by osmosis

"Most people, they take for granted that a mask is there to hide you," says artist Franco Mattes. "To me, I think that it's more like the other way around. You wear a mask because you want to show who you are." He is standing amidst an army of large scale digital portraits. The portraits depict avatars, virtual proxies people create for themselves in the online world of Second Life, and each seems to hauntingly resemble hearthrobs from the teen thriller Twilight. "I think that here," Franco continues, "you can just build your own identity and be and look like and behave like you would want to do in real life, so-called real life. That's very liberating." It's liberating, that is, if you're comforable looking like a glammed-up vampire.

Franco and his collaborator Eva Mattes (they usually refer to themselves by their web address, 0100101110101101.org) have been sampling from and subverting mainstream culture since 1998, when they staged what they called "the first internet coup": they created a fake version of the Vatican's website, stealing over 4 million visitors from the "real" Roman Catholics. Later, the team created a computer virus, which they sold at the 2001 Venice Biennale. In 2003, they announced that Nike would be taking over a square in Vienna, and launched a convincing marketing campaign which included this website. In 2005 and 2006, they widely promoted a non-existent film called United We Stand: Europe has a Mission. The promotions called it "A brilliant mix of espionage and sci-fi political stereotypes in which Europe, not the USA, saves the world from impending doom." Penelope Cruz and Ewan McGregor starred and the imagery on the poster screamed Iraq.

Lately, the duo has been re-staging performance art happenings in Second Life. The result is eery. When, in 1977,  artisits Marina Abramovic and Ulay staged Imponderabilia, standing naked in the doorway, forcing visitors to the Galleria d'Arte Civica di Bologna to brush up against their bodies when entering and exiting the space, the project was about physical closeness and fear of human touch. Re-restaged, people become voyeurs of their own synthic bodies and the sensation becomes more psychological than physical.

0100101110101101.org is a bit of a conundrum. The artists initiate geurilla-like attacks on mainstream culture, yet they also embrace the mediated identites, idealized bodies, and glamorous mystique of the virtual world. What exactly does this mean? Maybe that's the question they're asking. And maybe, like the rest of us, they aren't that close to finding an answer.