by Lorna McDowell // Nov. 3, 2023
The early days of the internet promised a flourishing network of creativity, openness and connection. We now sadly accept that the World Wide Web we know today is far from the internet dream of the 90s. While it still gives opportunities for connection and discovery, the internet has become corrupted—co-opted and monopolised by corporations, and rife with data extraction and security threats. Our daily life is intertwined with online experiences that have increased overall in quality and quantity, but from a social-impact perspective, deteriorated. Artists are always at the forefront of navigating our changing society, and as we move from a flat internet towards the immersive internet of the metaverse—the network of virtual worlds that sits within the new, decentralised iteration of the internet, web3—we need the imagination of artists to help us avoid the same mistakes. The group exhibition ‘Unleashed Utopias: Artistic Speculations about Today and Tomorrow in the Metaverse’ at Haus am Lützowplatz (HaL) presents the five nominees for the VR Art Prize, who offer a window into how artists are working in this area, while asking, “how can technology help to create a better society?”
Lauren Moffatt: ‘Local Binaries,’ 2023, still, VR Kunstpreis der DKB in Kooperation with CAA Berlin 2023 // Photo by J. Pegman, © Lauren Moffatt
In the airy exhibition space of HaL, visitors can encounter five site-specific installations featuring VR works accompanied by both analogue and augmented reality (AR) echoes of the same work. Each takes a different approach, but all posit “alternative future scenarios based on socially relevant issues.” Lauren Moffatt’s ‘Local Binaries’ (2023) draws on vivid descriptions gleaned from nine women who described their inner states through the metaphor of a landscape expressed with “geological shapes, sounds, plants, weather systems, and architecture.” The AR element of the work involves using a handheld device to pan across the floor of the installation space in order to explore a rugged and multilayered landscape containing solitary wandering figures. For the VR element, visitors lay on upholstered loungers and point and flick their fingers to pan across a map above them and land in a chosen world. One inner world depicts a lone figure covered with black butterflies, and every figure’s painterly texture reminds us that Moffatt has blended painting by hand with AI. In a society where pursuit of connection is capitalised on by tech giants, Moffatt depicts a slow and reflective universe that muses on the universal human experience of alienation.
Lauren Moffatt: ‘Local Binaries,’ 2023, installation view ‘Unleashed Utopias, Haus am Lützowplatz,’ VR Kunstpreis der DKB in Kooperation with CAA Berlin 2023 // Photo by J. Pegman, © Lauren Moffatt
Rebecca Merlic’s ‘Glitchbodies’ (2023) next door celebrates identity and self-expression. Merlic used 3D scanning to create avatars of real people—artists, musicians, writers, drag performers—who collaborated with Merlic to design their own digital protagonist’s persona and subjective environment. ‘Glitchbodies’ is a game that we can interact with via VR and AR, but also by sinking into a purple beanbag and picking up a gaming controller to play on screen. A shimmering congregation of beings are intended to counter the heteronormative and binary avatars encountered in classic video games. Inspired by Legacy Russell’s ‘Glitch Feminism Manifesto,’ Merlic draws on a “socio-techno construct of gender,” populating a dreamy digital world with many subjective desires and stories, accessed via an endless loop of portals. One portal leads to a softly lit, red velvet-draped bedroom, where a leopard print-clad protagonist reclines in comfort and campy glamour on a matching leopard print sofa. Characters are either fantastical and androgynous with distorted, glitchy features, or take on a more everyday appearance. All are sculpturally gloopy and fluid, intended to form a collective, politically-charged body that is housed by the safety and “motherly care” of the game engine.
Rebecca Merlic: ‘Glitchbodies,’ 2023, still. VR KUNSTPREIS der DKB in Kooperation with CAA Berlin 2023 // © Rebecca Merlic
Rebecca Merlic: ‘Glitchbodies,’ 2023, installation view, ‘Unleashed Utopias, Haus am Lützowplatz,’ VR Kunstpreis der DKB in Kooperation mit CAA Berlin 2023 // Photo by J. Pegman, courtesy of Haus am Lützowplatz
By contrast, Marlene Bart’s installation ‘Theatrum Radix’ (2023) leads us passively through an engulfing seven-chapter journey that questions our perception of the natural order of things. Bart interweaves her expertise in art and natural history with printmaking, glass techniques and the VR centrepiece of the installation. Taking a seat and putting on the VR headset, we soon find ourselves in the centre of a theatre inspired by philosopher Guilio Camillo’s ‘Theatre of Memory’—an imaginary semi-circular stage with tiers divided by aisles and columns, each area associated with a symbolic mythological figure. Bart’s columns are crowned with surreal 3D objects and artefacts from natural history, intended to depict “a modern architecture of knowledge.” Our view centres in on each object in turn, and we are pulled in closer to examine a dissected frog, a fluttering butterfly, a rhizome, a sculptural and translucent pair of snails—which are also present as a glazed, glass sculpture in the physical installation space.
