They're sleek, sexy, and shallow (and no, they're not the Hilton sisters). A new exhibition spotlights Second Life's virtual hotties

About a year ago, Eva and Franco Mattes were very short and very fat. No one would talk to them. Then Eva got pretty and thin. And when they needed to make some money, she became a prostitute.

"It's the oldest job in the real world, so it's probably the oldest one in the second world," Franco notes, referring to the online community-cum-
metaverse Second Life, where the couple, an Italian art collective-of-two called 0100101110101101.org, had mucked around for a while. "The sex life in there is fun."

The digital creatures are themselves just representations. "These are photos of self-
portraits, somehow," Franco says.Before long, an art project was born. Franco and Eva began scouting the best-looking of the 10,000 to 20,000 digital representations of people who wander around in Second Life on a given day, and "photographing" them. They favored those who looked like actual people as opposed to chairs or spiders, or who were invisible. Just like in real life, "the more beautiful will really find friends," explains Franco, speaking for the pair. The difference, of course, is that the digital creatures are themselves just representations. "These are photos of self-portraits, somehow," he says.

Inspired by Andy Warhol, who in the early '60s set up four-minute reels of film to record whatever striking person happened to drop by and turned the results into the compilations The 13 Most Beautiful Women and The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, Eva and Franco call their project—on view this month at New York's Postmasters gallery—13 Most Beautiful Avatars. Their portraits are printed on stretched canvas measuring 36-by-48 inches using a now-common machine that Warhol would have killed to get his paws on.

Taking another cue from Andy, the artists are always a little bored. "I'm not so fond of Second Life," Franco says.

The pair have worked as pranksters and provocateurs on and off the Net for years—rebranding Vienna's Karlsplatz as Nikeplatz with signage announcing the installation of a giant "Swoosh"; buying vaticano.org and stocking it with content from the Vatican's website (with slight, creepy alterations); and creating a harmless—but news-making—virus as their contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale. Their portraits are perverse, too, reminding us that for all their allure, online beauty is pixel-deep. "To me they look tragic," says Franco.

"Within Second Life, everyone can be a star," he adds. "That is one of the basic ideas of Warhol, to turn anybody into a star just by manipulating his or her image. And if you behave like a star, you become one."

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