The three-year collaborative multi-media project NO LAB in RMB City (2008-2011) by Beijing-based artist Cao Fei and Hong Kong-based MAP Office (Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix) was originally produced for the 2008-2009 inaugural exhibition of Prospect.1 New Orleans, the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States. The project was then later, repackaged as NO LAB on Tour, presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) at each of its locations in Lacoste, France (2009), Savannah (2009) and Atlanta (2010), Georgia, and finally in Hong Kong (2011).[1] Prospect.1 was conceived by veteran biennial curator Dan Cameron as a means to mobilize the cultural rebuilding of flood-ravaged New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. Biennial opened November 2008 in museums and alternative art spaces, historic structures and abandoned sites throughout the city the weekend before the presidential election which would see Barack Obama become America’s first Black president, and four years after Katrina devastated half of the southern seaboard the last week in August 2005, flooding eighty percent of New Orleans, Louisiana, with over 100,000 evacuees taking refuge in the Atlanta metropolitan area. As if excoriating the biennial’s intentions, red vinyl texts on the exterior of the NO LAB installation boldly read: “Fifty Percent of New Orleans’s [sic] Artists Lost Their Homes, and Dozens Lost Their Life’s Work,” “Tourists Buy Souvenirs. Collectors Buy Art” and “Prospect.1 is Going to Blow the Art World’s Collective Mind.” The location and organization of political activism has undeniably been revolutionized by the Internet yet skepticism remains over whether networked sociality, cyber-activism, and online protests staged in virtual worlds largely populated by those apathetic to real world concerns and politics, leads to greater awareness of pressing social issues, political activism and new forms of resistance in the “meatspace” of the physical world. This article explores how  Cao Fei + MAP Office’s NO LAB project proposed a model of mapping virtual and physical realities as contiguous rather than parallel or overlapping, “distinguished by a fluid barrier that welcomed “new and imaginative figures to cross from one side to the other via mechanisms tied inherently to the cosmopolitics of the international art audience: the local is reborn through the failure or even destruction of the liminal design flaws of the artwork” such that “contrariwise, it is also possible for images of the specific and the regional  to be absorbed back in the unnamed virtual space in which, for some, ‘art happens’,” leading to not only an appreciation but also a questioning of real world values.[2]

Featured downtown in the Contemporary Arts Center, one of Prospect.1’s main venues, NO LAB was an exploration of New Orleans as a virtual city in Cao Fei’s RMB City (2008-2011), her online fantasy world whose planning and construction were just getting underway on the Creative Commons’ Kula Island in Second Life.[3] Launched in 2003 by Linden Lab, Second Life (SL) is the three-dimensional virtual universe of different user-created worlds inhabited by over 20 million self-customized user-avatars called “residents” who communicate though instant messaging. Membership in Second Life is free to the public common spaces but with Linden dollars converted from real US dollars, residents can purchase land (their own “personal islands”) and the goods and services to build up and privatize their virtual homes and businesses. RMB City is arguably the most widely acclaimed SLart (art in Second Life) project in both SL and RL (Real Life) art worlds. Commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery in London and developed with Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, RMB City was envisioned from the onset as a platform/laboratory-as-concept piece and two-year residency for the artist and her peers to collaborate on creative projects. Between 2008 and 2011, it hosted and spring-boarded over a dozen activities ranging from in-world interactive exhibitions to hybrid events, such as NO LAB, that combine SL and RL performances as well as site-specific community-based interventions.
 

RMB City (as in the Chinese unit of currency, renminbi, literally “people’s money”) started out as the Cao Fei’s fictional vision of China’s feverish rate of urbanization, echoing early discourses of the Internet as a purely democratic space where people could enter and participate regardless of race, class, creed, or location in the real world. Sound artist and experimental musician Zafka, described RMB City as a “virtopia” (virtual utopia): “the triumph of a kind of grassroots production mode: everyone is the creator of the new world.”[4] By the end of its run however, RMB City came into its own as a critical parody of relationships between China’s state capitalism, free market economies and the virtual economies of an artworld island online. Filled with every conceivable socialist, communist and capitalist icon, symbol or architectural landmark of major cities from the Pearl River Delta to Beijing and Shanghai, celebratory historical monuments and signature high-rises alongside super malls and street markets dominated this new Asian remix city where China Tracy, Cao’s long black-haired ‘SLebrity’ avatar since 2006, roves (all avatars in SL have the ability to fly) as denizen participant-observer, resident/tourist and philosopher guide. But under the surface not all was well in RMB City. Marooned, rusted or perforated buildings dangerously hovered over a dysfunctional Tiananmen Square-cum-infinity pool, huge gushing toilets, and dilapidated houses

Across this virtual island laid its most dystopic site: the bleak digital scape of the forgotten black neighbourhood of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which was among the districts hardest hit by Katrina. In a slick tight costume of a futuristic warrior princess complete with rocket boots, China Tracy’s appearance on NO LAB territory was as an immediate futuristic anachronism. The bright, colour-saturated qualities and slick animation of RMB City’s chaotic futuristic theme park, typical of the original aesthetics of Second Life, starkly contrasted with the somber topographical features of NO LAB in RMB City. The desolate metaverse designed by MAP Office is in grayscale. Black-lined digital drawings extracted from photographs taken during a research trip depicted the synthetic waters of the Lower Ninth pre-, during and post-flood as well as archetypes of its residents and iconic American individuals, who aided in post-Katrina recovery efforts. These avatars included then presidential candidate Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Mayor Ray Nagin, actor Brad Pitt, founder of the Make It Right Lower Ninth housing project, When the Levees Broke documentary director Spike Lee, and the actors of artist Paul Chan’s restaging of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for New Orleans. They hoisted or stood resiliently by signs or billboards encouraging residents with slogans such as “Still Proud to Call it Home,”  “Change We Can Believe In,” or “Movin’ on Up!”

