Social Sculpture 2.0: "Every Avatar is an Artist"

by January Lightfoot, BeuYs2.com and the .0 Artist Group 

BeuYs2.com @  www.newBERLINartFESTIVAL.com

Physical Space: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (Germany)

Die Welt als Bühne
21. November 2009 – 10. Januar 2010
Eröffnung: Freitag, 20. November, 19 Uhr
Interaktive 3D Performance ab 20 uhr 

Virtual Space: BERLINin3D.com, newBERLIN (Second Life)

new BERLIN art FESTIVAL 2009
Opening: Friday, November 20, 10am PDT (SLT)

Interactive Performance from 11 am PDT (SLT)

As part of the group exhibition "The World as Stage", Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Jan Northoff has created the 3D art installation "Every Avatar is an Artist", which can be seen in real and Second Life. Taking point of departure in a reverent Beuys quotation and showing how it can be actualized today in regards to the opportunities of virtual reality, this project brings collective consciousness to a new state.

Joseph Beuys said: "Every Human Being is an Artist". This statement is now translated into the virtual World. The chat robot and virtual representative "Beuys2.com" is not a replica of the physical Joseph Beuys, but a contemporary result of responses to his own statement above.

"BeuYs2.com’s ‘brain’ is a database that is constantly updated via live feeds from all the tweets (posts) pertaining to Joseph Beuys on Twitter and from Avatars in Second Life. These information feeds gather both factual and misleading information, forming a true ‘collective consciousness’.

Joseph Beuys’ famous sentence “Everyone is an Artist” holds prophetic truth about the younger generations of today – although it now has a commercial bent. Achieving self-fulfilment is a core contemporary value that’s often measured by consumerist standards. People want to realise themselves by being creative in their job, improving their appearance, and living their lifestyle fully. Reality’s limitations can even be exceeded by adopting an expanded or ‘second life’ on the Internet." Solvej Helweg Ovesen, The World as Stage, 2009

The web 2.0 development is the Internet revolution of user created and user involved social platforms and networks, changing the real life word increasingly. The Beuys2.com bot implements an upgrade and manifestation of the collective memory of Joseph Beuys.


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"Every Avatar is an Artist" is an art project produced for the RL exhibition "The World as Stage" by n.b.k. Neue Berliner Kunstverein by artist and founder of newBERLIN Jan Norhoff. For further information please visit:
www.newBERLINartFESTIVAL.com, www.BeuYs2.com, www.BERLINin3D.com
 "The Wolrd as Stage " is curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen.

Opening: 20.11.09, 7-9 PM, Chausseestrasse 128/129 and www.avatar.BERLINin3D.com


Opening hours: 21.11.09-10.01.10, Tuesday through Sonday 12-6 PM, though Thursday 12-8 PM, Chausseestrasse 128/129. Closed 24.12.09-2.1.10.


For more information about "Every Avatar is an Artist" please contact Jan Northoff at jan@YOUin3D.com

For more information about "The World as Stage" please contact Sophie Goltz at presse@nbk.org

Background text on "Social Sculpture"

I Am Searching For Field Character

by Joseph Beuys

Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture/Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.

Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history.

But all this, and much that is as yet unexplored, has first to form part of our consciousness: insight is needed into objective connections. We must probe (theory of knowledge) the moment of origin of free individual productive potency (creativity).

We then reach the threshold where the human being experiences himself primarily as a spiritual being, where his supreme achievements (work of art), his active thinking, his active feeling, his active will, and their higher forms, can be apprehended as sculptural generative means, corresponding to the exploded concepts of sculpture divided into its elements - indefinite - movement - definite (see theory of sculpture), and are then recognized as flowing in the direction that is shaping the content of the world right through into the future.

This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism), but also of religious activity.

EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who - from his state of freedom - the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand - learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER!

Self-determination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom): in the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Self-administration and decentralisation (three-fold structure) occurs: FREE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL is born

Communication occurs in reciprocity: it must never be a one-way flow from the teacher to the taught. The teacher takes equally from the taught. So oscillates - at all time and everywhere, in any conceivable internal and external circumstance, between all degrees of ability, in the work place, institutions, the street, work circles, research groups, schools - the master/pupil, transmitter/receiver, relationship. The ways of achieving this are manifold, corresponding to the varying gifts of individuals and groups. 

THE ORGANIZATION FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY THROUGH REFERENDUM is one such group. It seeks to launch many similar work groups or information centres, and strives towards world-wide cooperation.

Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching For Field Character,” trans. Caroline Tisdall, Art Into Society, Society Into Art, (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974), 48.

Berliner Mauer Zitat: Joseph Beuys

"Beuys empfiehlt die Erhöhung der Berliner Mauer um 5 cm (bessere Proportion!)"
Sediment #16, 19. Juli 1964 Joseph Beuys.

Die Betrachtung der Berliner Mauer, aus einem Gesichtswinkel, der allein die Proportion dieses Bauwerks berücksichtigt, dürfte doch wohl erlaubt sein. Entschärft sofort die Mauer. Durch inneres Lachen. Vernichtet die Mauer. Man bleibt nicht mehr an der physischen Mauer hängen. Es wird auf die geistige Mauer hingelenkt, und diese zu überwinden, darauf kommt es wohl an. (…) Spontan entstehende Frage: Welches Wesensglied in mir oder anderen Menschen hat dieses Ding entstehen lassen? Wieviel hat jeder von uns zum Möglichsein dieser Mauer beigetragen und trägt weiter bei. Ist jeder Mensch ausreichend am Verschwinden dieser Mauer interessiert? Welche antiegoistische, antimaterialistische, welche wirklichkeitsgemäße geistige Schulung bekommt der junge Mensch, diese jemals zu überwinden? Quintessenz: die Mauer als solche ist völlig unwichtig. Reden Sie nicht soviel von der Mauer! Begründen Sie durch Selbsterziehung eine bessere Moral im Menschengeschlecht, und alle Mauern verschwinden.
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986)

and another exhibithion here:
http://www.stefanmicheel.de/info11.html