Tower of Babelfish

Second Front includes a number of artists working with the virtual telepathy of Second Life, including Scott Kildall aka Great Escape and Jeremy Owen Turner aka Wirxli Flimflam – friends who together collaborated to re-perform a work by Abramoviç/Ulay and other key examples of performance art. In addition to the telepathy of appropriative reperformance, an example of Second Front telepathy work is a group performance they undertook with the spirits of four dead performance artists in Tower of Babelfish (2007): Tristan Tzara, Ana Mendieta, Charlotte Moorman and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Fluxus Conceptual artist Larry Miller, who works with telepathy and hypnosis in his real world performances, has re-performed a number of his own Fluxus art works with Second Front, including one performed with Bibbe Oh/Bibbe Hansen called See you in your dreams (2010). It was originally written in 1977 with the instruction: “appear in another’s dreams.” Second Front works with virtual world collaborative telepathy of digital avatars whilst nurturing indirect collaborations with Dada, Fluxus and art history, including direct collaboration with Fluxus artists Hansen and Miller – Miller being one of a number of late Conceptual/Fluxus artists working with hypnosis and telepathy. Second Front also work with online swarming, as do Eva and Franco Matte, as a kind of ‘collective telepathy 2.0’ as discussed by Jose Luis Brea.