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I visited the new solo show from Eva and Franco Mattes (aka, a bit obnoxiously, as 0100101110101101.org) at Postmasters Gallery directly after catching the final weekend of Marina Abramovics “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA. This is significant, considering that the Matteses once staged virtual renditions of key Abramovic works — like Imponderabilia”— using the virtual medium of Second Life. There’s more Second Life-facilitated art here at Postmasters — all of it oddly beautiful and bizarre, humorous yet also ingenious in its exploration of how digital animation and virtual reality can affect human interaction (and the nude anatomy).

The videos are displayed on monitors that are offhandedly set on the floor, propped against the wall. Gallery visitors can sit on crummy air mattresses and watch the Mattes duo, as avatars, flying, contorting, or suffering quasi-epileptic fits. The decorative aesthetic in the gallery is half college dorm room, half Bushwick squat. In one video, Medication Valse, Franco’s avatar “melts” into a chair in the center of a room; other avatars float around the space in various states of undress, part of a Second Life orgy fantasia. I know that it’s all a state of mind features the virtual Franco and Eva twitching, convulsing, falling through each other’s bodies, and generally performing the sort of high-pain, high-endurance antics that would be right at home over at that Abramovic retrospective. (If these descriptions don’t fully convey the content of the videos—and there’s little chance they do—all of the work can be screened in its entirety on the artists’ Web site.)

The Second Life-based work is both an affirmation of and a satire on the virtual reality platform. Whether you view it as legitimate art — which you should — the Matteses nail what makes modern video games such fun, and why the Grand Theft Auto franchise and Second Life have thrived. While video games are restricted by a degree of plot and mission, both are open-ended platforms that encourage, or at least allow, a measure of anarchic freedom. In Second Life, it’s possible to visit a virtual swinger’s club, affix a virtual phallus to your forehead, and then teleport to a virtual Apple store, where the virtual employees may berate you for your avatar’s unfortunate appearance. The medium invites a certain degree of creative vandalism or aesthetic terrorism. The Mattes have simply taken this impulse — a teenager’s drive to break the rules in a fundamentally unruly environment — and codified it into art. But there’s more to it than the chuckle factor of a cartoon avatar wearing a dick on its head; 0100101110101101.org remakes the Second Life platform and makes it a thing of beauty, incorporating the software’s own visual glitches as part of the work (and never being as boring or bland as that slice of tech art known as “glitch art”).

Internet art needs to move as fast as the Internet itself, so 0100101110101101.org’s other recent work focuses on that viral sensation, Chatroulette. Their intervention, No Fun, is a bit less successful (perhaps because Chatroulette got so wildly popular so swiftly — and its usefulness as an artistic medium may have been compromised by the time it ended up being skewered on The Daily Show.) We see the now-familiar split-screen video in which strangers are randomly connected using their web cams. 0100101110101101.org have concocted a morbid mise-en-scène, though. We see Franco in a trashed, messy room; he’s hanging from the ceiling, an apparent suicide. If 0100101110101101.org were trying to prove a larger point — that Internet culture has made us so voyeuristic that we’ll merely laugh at death — they fail to a degree here. Most of the strangers who witness the “suicide” rightly doubt its authenticity; the guy who actually attempts to call the police comes across as a rube, ignorant of the rules of virtual space. (He might as well be reporting a murder in Second Life.)

The final — and perhaps most controversial — part of the Postmasters show is a work called Stolen Pieces. There’s nothing virtual about this one, unless you consider fragments of well-known artworks — a bottle cap from a Kienholz installation, limestone from a Robert Smithson, a sliver of a Warhol canvas — pilfered by the duo, to constitute a “virtual masterpiece.” (A photographic summary of the stolen bits is available here.) These odds and ends from modern art icons have been lifted from various museums and collected here, in a sort of display case. Sophomoric, immoral, and a ready-made (not to mention readymade) publicity stunt? Sure. I doubt Eva and Franco Mattes would say otherwise. (And the recent rash of high-profile art crime has certainly made them seem prescient.) But it does raise an odd question: What would have happened if this reviewer had attempted to liberate some small piece of art from the Postmasters Gallery? Would I have been prosecuted as a crook, or applauded as an art guerrilla? Perhaps anticipating just such a question, the gallery has ensured that all the “stolen pieces” are safely under glass. There’s nothing tangible here for the taking — just some cables, Apple equipment, and cheap air mattresses. So there’s the rub: you can’t steal an avatar.