2013: A Real Space Odyssey

"Second Life" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We all know what was done to the swastika--the Hindu sacred symbol--when it was appropriated by the Nazis.

The symbol fell from divine grace and became a byword for genocide and evil.

Not all words and symbols suffer the same disgrace, but they do, in ways, small and big, risk altering into their "other" when hauled out of their originating contexts and put into a radically different one.

Italian artist Filippo Minelli recontextualizes names of Social Network giants like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube, by ripping them out of their familiar home of the browser and re-painting them on the walls of slums in Mali, Cambodia or Vietnam. 

His goal is not to strip these words, that are gateways into social networks that people enter to enjoy secure interaction and communication with online users across the globe, of their dignity, but to see if they undergo significant meaning-alteration when re-planted in real space and real time. Minelli is especially interested in putting the words in those spatial and temporal realms that are the "detritus" rather than the fragrant flowers of a technology-dominated capitalism. 

In a way, the slums of the world are the absolute "others" of the secure and organized virtual spaces of the online world. Imagine painting the word "Second Life" on the walls of a decrepit and dingy wall of a slum, where not only is another "life" a luxury and a sacrilege to contemplate, but also dangerously redolent of drug-addled escapism from the misery of real time indigence. Remember, the trainspotters in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting? The second lives of these Irish urchin addicts were cocaine trips into oblivion. 

Minelli says his intention behind transplanting social network words from their virtual cocoons into the real world of slums is "to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies."

Here is an excellent guide to what might be philosophically at stake in Minelli's work.

Where, I wonder can the word Facebook be re-painted?