Tuesday, March 11, 2008

#11: China as it would love to be

RMB City, by Chinese 2nd Life artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy (posted at KSMGRD)
Urbanism is the new hyper-life, the nominalist fantasy that results from the surreal collision of aspiring local culture in the midst of globalism, i.e. "glocal" expression. Maybe it is a mooring strategy to propel society through the highly unstable and disorienting, uncharted waters of the new global economy.
As the artist puts it:
RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future.

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