Bart leads us into an immersive encounter with each object. We submerge into and out of other beings, embodying gastropods, insects and other organic forms. In one scene, we find ourselves in the exhilarating experience of floating through the air with a twirling spiral of fluttering butterflies, and in another, embraced from behind by a large insect—more of a visceral, queasy affair. Bart wants us to think of order “not as hierarchical, but as an organic and evolving network”, which I believe is achieved through the decentering of the human perspective, and the slow, soft quality of the work. Boundaries between animals and plants are dissolved, moving away from anthropocentric perception and into nature’s interconnected webs. Bart opens up a playful utopian reality where this is possible.
Marlene Bart: ‘Theatrum Radix,’ 2023, still. ‘Unleashed Utopias, Haus am Lützowplatz,’ VR Kunstpreis der DKB in Kooperation mit CAA Berlin 2023 // Directed by and screenplay by Marlene Bart. Produced as a cooperation of Marlene Bart, Ikonospace founder Joris Demanrd and 3D Artist Manuel Farre. Music by Daniel Benyamin. © Marlene Bart
Marlene Bart: ‘Theatrum Radix’, 2023, installation view. ‘UNLEASHED UTOPIAS, Haus am Lützowplatz,’ VR KUNSTPREIS der DKB in Kooperation mit CAA Berlin 2023 // Photo by J. Pegman. Courtesy of Haus am Lützowplatz
In the next room, performance artist Anan Fries’ ‘[Posthuman Wombs]’ (2023) touches on themes of gender, binaries and the boundaries between nature and technology. Fries depicts a future where all bodies can become pregnant, with a VR work that is both a visual essay and “a tender trip into the belly of the pregnant Posthuman.” Viewing the work from within the cocoon of an egg-shaped chair in the installation space—which is punctuated with silicone umbilical-cord sculptures that also resemble plant life—we are birthed into a saturated world where pregnancy is a body-hack and avatars deliver a choreographed performance in community and otherness, together. The AR aspect of the work plays further with the idea of ectogenesis, the technology whereby an embryo is developed in an artificial environment outside of the human body, by mimicking an online store where customers can design their own “ectobag.”
Anan Fries: ‘[Posthuman Wombs],’ 2023, still, VR KUNSTPREIS der DKB in Kooperation with CAA Berlin 2023 // Creator, director and script by Anan Fries, creator, composition and sound design Malu Peeters, © Anan Fries
Anan Fries: ‘[Posthuman Wombs],’ 2023, installation view. ‘Unleashed Utopias, Haus am Lützowplatz,’ VR Kunstpreis der DKB in Kooperation mit CAA Berlin 2023 // Photo by J. Pegman, courtesy of Haus am Lützowplatz
Lastly, merging spiritual divination traditions with AI technology, Mohsen Hazrati’s ‘Fãl Project [none-AI]’ (2022)—the recently announced winner of the VR ART PRIZE—creates an eclectic virtual space populated by machinic figures and clanking, metallic birds soaring above us, while technological debris floats by. A neon-green wishing well beckons us to approach with a small iPad, which we use to activate an algorithm that delivers words of wisdom extracted from ‘The Diwan,’ a 14th-century volume of poems by Persian poet Hafez. Hazrati has engineered things so that his influence over the data and AI is minimal, and verse is selected totally at random, inspired by the Iranian tradition of allowing a budgerigar to randomly pluck out verse in order to foretell the future. ‘Fãl Project [none-AI]’ is asking that we reflect inwards—but here we reconnect with our intuition via technology, in a world where technology usually crowds it out.
Mohsen Hazrati: ‘Fãl Project [None-AI],’ 2023, still, image from Newviewing 43 online show, Barbara Thumm gallery, curated by Mukenge/Schellhammer // © Mohsen Hazrati
Mohsen Hazrati: ‘Fãl Project [None-AI],’ 2023, installation view. ‘Unleashed Utopias, Haus am Lützowplatz,’ VR Kunstpreis der DKB in Kooperation mit CAA Berlin 2023 // Photo by J. Pegman, courtesy of Haus am Lützowplatz
Our lives will likely always be intertwined with the online world in a perpetual feedback loop, and there is a need to carve out spaces in our expanding virtual world to play and experiment with utopian solutions to our many global crises. In the virtual spaces of HaL, artists hold the power of a direct line to their audience, with the ability to pivot our gaze, in a literal sense, and walk us through such speculative, artistic futures. At its best, virtual art can offer a visually moving escape, but also a profound and experiential shifting of perspective—allowing us to have urgently needed relational experiences with nature and other beings that are normally completely beyond our realms of perception.
Exhibition Info
Haus am Lützowplatz
Group show: ‘Unleashed Utopias. Artistic Speculations about Today and Tomorrow in the Metaverse’
Exhibition: Sept. 9–Nov. 5, 2023
hal-berlin.de
Lützowplatz 9, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
