Tour a Digital Art Gallery Curated by an Avatar

YOU DON’T WALK into Panther Modern so much as click into it. Panther is a gallery, filled with gallery-like stuff: artwork, windows, benches and “no touching” signs. Not that the signs are needed. This world, in all its dimensionality, lives solely on the internet as a digital exhibition space.

It’s the work of LaTurbo Avedon, an artist known only by the pale, blonde-haired avatar she presents on various social media channels. Avedon is an odd breed of artist. Not only is she, as an avatar, a maker of artwork; she’s also a piece of artwork herself. No one knows who is behind LaTurbo Avedon.

Avedon has presented exhibitions all over the internet (and even in real life), but Panther Modern is by far her most ambitious effort. The gallery, which opened its proverbial door with an installation by multimedia artist Aoto Oouchi, is very much a digital product. Its architecture—a strange white building comprised of incongruous wings and corridors—is built in Cinema 4D, and the artwork within it is constructed using digital tools, too. And yet, for all its digital nativeness, there’s something about Panther Modern that feels real, in a very IRL (In Real Life) sense of the word.

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Mark Dorf’s installation. MARK DORF

Since Panther opened last year, Avedon has curated 10 new media artists to create site-specific installations. Every installation begins by Avedon presenting artists with a file for a digitally constructed room containing nothing more than blank walls, windows, and a sunny day.

From there artists can use the room however they please. Some artists, like Kim Laughton, build theirs to look as though they were plucked out of a Chelsea gallery and transported to the internet. Others, like Emilie Gervais, create bursts of color that would be impossible to replicate in the real world.

For Panther’s most recent installation, artistic duo Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper of MSHR transformed the gallery space into a dark lair filled with glowing, curved sculptures that emit an unidentifiable buzz. In the physical world, MSHR is known for something similar. The team crafts sound installations that are marked by the same odd forms Cooper describes as “resonant hyper symbols.” Though the process is the same—both the tangible and intangible sculptures are created using algorithms—Cooper says they somehow feel more at home in a space like Panther. “The algorithmic aspect of our sculptures are in their native habitat,” he explains. “We’re not having to translate that into another medium that’s maybe more forced.”

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LaTurbo Avedon

The internet and its unbridled creative freedom allow artists to experiment in ways they might not be able to otherwise. Scale, materiality, the rules of physics aren’t at play. “I have selected artists that work in ways the physical world can’t really accommodate yet, and others that create things that don’t require physicality at all,” Avedon says. “Working in these files allows the ideas to come first; objects can be retextured, scaled, deformed, destroyed without any expense to the creators.”

Still, in many of Panther’s rooms, you get a sense of obedience to certain terrestrial constraints. Though MSHR’s sculptures are made out of what they describe as an impossibly glowing, goopy material, you can see cables jutting from the instruments, as though they’re plugged into some kind of digital power outlet. Avedon herself says the choice to use realistic architectural models was intentional. “As long as a sentient human is the viewer of Panther, there will be a relation of that body to the things they are seeing. ‘2-D internet’ is going to be a thing of the past soon enough, and that makes the consideration of virtual architecture all the more important.”

It does feel like the art world is an appropriate venue for exploring the increasingly blurred boundaries between what’s “real” and what’s not. Online exhibitions are in no way a new idea. Net artists have long used the web as a platform to disseminate their work (see New Hive, for instance) and as a medium itself. In talking to DIS magazine, artist Rafael Rozendaal described his use of domain names. “It’s a bit like a frame around a painting, whereby you say: This is done, it’s not a sketch, I’m really hanging this.”

Panther Modern seems to be intentionally leaning on those tensions, forcing us to ask ourselves to consider the true difference between digital and real life. Of course, we’ve already come to terms with our digital and physical personas bleeding into each other. And you could reasonably argue that there’s no distinction to be made at this point. But digital art has a way to go before some people can accept its immateriality. “Even though people have become very familiar with looking at art online, the lingering ideas of ‘aura’ and physical importance are still very significant to people,” Avedon says. “I think this, too, will change—it just takes time for people to be content without holding something in their hands.”

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/tour-digital-art-gallery-curated-avatar/