Economie 0 - Upgrade! Paris....

This pic was taken at the beginning of the artist talk for Upgrade Paris. The official website for the streaming live video of the event is listed right on the picture itself.

Hey there Parisian Upgraders, Senegalese Ultra-Nationalists, and bribed critics!

The intro pic above gives you the impression that our artist talk at Upgrade Paris went smoothly and on time but actually for the first part of the day, we were unsure if we had schedule at the correct time! There was alot of confusion between AM and PM and SLT (Second Life Time/Pacific) time zones. Were we supposed to meet at 5 PM or 5AM and was it in France's local time zone or in SLT? One of the curators, Toto Donat had troubles signing on apparenty, so we could not find her online...we figured that maybe we had already missed our talk like 12 hours ago...sigh! There was no sign of any curator nor any other speaker (including a bunch of curators and artists from Senegal who were scheduled before us).

It was a good thing that we killed some time at Club Neptune just in case one of the curators would sign on and tell us what was happening. Fortunately, co-curator Karolwojtyla Sobocinski signed into SL in the nick of time and apologized for being late.

Here is a pic of us dancing at Club Neptune while waiting for the curator to show up...

What better way to wait for a curator and discuss future shows than to dance your ass off?

Waiting for the curator(s) to arrive was a good idea because we managed to talk alot about our earlier performances and they even publically acknowledged that we are now an "established institution"...wow! I guess it has been awhile since we formed in late 2006!

During the talk, it was slightly confusing as to exactly what was happening in Paris. There were two people in RL controlling Karol's SL avatar (Marika and Karol, one guesses) and they were also fiddling with the video camera in Paris which we could not see...in fact, our SL audience only consisted of one avatar but that one avatar was a camera from which an indeterminate number of RL audience members were checking us out. Karol tried to keep us on topic with regards to the ways in which SL's economy influences our performance. We bribed Karol behind the scenes until he/she was content with our answer ;-) But basically, we talked about squatting abandoned corporate headquarters, delivering pizza for free, unintentionally interrupting stock market transactions, bribing critics and hiring bodyguards for disproportionate prices. No one in their right mind would actually think we were really inspired by something as banal as the economy, right? Heheheheheh...Speaking of sponsorship to stimulate the economy, it was great to see Ars Virtua's logo represented at the venue.

Wow! Look at that detailed Google Map! What is that doing on the floor? It does not look like Wall Street at all! ;-) Ok ok, actually it is a map of Beijing...The artist talk was held on the site of JC Fremont's installation, Imaging Beijing. As for the event itself, it was around this time that we were begging Karol (or perhaps Toto/Marika Dermineur if she happened to be behind the avvie) to get the audience to ask us some questions because we were running out of anything relevant to say...usually, it only takes us a total of 2 minutes before we give up on talking about anything and feel the compulsion to launch some rockets and/or explode over and over again! We were unusually patient and self-disciplined today...we even kept our clothes on...phew!

Bibbe Oh was finally able to join us to wrap up the Q&A session with Upgrade Paris...She left the Club Neptune earlier at a time when we all felt that we were too late for our own talk but then Bibbe heeded a desperate IM from us to rejoin the fray and answer a concluding question about the new European taxation system in Second Life...it did not seem to matter though since only one of us in attendence was living in Europe.