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Carla Gannis ’ solo exhibition “wwwunderkammer” opens at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (HICA) in Charleston (US), aiming to decolonize the wunderkammer and, by extension, the museum. A real-world manifestation of her ongoing social VR project (2019–), the show invites visitors to explore a series of ‘chambers,’ each focusing on a different aspect of life in the internet age. In line with the American transmedia artist’s penchant for illusionism, the gallery uses AR to obfuscate what’s real and what’s not.
Copenhagen Contemporary opens “Yet, It Moves!,” a city-wide exhibition of art-science encounters that explore the universe’s only constant: movement. Eleven artists including Cecilia Bengolea , Ryoji Ikeda , Black Quantum Futurism , Jakob Kudsk Steensen (image: Tongues of Verglas , 2023), and Jenna Sutela worked with leading researchers through Arts at CERN , ModLab , DARK , and the IMC to express phenomena like black holes, star formation, and gravitational waves as 3D animations, VR, AR, sound, and immersive installations.
OUT NOW :
Christiane Paul
Digital Art (World of Art)
The forth edition of the
digital art curator ’s acclaimed 2003 survey includes recent developments like AI, augmented and mixed realities, and NFTs (and features pioneer
Caudia Hart on the cover).
”New Surroundings: Approaching the Untouchable,” an exhibition organized by Molior that delves deep into the digital sublime, opens at Montreal’s Livart . Curated by Nathalie Bachand , it features artists including Caroline Gagné , Olivia McGilchrist , François Quévillon (image: MÉTÉORES Sabrina Ratté presenting works in print, installation, video, and VR that explore extreme tensions between ”modified, reorganized, and augmented” digitality and nature.
“A legless Donald Trump, just wandering the empty streets of Horizon Worlds , selling commemorative coins.”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , imagining the sad combination of Trump and the metaverse, in the aftermath of Meta reinstating the former U.S. President’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after a two-year ban
“The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you.”
–
Oculus founder
Palmer Luckey , working on a new VR headset that will kill the user if they die in-game. Inspired by the NerveGear helmets in the
Sword Art Online anime, Luckey’s prototype features three explosive charges aimed at the player’s brain. “At this point, it’s just a piece of office art,” he reveals in his
personal blog , “a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.”
“This POV camera was a little creepy, because it didn’t notify others when it was turned on. When I revealed I was recording, people would sometimes shout, ‘she’s a fed!’ and run away.”
– Privacy reporter
Kashmir Hill , describing folks’ cheeky reaction to her recording interactions in the Metaverse. Seriously committing to her story, Hill spent more than 24 hours logged into
Horizon Worlds , Meta’s VR social network, to get a sense of who the early adopters are, and how they feel about virtual reality.
Dani Ploeger ’s XR installation Line of Contact
Bringing her RGB eccentricity to French Canada, Sara Ludy ’s solo exhibition “Swimmer’s Canyon” opens at Art Mûr Montréal. In the titular VR piece, curated by Samuel Arsenault-Brassard , the American artist and composer sends viewers on a journey “through a star-filled canyon to a swimming hole, presenting a world populated by the absurd and the unknown.” Not in Montréal? The six VR scenes included can be viewed—and owned—as NFTs as well.
Marshmallow Laser Feast ’s newest collective VR experience, Evolver , premieres at Tribeca’s Immersive showcase, dropping New York audiences “deep inside the landscape of the human body.” On their journey, narrated by Cate Blanchett , visitors follow the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem, to a single ‘breathing’ cell. The transcendental trip, the London-based collective argues, reveals our connection to the nature through the cycle of respiration.
“So, how do you build a metaverse? Rule one: spend twenty years.”
– Media artist
Claudia Hart , chronicling her decades building in virtual space. Speaking at
VR WSPark , an online exhibition space curated by
Snow Yunxue Fu , Hart ruminates on the iterations of her
Dolls (2014-) project, which blends CGI, costume design, and choreography in mixed-reality performance.
Tokyo’s SAI gallery dedicates a new solo show—his largest yet—to the cyberpunk creations of Ikeuchi Hiroto , showcasing mechanical masks, VR headsets, wearable exoskeletons (made in collaboration with Skeletonics ), and a futuristic vehicle (image). Ikeuchi, who rose to fame with robotic augmentations in the fashion world, combines ready-made plastic models with industrial parts, imparting decontextualised objects with new meaning through amalgamation.
In a post on his blog, designer Matt Webb offers unflinching analysis of the metaverse. Hashing out a rough definition that it is immersive , multiplayer , and has an economy , he challenges some widely held assumptions about what technologies are required (e.g. VR plus crypto does not a metaverse make). Beyond the obligatory Snow Crash former studio ’s work during the web 2.0 era and his experience establishing London’s Silicon Roundabout tech cluster, noting how common goals create strange bedfellows. Now, Webb sees the same thing with the metaverse, observing “we have crypto-libertarians tech nerds from Web3 somehow aligned with platform monopolist VR-maximalists from Facebook. Their values couldn’t be more opposed yet they are boosters for the same trend.”
“Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” the first major survey show of American artist Jacolby Satterwhite opens at Pittsburgh’s Miller ICA. Providing a chronology of the artist’s signature fusion of worldbuilding, mythology, and queer theory, and interpretations of his Mother’s drawings, in mixed-media works spanning installation to VR and CGI (image: Black Luncheon , 2020), Satterwhite “transforms existential uncertainty into a generative engine of resilience, reinvention, and celebration.”
A hat tip to the star-studded browser space of Olia Lialina ’s net art classic Some Universe (2002), the 11th edition of Eastern Bloc ’s Sight + Sound Festival opens with the online exhibition “Some Universe—Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World.” Featuring 13 VR, video, and net art pieces by AAA , Banz & Bowinkel , Ronnie Clarke , Mara Eagle , Jiwon Ham , Jakyung Lee (image: Exodus , 2020), and others, curators Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerländer explore how the pandemic shift online has changed our sense of space.
The 24th Japan Media Arts Festival announces Meiro Koizumi ’s VR piece Prometheus Bound Adrien M & Claire B , Simon Weckert , and Myriam Bleau .
With “Cao Fei: Staging the Era,” the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, opens a major retrospective of the trailblazing Chinese multimedia artist —the first in her home country. For over two decades, Fei has harnessed nascent formats (film, video, MMOs, VR, etc.) to surreally depict the dramatic social changes of a globalizing China. Years in the making, the show is realised as an IRL parkour of her many virtual worlds, where works bleed into one another to create “a sense of belonging to this particular here and now—a stage for our era.”
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