Rmbcity (2007)
By Cao Fei
In the near future, China Tracy will build a city dubbed RMB City within Second Life. This will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future. In RMB City, we will be able to cruise the digital ocean, witnessing a Ferris wheel rotating on top of the Monument to the People's Heroes; looking down from the sky on the water of the Three Gorges reservoir gushing out of the Tian'anmen rostrum; passing the giant new totem symbolizing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai; hopping over the Feilai Temple marooned in a raging torrent; walking across a vast, desolate state-owned factory area in Northeast China; and finally hovering over the Grand National Theatre i…
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