The lowest level is a true wonder, recalling a 2-D version of Marker’s installation Zapping Zone. Haphazardly piled on the floor, monolithic screens stream belts of images—surreal collages of iconic paintings infiltrated by technological absurdity. The attendees of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe idly channel surf, while Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is intruded upon by a surface-to-air missile. Marker’s career has long anticipated the age of new media, the fraying infinities of images composing and confounding the visible world and our status within it. His recent installations and the database work Immemory relied on the agency and interaction of a spectator beset by vying narratives and images. With the navigable space of SL, Ouvroir goes one step further by embodying the spectator within the spectacle—your avatar becomes a flaneur of the air, carving an irreproducible path through the island. Or maybe just gliding off to have weird virtual sex. Go to secondlife.com
