RMB City Grand Opening
Jan 9, 2009: 6pm-8pm (SecondLife Time)
Jan 10, 2009: 10am-12pm (Beijing Time)
RMB City at Second Life, 2009
RMB City office at Beijing, China, 2009
Cao Fei / China Tracy
RMB City
Since 2009
Internet Project
RMB City is developed by Cao Fei & Vitamin Creative Space
website：www.rmbcity.com Welcome!!
RMB City — Online Urbanization
Text: Cao Fei
Sine 2009, China Tracy has built a city dubbed RMB City within Second Life. This is 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-permeate, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political.
China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City is realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future. In RMB City, we’re 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 in Beijing. Also in our view are gigantic planes gliding over terraces in the crevices of the central business district, and aerial super-malls. We see water flowing into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta area before traveling through the sewage system into an ocean with floating statues of soldier. The rusted steel structure of the Olympic Stadium aka “Bird’s Nest” is washed in splashes of ocean spray, while an aerial band on a floating sheet of the national flag filled with five-pointed stars makes a deafening noise that shakes Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV building, causing it to collapse….