virtual artists/virtual architecture

RMB City is an installation of "virtual city planning" created by Chinese artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy, in Second Life, a landscape that is a parody of contemporary Chinese culture - a giant panda swinging on a crane counterweighted by OMA's CCTV building, for instance, and a commentary on the intensive urban hyper-capitalist development taking place across China:

"RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future."



In true "post-post-" fashion, you can see the documentary of the opening for China Tracy Pavilion in Second Life from June 2007, created as part of her participation in the rl Venice Biennale.




An exhibition featuring the latest iteration of the RMB City project continues at Lombard-Freid Projects in NYC until April 5, 2008.