single channel video, 32:20min, 2009
If you want to screen this film or rent an exhibition copy
please contact the Video Data Bank in Chicago

“If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. Eteam’s “Prim Limit” traces this fascinating unexpected trajectory.

A plot of land is purchased in the online 3-D Second Life network and a simple question is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them? To find out eteam set aside a year to let this virtual land use problem unfold and what is captured in “Prim Limit” is the lived experience of avatars managing and recording this dumpster. The account shifts from problems of accumulating trash and, paradoxically, making it digitally decay, to existential notions and experiences of virtual life; its surfaces and beings. The narrative is told from the point of view of a camera avatar who is encapsulated in a box to film the dumpster activities 24 hours a day. His records capture the stunning, if not cavernous beauty of all manner of accumulating and disappearing objects and persona, each a strange caricature of some real world referent. Awkward and repetitive movement abounds, acute and close up camera angles give us peculiar feelings of intimacy with other avatars. A pervading sense of impermanence, emptiness and imprisonment emerges in the mise-en-scène. The play within this play is the skyscraper “Endgame”, Samuel Beckett’s of course, suggesting that Second Life avatars have reached this philosophical dilemma. This is a very contemporary Existentialist tale that is more about Wasteland than Waste, and all the very human emotions this terminal condition evokes.”   – Will Pappenheimer

With support from Rhizome.org, Smack Mellon, Research Foundation of the City University of New York, 18th Videokunst Förderpreis Bremen and Yaddo