Press Release: DanCoyote’s 12-Year Retrospective Exhibition

2.5 miles of Virtual Art by DC Spensley

Saturday, September 22, 2018, (Second Life, LEA 27)
[http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA27/148/226/39]

San Francisco artist, DC Spensley, will premiere a 4+ kilometer-tall, 40-level, 100-artwork exhibition, in an expansive retrospective of his work in the social, virtual world of Second Life. Featured in the exhibition is DC’s avatar, DanCoyote Antonelli, responsible for twelve years of virtual artworks and performances that have been critically recognized and widely emulated.

DC’s largest artwork, and perhaps the largest in Second Life history, is the Tower of Light – a 4.5 kilometer monolith currently on display at LEA 27. DC Spensley is also the creator and artistic director of the world’s first virtual, aerial dance company – the ZEROG SkyDancers. Linden Lab original, John “Pathfinder” Lester (AKA Pathfinder Linden), compared this genre-expanding, three-dimensional dance to Cirque Du Soleil changing the circus forever. In all his work, DC Spensley, and DanCoyote, have been driven to create art installations and theater productions that are intentionally native to the virtual world, a thesis which DC calls Hyperformalism.

Wagner James Au (AKA Hamlet Linden) in his seminal book, “The Making of Second Life”, has recognized DC Spensley for the advancement of virtual art. DC ’s work has been referenced in mainstream press, including The New York Times, Reuters, Step by Step Design, and Fibreculture Journal, as well in Europe, where DC has a strong following and is referenced in a number of European academic books and art journals. Additional recognition includes New Media venues such as Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), ZERO1 Biennial (San Jose, CA), Digital Electronic Arts Festival - DEAF (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and the Frye Museum (Seattle, WA). DC won a UNESCO award for virtual architecture in 2007. He has also written extensively about new media art theory focused on virtual worlds in Arts 21 and other publications.
 
About DanCoyote Antonelli:
The avatar DanCoyote Antonelli, as the proxy for David “DC” Spensley in the virtual world of Second Life, was derived from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in honor of a coyote that Joseph Beuys lived with for a time at the René Block Gallery in New York during his 1974 action, “I like America and America Likes Me”. Apparently nobody realized how close Beuys and the coyote had become until DanCoyote was born.

For more information please contact:
DC Spensley
dc@spensley.com

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