glamourazzi

If you love art and color, this place is definitely worth your time. I am astounded at the talent of Elros and all the others that contributed work to this exhibit.

Sometimes it's nice to just wander through beauty.

Official Press Release:

New Media Consortium and the Museum of Hyperformalism Presents "Kiss the Sky", an art historical survey of Hyperformalism in the virtual world of Second Life A 21st century art movement, native to the the virtual world - Curated by DC Spensley (DanCoyote Antonelli in Second Life)

Virtual worlds are a place for discovering new territories and exploring meaning outside the context of the material world. Even in virtual worlds there is an avant garde, a native artform spawned from unique conditions. "Kiss the Sky" is an exhibition of artists that have been wowing viewers since 2006 with art installations indigenous to the virtual world that artist/curator DC Spensley calls Hyperformalism.

On May 17, 2008, 12PM PST, DC Spensley will unveil "Kiss the Sky" the definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism as expressed by over a dozen artists working the discipline in the virtual world of Second Life. Artists included are the most notable creators in the virtual world of Second Life, chosen specifically for their Hyperformal direction. On display are Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

More information about each artist and artist biographies are available at the main platform at the exhibition.Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.With a figure in the picture, nobody notices the landscape.

Hyperformalism proposes that that by removing the comfortable cliché of anthropocentricism a viewer will be more open to a whole other class of experiences that resonate on a more basic level of awareness and reflect back to the viewer their own humanity. The perception of immersion and variable point of view implicates the viewer into unique relationships with the work destroying all of the usual boundaries between the viewer and the work.While space in virtual worlds is a simulation, place can be real. In fact art experiences are the only thing that can be real in both the virtual and material worlds at the same time. Abstractions that exist as discoverable objects are somewhere between object and concept. It is the state of half existence between object and concept that differentiates formal abstraction in virtual worlds from preceeding expressions of formalism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. Hyperformalism is not Modernism, it is not Post-modernism because it is native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view. Contact for more information:DanCoyote Antonelli (DC Spensley in RL)Curator/Artistdc@spensley.com