the i buy everything event — the stage in Second Life, the live video mix from Cologne on the wall.
2006 – 2007
Two live events that connect first life and second life in real time — a happening around money and eros in Second Life, and a mobile broadcast that carried the shopping street into the grid.
the format
"the purpose of the experiment was to connect the digital world
of secondlife with the nondigital world — and vice versa in order to
generate an open hybridspace."
— meta unlimited, 2006
A hybridhappening is a happening in the tradition of the 1960s, extended by 21st-century communication technology. Two worlds are wired together in real time — a room in Cologne and a piece of land in Second Life — by a two-way video and audio stream, and left to react to each other. The tools are the tools of pop culture: a games platform, a webcam, a streaming server. The question is the diploma's question: what public space can open inside the spectacular space?
Both events were run as meta unlimited from the bluebox studio of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. They are the live, performative side of my multiple hybrid spaces.
the i buy everything event · 6 december 2006
geld · macht · sex — the shopping street as the field of the spectacle. The happening carried the same theme into Second Life: a simulation of sex, money and power.
On 6 December 2006, in the bluebox studio in Cologne and on a prepared piece of land in Second Life, the first hybridhappening took place: a happening around money and eros, the two great themes of that world. For two hours the guests were invited to build anything they liked; Lance Kanno — Kuhlmann's avatar, an RGB raccoon — promised to buy everything they built. Only one condition: the objects had to have the colour of the hour. Green from 14:00, then blue, then red, then yellow until 16:00.
A video livestream carried the studio to a video wall in Second Life; video projectors carried Second Life back into the studio; the text chat, readable on both sides, was the shared voice. The studio guests could watch, or join in with their own laptops — "four guests = one avatar? the number kept changing constantly." The eros part was taken on by ge:schütz, in a sex-and-gender performance. The economy of the virtual world, run for two hours as a live game.
the going mobile event · july 2007
Half a year later the happening left the studio and went mobile. On two July days in 2007 (4 and 13 July), a mobile broadcasting unit — a MiniDV camera, a MacBook running a QuickTime broadcaster, a mobile broadband connection — was carried through the shopping malls of Cologne's Hohe Straße and streamed live into Second Life, while the shopping malls of Second Life were streamed back onto the screens. The shopping street of first life and the shopping street of second life, wired into one loop.
Men in business suits worked the street with signs reading there's no business like the vr business, a pram rigged with equipment and balloon flowers as props — the aesthetic of meta unlimited taken out among the shoppers, past Media Markt and Bulgari. A full video documentation of the mobile stream exists in the archive.
projects — floriankuhlmann.com