Currently open at IMAGOLand & Galleries is an interesting exhibition by the gallery’s owner, Mareea Farrasco. Entitled Nature and Culture, it sits as an examination of the intersection of nature and culture expression, as seen through the creative lens of Second Life.
In the physical world, what we today view as culture – which here might be defined more as lifestyle and couture – largely stands very apart from the natural world. Where once culture – culinary preferences, mode of dress, belief systems, etc. -, were very much rooted within the environments in which they flourished, they now easily exist divorced from their natural origins, allowing them to be found and experienced the world over.
However, in Second Life, there is no such separation – indeed no such evolution from nature to culture / couture. As Mareea notes, everything is effectively manufactured, born out of deliberate design and the manifestation of light photons through the electronic medium of graphics chips and processing.
The result is a world in which “nature” and “culture” are – from a creative standpoint – one in the same. There is no separation of one from the other, just as there is no natural progression from one to another. They both simply exist.
This is reflected within Nature and Culture through both juxtaposition and combination through its mix of avatar-centric “fashion” pictures and images of an avatar exploring in-world locations. The juxtaposition is just that: the placing of the “fashion” images alongside of – but somewhat distinct from in terms of style (such as the triptych) and content, the “landscape” images. It’s a presentation that leaves the two as feeling separate and distinct. Until, at least, one considers the avatar herself. She brings them together, and she does so not merely because of the outfit she wears
She does so because her presence throughout all of the images reminds us of the fact that everything in SL is conjoined through the aforementioned act of intentional creation. She, the clothes she wears, the settings she is “exploring” – all underscore the fact that neither nature nor culture exist within Second Life in the manner in which they have grown together and undergone separation within the physical world.
Thus we’re presented with a series of images prompting us to consider both the nature of Second Life as an environment of consciously-created landscapes, characters and couture and – perhaps, in going beyond the exhibition itself – on the manner in which we have managed to take culture from its natural origins and environments and reduce it to a statement devoid of natural heritage and open to appropriation.
SLurl Details
- IMAGOLand & Galleries (Desert Sands, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 