Brooklyn is Watching

A two-way window between Second Life and a Brooklyn gallery — a decade before "the metaverse"

Brooklyn is Watching was a landmark mixed-reality art project connecting a virtual island in Second Life with the Jack the Pelican Presents gallery in Williamsburg. A massive gallery monitor broadcast a live feed of virtual artworks to a physical audience of critics and peers, who debated the merits of the digital works in a weekly podcast — while the disembodied "Brooklyn Eye" avatar, Monet Destiny, carried the gallery's gaze back into the virtual world. The project forced a confrontation between the labor of virtual artists and the critical vocabulary of the New York art scene, probing the attention economy and the power dynamics of watching and being watched. Covered in The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and New World Notes.