Pizza SLuts - Snapshots from Wirxli FlimFlam...

Here is Wirxli Flimflam with the owner of Pizzaria Sublimini, Abby Hynes. At first, we thought she worked at Pizza-Master in Switzerland (pictured here) but it turned out that she was doing the same thing we were: "re-delivery"...heh heh.

Hey performance art and pizzaria SLuts,

Just thought I would post my own Pizza SLut pix on the SF blog before the official SF Pizza SLut videos have been made public for your ravenous consumption.

Hopefully in the photo-captions below, I will give you some sense of what happened....


Here are a few of us ordering some SLices from the official Pizza-Master' menu for our re-delivery performance. We definitely did not approve of the high-prices (especially for the chicken wings which we did not bother buying) and the pizzas did not seem customized at all so I IM's Abby Hynes who was trolling around with us and asked if she could make a custom pizza that included fire...she replied that she had all the ingredients I asked for except for the fire itself...sigh! Well, that was no big deal as I am used to providing my own flames for the occasion :-)

Here is an aerial view of the Pizza-Master franchise. So, we had ordered a few pizzas and now we were thinking "who should we deliver these SLices to?" Well, we then went through our friends' list to see who was online. Yaaay, we found Rubaiyat Shatner from Ars Virtua online so he was our first lucky recipient!

...but first of all, I had to SLice Abby in gratitude for her customized pizza creation. It was Luv at first SLice indeed! Heheheheh..Also in this pic are my co-performers Man Michinaga and Tea Chenille. :-)

Ok ok, we are still SLacking off in the Pizza-Master outlet...sigh! When will get our act together? I guess we are no Hiros...heheheheh! Well, at least this pic contains a flattering angle of our primary deliverator (which is usually used for transporting more innovative bio-tech materials), the Strange Culture delivery van :-)

Well, here are re-delivering pizzas en masse to Rubaiyat Shatner. From left-right: Tran Spire (wearing his pizza box from CJ's Pizzaria), Gazira Babeli in her UPS van containing some of her singing pizzas, AliseIborg Zhaoying with her pizza-cape, Lizsolo Mathilde as the sexxxy and fae naughty-nurse SLut, Wirxli Flimflam (me) with his/her full-serve pizza toppings, Great Escape sitting on top of the Strange Culture van with his custom super-sized pizza SLice, Abby Hynes from Pizzaria Sublimini, Tea Chenille (with her SLiced head and plaid skirt), Rubaiyat Shatner (looking like he accidentally ordered too many pizzas), and Man Michinaga looking somewhat androgenous (more than usual). I am not sure who is in the UPS van above with the purple hair but I think that is Gaz's friend, Olga.

So, after Rubaiyat receieved his 1,000 pizzas as per his order, we then proceeded to deliver to the NMConnect curator, In Kenzo who invited us all into her kitchen (well, it was the Kraft Kitchens Cooking Institute) for a much more direct delivery...we delivered straight to her oven...heheheh... In Kenzo is pictured in the far right of the kitchen by the oven eating a rather large SLice.

...and here was the moment we made a delivery to the SLEnquirer and ended up at...well...at the Stock Exchange during the testy trading of shares...yikes! Well, this is the delivery that got us into some hot sauce, you can read all about it in this blog posting.

BONUS REHEARSAL PIX...

Here are three of us in a sandbox the day before painstakingly trying to undertake the usually simple task of loading pizzas into a van...Why does SL have to be less intuitive than RL? Why? Why? Why? Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Here we are the night before getting ready to transport our toppings. The Aussie critic Dr. Lisa Dapto also managed to officially inspect our semi-covert operation...

...and here was the very first Pizza SLut related pic that I photographed...it depicts me trying to drive my UPS van...yeah, I am a SLacker, I know! Sigh!

Pizza SLuts - Snapshots from Great Escape...

Here we all are at Ian Ah's rehearsal lounge getting ready to order some pizzas from Pizza Master and Pizzaria Sublimini in order to re-deliver them.

Hey performance art fans and pizza SLuts,

Second Front co-member, Great Escape, just submitted some of his snapshots for inclusion in our blog.

Have a look at the other two pix that GE snapped on the group's behalf...

From left-right: SF's Strange Culture Delivery van, Great Escape, Man Michinaga (aka. La Cicciolina), Ti Mosienko and Wirxli Flimflam.

Here is Abby Hynes from the Pizzaria posing with Ti Mosienko.

Pizza SLuts Preview...

All of these tiny thumbnail images were submitted by Second Front co-performer AliseIborg Zhaoying as a taster of future blog SLices to come...









Here is a quick summary for you:

1) A few days ago, Second Front ordered some Pizzas from Pizza Master in Switzerland before buying some custom made pizzas from a pizzaria owner named Abby Hynes from Pizzaria Sublimini...

2)After making sure we also had some of Gazira Babeli's Singing Pizzas in our collective inventory, we loaded up the UPS, Fed Ex and SF's Strange Culture delivery vans and proceeded to make personal deliveries as a group to people on our friends'list.

3) After delivering to friends such as Rubaiyat Shatner at Ars Virtua and In Kenzo at NMConnect, we proceeded to make a delivery for a friend at the SL Enquirer which turned out to be a surprised delivery during a sensitive (and possibly shady) transaction at the Allenvest International Stock Exchange (AIVX)...whoops! I think we SLiced off more than we could chew with this delivery... Some of us just needed to get to the bottom of these tentative and tense toppings...

Do you want to see more pix and learn about the context in more detail?
If yes, then stay tuned.... In the meantime, check out this sneak preview video...

SPAWN OF THE SURREAL VIDEO!

