Forever Michael – 7 minute video touring some of the hundreds of Second Life tributes to Michael Jackson

Forever Michael (Sin City)

Designed around spontaneous memorials that are erected around key sites at the time of celebrity deaths, this installation both pays tribute to and comments in the mass hysteria surrounding Michael Jackson’s untimely passing. First reported on celebrity gossip site TMZ.com, Michael’s death sparked an unprecedented internet frenzy, with Twitter recording over 5000 Jackson Tweets a minute. Over 11 million people watched his memorial live on the web, and tributes, traditionally found on the street were springing up on social networking sites and virtual reality applications such as Second Life.This traditional tribute memorial combines both the physical and virtual with a 7 minute video touring some of the hundreds of Second Life tributes to Michael Jackson. Streaming along the bottom of the screen are the sensationalized headlines which appeared, and continue to appear, on TMZ.com. Ending with paparazzi footage of Michael in the last month of his life, we are both voyeur and sympathiser as we watch a lonely figure being hunted and trapped by a mob of ever-persistent cameramen who feed the frenzy that surrounded him in life, and now in death.

“Michael Jackson kept his most stunning performance for the very end. Always able to command an audience, he knew how to bring whole arenas to fits of exultation with his moves and then silence them to the point of tears with his poetry. He was brilliant, excessive, maudlin, tacky and possibly criminal, but you could never ignore him. So it was fitting that in death, he momentarily silenced the largest arena humanity has ever known, the Internet.” TIME MAGAZINE, JULY 2009

Join us for one of Don’t Look’s final exhibitions!

What: Forever Michael (Sin City)
Who: Georgie Roxby Smith
Where: Don’t Look Gallery, 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, Sydney, Australia
(a block back from the corner of New Canterbury Rd and Marrickville Rd).
When: Opening — Wednesday 9 December, 6.oopm
(see the exhibition for the next ten days through the front window)
Contact: dontlookgallery@gmail.com, Greg -0401 152 434