Coming back to the Sims idea has been challenging. We’ve been carrying out tests (making short films and taking screen shots) to attempt to work out what the work actually will be. There have been a variety of different ideas, which have come about through further research into either artists or other influences. We considered taking the approach of Eva and Franco Mattes, an artist duo who have remade famous performances, such as Chris Burden’s ‘Shoot’ and ‘Imponderabilia’ by Marina Abramović and Ulay, in the virtual world of Second Life. Our idea was to make a relatively tall, skinny black guy with dreadlocks and put him in a basement with no way out and force him to paint until eventually he died. We would call him Jean Michel Basquiat. This idea didn’t quite work as after 3 paintings and no food he became angry and refused to paint anymore. This in itself could be interesting – Sims fighting back. But this would work better if it were its own idea as opposed to linked the remaking of an event. Another thought was to make us (Sid and Jim) as baby Sims and then we would grow up over the period of an exhibition so that at the beginning of the exhibition we would be babies and then when it came to the end we would be dead. But it was this idea that people would periodically return or glance at the film and it would be very different from when they were there previously. This was brought on by watching the film Boyhood, which is filmed over 12 years and utilises the same cast. Because of this genuine aging process, Boyhood charts the rocky terrain of childhood like no other film has before and is both a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past and an ode to growing up and parenting. It’s this sense of time that we thought would be great to capture over the space of an evening. Thinking about it with respect to an exhibition – we could recreate the gallery space in Sims and then stage the exhibition too. Creating a strange sense of duality and promoting thinking about multiverse theory. Ideas actually to do with the paintings created are very similar but also are definitely their own ‘thing’. We thought about having a screenshot of every painting that an individual Sim has done so that the audience can see the progression. Included in the title of the work would be the price at which the piece has been valued. Something else we considered was picking famous artists and deciding on the closest 5 character traits to these artists and then creating a Sim with these traits. The Sim would then go on to make works of art and we would juxtapose them against the work of the artist themselves. This links with another idea; achieve the top status of artist that Sims will allow but with characters that have entirely different personality traits. The title of their final masterpieces will be a list, which supposedly makes up their personality. We’ve tried to make sure that these all still continue to question the nature of authorship and ownership.
Revisiting some previous ideas has also been something we’ve thought about recently. Ideas, which we felt were perhaps ‘complete’ (if that’s even possible) at the time but could now be honed in on and expanded. One in particular that falls in to place, due to the current work being centered on the perceptions of art and artists, is the piece pictured below. Even Microsoft Word is implicit in encouraging the stereotype of art = painting. This work hasn’t quite reached its final form and it’s only really because of these new conceptions that it’s being re-thought. Maciej Ratajski is an artist we’ve been looking at during this process as his work questions the function of the author, with an emphasis on the work’s influences exerted by the surrounding media system and the need to redefine the relationship with the audience. Ratajski poses questions within the same field as ours - ‘what do we mean when we talk about art?’ The work is undeniably postmodern (and has a strong link to the aesthetics of post-net culture) with its, highly intelligent, criticism against the image of contemporary art. One of our favorite creations is the background to his website which is the phrase ‘what everyone could have done’, clearly referencing the famously lazy and juvenile criticism of modern art - ‘but anyone could have done that’. He’s using their words against them and employing them to poke fun at the same time.
New ideas are also a part of our agenda. The art world is regularly seen and portrayed as one big competition and one that never appears to have a clear winner (if any at all). Since we have been making art about how art is seen it felt only logical to continue to do so with regards to this. We thought that when we began we should try to enter as many competitions as we could every day but they had to be free ones. And then the work would be the documentation of us entering the various competitions and also the items that we won (if any). This echoes the incorrect assumption that within art there are winners and losers since if you’re making art you’re already a winner.