Diomita Maurer’s Blog

Milena Carbone invited me to see her newest installation named “Living Picture #3” at the dance hall of The Carbone Studio.

The landmark leads you to the entrance of The Carbone Studio. You get their instructions how to set up your viewer for the best experience. Choose “Dance Hall” from the teleport pad to get to “Living Picture #3”

Living picture is a series of art experience in Second Life that combines a short contemporary music video piece and a dance sequence in Second Life of one or more avatars in phase shift. The video and dance sequences run in a loop, 24/7. Milena calls this technique “phase dance” in tribute of the “phase music” created by Steve Reich and Terry Riley in the 1960s/70s.

Living Picture #3 by Milena Carbone at The Carbone Studio – Dance Hall

When you enter you see the phase dance in front of the video and you hear the music. The music is a beautiful jazz piece named “Rites” by composer and saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Two avatars, Milena herself and her dance model Lalitha, were dancing synchron when I visited Monday, July 11th. You can easily join the dancers and dance yourself by clicking the sphere next to the big board and below the smaller board with technical instructions.

There are 2 rather dystopian video clips of 5 minute length each that are shown in the background. One is a fantasy ficition with hunt scenes, the other shows scenes of waste, distruction and poverty and people who live under these circumstances. The scenes seem to be from the Middle East, some seem to be from the African continent. The dancers and their art are quite a contrast to the video. As the dance sequences are 4 minutes long as opposed to the 2 times 5 minute video clips, there’s hardly not a single scene or picture that you could reproduce once again.

There’s also a teaser video on youtube of Living Picture #3 by Milena Carbone, that you can see here.

Milena Carbone’s art always consists of at least 2 elements, one is always a text. The text Milena published along with Living Picture #3 did touch and impress me:

“A team of researchers recently discovered that the cells of a corpse continue to live after death. Their activity was even greater than before. Some have seen, blinded by hope and dread, the proof of eternal life, but it is not so.

The activity of the cells corresponds to desperate signals they send, like bottles to the sea, to other cells. All the cells scream, but apparently none hear the others. They can no longer listen to each other, to coordinate. It is as if, what is dead, is not a set of cells, but its consistency, the relations between them.

Are we, the human species, already dead ? We have never communicated so much, and we have never been so alone. Every second, thirty thousand billion bytes of information is emitted worldwide. Data, new data, data adjusted for seasonal variations, data on data, personal data, pornographic data, financial data, a lot of financial data, lolcats, spam, seflies, lots of selfies… These data scream “Hey! I’m here ! Why do not you hear me! “And the more data shout out personal information that never interests others, the more data they have and the more they scream.

Refugees in their little cabin, stood petrified in front of their makeshift radio. They were no longer receiving any message. Neither from Earth nor from the sky. The cells eventually die, too.“

Impressions of Diomita, Milena and Lalitha dancing in Living Picture #3 by Milena Carbone at The Carbone Studio – Dance Hall

I played a bit with my camera while dancing and noticed that the video screen is semi transparent from the backside. Looking from the backside you can see the dancers completely embedded into the video, quite intriguing.

Diomita, Milena and Lalitha dancing in Living Picture #3 by Milena Carbone at The Carbone Studio – Dance Hall – seen from the backside of the semi-transparent videoscreen

Milena Carbone (mylena1992) is a French artist and is in Second Life since mid 2019. She discovered its artistic potential and since then has devoted all her free time to creation, associating, as in real life, images and texts: “Milena Carbone is a fiction in which, as in any artistic work, biographical and imaginary elements are mixed.” Her creative process is iterative: some of her images inspire her stories and these stories modify the development of the image, which itself transforms the story.
Milena has an own gallery, the Carbone Studio and she has a bookstore @ Noir’Wen City.
Milena has an own website, you can also find her on flickr here and you can read her texts here.
Milena also published an own article about “Living Picture #3” on her website.

Thank you Milena for another great art experience.
Living Picture #3 by Milena Carbone cane be experienced at The Carbone Studio until July 31st.

Landmark to The Carbone Studio
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Woiler/176/182/3331
Landmark to The Carbone Bookstore @ Noir’Wen City
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Noir%20Wen/243/203/32
Milena’s website
https://sites.google.com/view/thecarbonegallery/news
Milena’s video teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSKUHVNw6I
Milena’s post about “Living Picture #3” on her website
https://sites.google.com/view/thecarbonegallery/dance/living-picture
Milena Carbone’s flickr
https://www.flickr.com/photos/milenacarbone/
Milena Carbone’s writing
https://medium.com/@539568