YOU TUBE Version: If you cannot view this embedded video, click here.

GOOGLE VIDEO Version: If you cannot view this embedded video, click here.


Hey performance art fans!

At long last! The video archive from the Spawn of the Surreal performance (Feb 11, 2007) is now on our blog!

Please thank co-performer Man Michinaga for taking the time and energy to edit it over the weekend.

SECOND FRONT'S

SPAWN OF THE SURREAL


Second Front infected by Code Deforma! From left: Great Escape, Man Michinaga (with guitar), Wirxli Flimflam, Tran Spire, Alise Iborg; Far right: Tea Chenille trepidatiously looks on.

Dear Performance Art Fans,

On February 11th, 2007 Second Front performed Spawn of the Surreal at the NMConnect Campus (New Media Campus) as part of the Chaos festival program organized by In Kenzo. Spawn of the Surreal was a three-act performance with the first act comprising of a spectacle of avatar B-flick horror as members of our audience, unbeknownst to them at the time, mutated into Cubist-like configurations as they sat in the scripted staircase chairs that were part of our installation.

Second Front's Alise Iborg observes audience members deforming.

The idea of mutating avatars came to us when one of our members, Gazira Babeli, reported that one of her code scripts was behaving badly and deforming her avatars. Second Front took this as an opportunity to interrogate the idea of beauty and perfection in avatar beings since it seems that human simulation in Second Life and generally, in other virtual worlds (ie: multiplayer online games), there is a compulsion to create physically attractive avatars. What better way to interrogate this remediation of Classical idealism than to ‘infect’ fellow Second Life beings with our ‘bad’ code a.k.a. Code Deforma which produced elongated arms, inverted heads and contorted limbs!

Spawning is Wirxli Flimflam in pink, Alise Iborg in lab goggles and Tea Chenille with miniature head.


Enclosed within our "No Entry" border tape, from left: Alise Iborg, Tea Chenille, Wirxli Flimflam and Tran Spire.

The title of our performance came to us after much back and forth discussion and we finally settled on Spawn of the Surreal which we liked because it encapsulated the Fantastic of the B-horror film genre and the kind of Surrealistic operations of disturbance, disorientation and rupture that we were planning on releasing on our audience (at least one audience member fled in terror with his avatar still deformed)!

Infected by "Code Deforma", "spawned" audiences trample Second Front member, Tran Spire (the one in blue) as they flee the stage!

With the closing of the first act, I witnessed not only avatars fleeing the scene but also others requesting more deforming, or ‘Gazzing’ as one audience member put it (a fitting tribute to our coder, Gazira Babeli), Second Front performers joined in on the spectacle, performing a variety of shape-shifting animations.

I felt like I was participating in a morphing dance of sorts as our limbs and bodies were wrangled into bizarre forms.

Our morphing dance encompassing a frenzy of spastic movements, makes it almost impossible to know who is who! From left, Gazira Babeli in red, Alise Iborg, Tran Spire, Man Michinaga (with guitar) and Tea Chenille in far right corner.

Unexpectedly, part of our dance went aerial when myself and others were flown out of the space - a very disorientating experience indeed!

Flying "spawn" - Alise Iborg with unknown "spawn" at left, and in the background right, is Gazira Babeli.

The third and final act of Spawn of the Surreal involved Second Front members making a group sculpture out of barricades that we used at a previous performance entitled, ‘Border Patrol’ part of JC Fremont’s Imaging Place SL: The U.S./Mexico Border at Ars Virtua.

Beginning formations of our group sculpture.

The barricade sculpture at times, seemed to take on the forms of Cubist geometry and also made me think that our 'infected' avatars were conspicuously coded to create a totemic idol of worship to "Spawn" - I think, either way, a perfect tribute to our spectacle!

Please read on for recollections of Spawn of the Surreal by other Second Front members.

Virtually yours,
Alise Iborg a.k.a. Penny Leong Browne

Wirxli Flimflam's Recollections:

Hey there performance art fans,

Feb 11, 2007 marked an important date for Second Front. This was the first time that we let the audience become the performers for a change :-)

If we “performed” at all, it was all to lure the audience into sitting on Gazira’s scripted seats which would mutate their avatar’s appearance to become the “Spawn of the Surreal" which became also became the “spectacle of self-consciousness”...heh heh!

Many members of SF acted as ushers (complete with flashlights) and insisted that a performance event was going to occur. Since the theme of the sim for this event was “Chaos”, we figured that continually goading and frustrating the audience would simulate a potentially chaotic situation.

A personal highlight for me was trying to convince one of the audience members that he was at the correct campus event... He was there do see a concert in a nearby sim area (also in the “chaos” section of “Outreach Island”), and I insisted that he was indeed in the right place and that the musical performance would begin shortly. He sat for awhile and then his intuition got the best of him and he realized he would need to bail fast if he wanted to catch the musical concert. Fortunately for us, he still sat in our of Gaz’s chairs and became a member of the "Spawn of the Surreal". He also had difficulties getting out of the exit door – he sure was considering alternative exit strategies! Heh heh!

My only regret was that I kept on getting airlifted out of the performance space (probably by a mutated audience member), this prevented me from properly participating in our impromptu performance sculpture towards the end of the audience-mutation portion.

I would imagine this performance at the NMConnect Campus that was organized by In Kenzo will be one of our last formal and official performances for a little while because we as a group are itching to do some more top-secret performance interventions. We are definitely wanting more balance in our lives :-)

So, stay tuned next for archives of previously unpublicized events... If you are lucky, you will have managed to fluke upon seeing us execute one of our most recent performances!