world; SaveMe Oh.

Catarina Carneiro de Sousa aka as Capcat Ragu did another attempt to promote her work by several “SaveMe Oh” namedropping in her latest scientific paper but did it need to be in such a lousy way? The times Capcat Ragu really visited a performance of SaveMe Oh one can count on the fingers of one hand. And so we get some bullshitting about what she assumes could be right.

So I better pretend I am Catarina Carneiro de Sousa and produce some decent work.

In Collaborative Virtual Environments, pseudo artistic activities are carried out by avatars that fall into the “I Want To Be A Performance Artist” subgroup. They steal from conventional art forms such as theatre, opera, dance, circus and musical performance and label it as new types of enactions, tailored to an audience with a severe death wish.

The duo of Portuguese wannabe artists Kikas Babenco and Marmaduke Arado takes advantage of their rich Wikipedia knowledge ability combined with their dexterity to attach marketplace artefacts to their avatars, in order to satisfy an audience who loved to play with dolls at a younger age.

How different this is in the approach used by the only artist in Secondlife; SaveMe Oh, who displays full installations in the world, which in reality are not part of the environment, but are ‘worn’ by her avatar. SaveMe Oh use this strategy in her performances to create a strong visual impact, usually with satirical intent towards the world of art and the social codes of the metaverse. These events are usually improvised and participatory, as SaveMe Oh often offer her artefacts to the public and invite them to join in the performance.

Not a lot of people answer to this invitation as the aura of SaveMe Oh is so strong and heavily focused on her artistic persona – whose avatar, more than an author, embodies the work itself, that it scares of potential participators who are better labelled as blind admirers. SaveMe referred to herself (an avatar) as an artwork and not as an author, in the talk promoted by Transdisciplinares Artes Lisboa (2014), in the activities related to the event and exhibition entitled Virtual Interactive Participatory Arts. SaveMe presents herself as an agent provocateur in the art world, often invading artistic events with her performances, which can cover a whole SIM.

It should be noted that, while it can be argued that this somewhat ironical questioning of authorship and identity may have roots in previous ‘real world’ works, the spatial, environmental and behavioural properties of SaveMe Oh’s performances are unique to the affordances of a CVE and could hardly take place in our world..”