Memespelunk

I’ve had a surprisingly fruitful start in SL over in the past 3-4 months. There have been several complex installations up and two large solo shows up now. So the idea of doing an artist talk at the Bluffs Art Center on May 24th (my piece Land of Forgotten Lights is there) seemed like a natural thing to do. Of course, not having much of an SL career yet meant that it was more of a “let’s get to know Juria” talk.

I started thinking about what I could show and how to do it. I decided to reach way back and show images from real life past, starting from art school and continuing up to the present day Juria. The idea of showing old pictures of me in art school playing the bongos or setting up installations in the 1990’s seemed to make sense to build some context for Juria. The feeling I had and have was that we’re role playing as artists in rl and sl, and I needed to create connections in time and place to be really understood - both about me and the art work.

So with 50 some slides of old and new, rl and sl to show, I attempted to peck out my life story in text messaging. Being a bad typist, this was probably the biggest hurdle to making sense. So I was forced to keep explanations short and sweet, and typed like mad to keep things interesting. In real life I tend to say a lot of things I don’t need to so this exercise in zen talk was probably a good thing. Around 20 or more people were kind enough to show up and were “active listeners” asking loads of questions to keep me on my toes. At some point it was hard to keep the talk in focus but I rambled on…

The feedback that I got from friends after was that the biographical material (probably the photo of my Mom and me) added a personal touch they liked. One idea Dutch artist friend Josina had was to limit questions to the end and write out my talk to copy and paste - to keep things quick and smooth. This is something I’d definitely like to try next time. But I also liked the interaction with the listeners during the talk so I think it’ll have to be both. Ah, isn’t it always that way.

I would like a second try with this particular artist talk, of course with a different crowd and venue. The main learning was that as hard and stressful as these art talks can be, they’re really good in that they force you to organize your thoughts about your work. As I spend a lot more time making the art than talking about it, it can be sort of catch up time with myself. What am I really doing here? Why should you care? Where am I going with this stuff? At least that’s what I tried to get across. Probably the most memorable thing was the photo of me wearing a blonde wig. Oh well…

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technorati tags: secondlife, art, public, speaking