NeoCubist Hyperformalism

Snapshot in time: Jul 26, 2009

In the last days of the first year of BiW Selavy Oh, DanCoyote Antonelli and Oberon Onmura exhibited three very different, but related artworks at the Brooklyn is Watching sim (at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, New York). It may be that this was pure coincidence, however all three projects were composed of an assembly of cubic platonic solids (cubes) and were in some way transient in nature.

In the case of Selavy Oh, the sculpture was a framework creating a cube of cubes, like a cage. This assembly would shatter and collapse on to itself when an avatar came close, breaking into hundreds of little edges of the cubes and then the assembly would reassemble itself and start the process again.

The next work chronologically was DanCoyote Antonelli’s (DC Spensley) “Don’t Touch!” which was a cubic matrix walling in the entire Brooklyn is Watching sim on 5 sides (the walls and top) creating an interior space inside and isolating the objects within. “Don’t Touch!” was ephemeral in a very different way in that each of the cube walls was scripted to delete the cube on avatar touch. However obnoxious it was to wall in the sim, anyone could delete every single object in the wall any time they wanted, and many people did. As the cubes were deleted, the artist would come in and replace them on a daily basis.

Oberon Onmura also decided to wall in the sim. One by one, 20 meter bricks, being hollow within, further subdivided the space within a space while automatically stacking themselves in sequence until the entire BiW sim was covered. When the bricks were done self stacking they spontaneously fell away vanishing as they fell.

All three works deal with transience in very different ways, were scripted and composed of assemblies of cubes.

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