For the Prospect.1 installation, a five-minute machinima (animated film made using 3D game engines in a real-time virtual environment) of NO LAB directed by Cao Fei with a soundtrack by the Japanese rock band Prague, was projected on one end of a temporary, DIY Carnival cart constructed out of whitewashed plywood. Nearby, interactive computer stations enabled visitors to create their own avatars to participate in the “live” remaking of the virtual New Orleans. Prominently featured wandering in colour photographs of the barren Lower Ninth filled with overgrown grass and weeds are China Tracy and the MAP Office duo, the latter present through the signature black and white drawings of themselves – their avatars since 2005.
 

Having come up with the idea of using a Mardi Gras float upon MAP Office’s happening on an abandoned lot of discarded Carnival carts, the island became a deeply operational concept, one which has long preoccupied the artists in their work. In the case of NO LAB, it compelled the simultaneously consideration of the material implications of recovery through cultural tourism (the Lower Ninth is still the highlight of Katrina disaster tours ever since Brad Pitt’s Global Green made it right) and urban poverty, racial polarization and the government neglect of marginalized African-American communities even before the massive natural disaster (when the Lower Ninth had the highest black homeownership rate in the city).[5] “By June 2006, investigations by engineers and journalists ultimately revealed that the flooding in the city was caused not by the strength of the hurricane but by the weakness of the levees. These levees were designed and build by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. They were not constructed to the specifications of the designs.”[6] The Lower Ninth and neighbouring St. Bernard Parish are located immediately in front the east levee breaches of the Industrial Canal where three major failures occurred. The media speculated that New Orleans would survive only as an island surrounded by miles of open water. “[S]urrounded by waters as it were, New Orleans is more akin to an island than to a continental landmass,” Prospect.1 Associate Curator Claire Tancons writes, “along with the parallactic shift implied in seeing New Orleans as a Caribbean island rather than an American [city]” (always somewhat under discussion since the Louisiana Purchase) “is a refocusing upon the specificity of its cultural traditions. Chief among them is Carnival, locally known as Mardi Gras, [which is] very much a Caribbean celebration.”[7] Following the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the Mardi Gras, traditionally hosted by the Lower Ninth and other black neighbourhoods who stood to gain the most was invoked and in fact Carnival became an icon of post-Katrina recovery, at least in the media.

NO LAB on Tour subsequently extended and built-up a prolonged engagement and series of activities over time by incorporating the Carnival’s signature Second Lines and Mardi Gras Indians. Second Lines are traditional New Orleans-style street parades where “second” refers to the people following a brass or marching band (the “Main Line”). They are more casual than a confrontational protest march and can be described as “in effect a civil rights demonstration, literally demonstrating the civil right of the community to assemble in the street for peaceful purposes [-- to assert their right] to exist.” [8]  On September 18, 2009, NO LAB on Tour #2 organized the Savannah Second Line, a real-life procession that aptly ended on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, led by a Mardi Gras Indian and accompanied by life-size two-dimensional wooden figures of the avatars created for NO LAB in New Orleans. The grand procession also included community members, as well as students, faculty, and staff from the Savannah College of Art and Design, marching alongside also costumed as the cut-out black and white avatars. In contrast, NO LAB on Tour #3 in Atlanta in 2010 opened as a gallery exhibition followed by a Second Life Second Line in NO LAB’s virtual New Orleans the day after, virtually bringing the parade full circle.

In retrospect, it is difficult to avoid linking NO LAB and the myriad of issues it raised to Cao Fei and Map Office’s other socially-engaged projects: parade and protest in MAP Office’s repeating islands from Hong Kong to China to New Orleans in SL and RL and Performing the Archipelago (2012), their The Final Battle (2008), a procession for the Seventh Gwangju Biennale to commemorate the lives lost during the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising, or Cao Fei and Ou Ning’s “village-in-a-city” under siege documentary films on the traditional village of San Yuan Li (2003) in Guangzhou whose hardy residents forced real estate developers to build around the now prime land and Dazhalan (2005) on the demolition prior to the Beijing Olympics of one of the poorest and highest density old city-centre neighbourhoods southwest of Tiananmen Square. Cao Fei’s last invocation of RMB City was as a one-person game art installation grimly titled Apocalypse Tomorrow: Surf in RMB City (2011) that invited audiences to guide the on-screen avatar, “an intrepid meditating monk,” through a post-disaster floodscape of the submerged once-famous SL city sometime in the future.

While SL as a cultural interface offers abundant possibilities for identity play, NO LAB adamantly debunked the myth of the Internet as a space without difference or material effects at the same time they push the limits of online gaming technologies to address and be relevant to real-life geopolitical economies and social hardship. Towards a sense of global justice, Cao Fei and MAP Office’s social practice art have consistently strategically and creatively deployed the potential of hybridized media art practices to activate community through a process of continuous remaking that allows for constant participation of other people, and to generate multiple sites of collective sharing, creation and political engagement in real and virtual worlds – both as it were, of our own making.

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