Exhibiting New Media Art In The Many Worlds Of The Metaverse
At our most recent WAC Weekly, we were joined by Sammie Veeler from New Art City. In their current exhibition Terms of Service, New Art City explores its dual role as an artist-run virtual space and a piece of technical infrastructure. The pieces explore what stewardship looks like in a virtual space, as opposed to the extractive relationship big tech platforms have with the creators who use them.
Sammie joined us to talk about what the metaverse could do for exhibitions, how it changes the exhibition as we know it, and the skills institutions will need to develop to thrive there.
New Art City in the metaverse
New Art City has been making virtual worlds since before the word “metaverse” came about. Sammie told us that while the group was excited about the promise of interoperability, there needs to be more agency.
While something like Fortnite — the game at the center of the “metaverse” as Matthew Ball popularized it — gives players the opportunity to wander around virtual spaces and experiences, this vision of virtual avatars walking around a building shouldn’t be the height of our ambitions.
The composable tools of Web3 could enable all kinds of opportunities for creators and gallerists to create new experiences that go beyond simulating what we might do in person in an art museum. In this fast-moving space, we’re seeing experiments all the time on how interoperable tools can create novel experiences that aren’t limited to one exhibition, world, or platform.
Challenges of the metaverse for art exhibitions
According to dslcollection’s Sylvain Levy, technologies like AR, VR, and the metaverse enable a move from a traditional art experience to an immersive one, to which dslcollection is adding a gaming experience.
In the game Forgetter, made in collaboration with Sometimes Monastery, works from the dslcollection are included in a sci-fi story about a technician reworking the minds of traumatized artists. It’s a more natural fit than it might sound, with included artists like Feng Mangbo and Cao Fei having created work “natively” inside gaming engines.
Whether they’re a customized character or they’re just invisible, the avatar through which one experiences a virtual space makes it inherently different from a physical walk through an art gallery. Trying to recreate that experience in the virtual world is futile.
But how accessible are those virtual worlds in 2022? The metaverse comes to us from the gaming world. If anyone part of the metaverse isn’t literally a game, it uses the mechanics of gaming: navigating through a 3D world with an avatar and distinct, interconnected areas or “levels”.
While gaming is hugely popular with a Gen Z crowd, how much of the traditional museum-going audience will you find dominating the battle on Fortnite?
The interoperable future of the exhibition
Sammie pointed out that the blockchain has a unique solution for this. While the blockchain is one single source of truth, interoperability allows for multiple “viewing layers” on top of that information. There’s clear provenance on that data, but you can “view” that data in any way you like.
A platform like Async Art is driven by this idea, the work is a “blueprint” that can be altered based on on-chain activity. When the entire hic et nunc site went down, a replacement was built within hours because all the important data on the artworks, their creators, and their owners was unaffected.
On Web 2.0, all that data would be siloed on the servers owned by a platform. In Web3 and the metaverse, data is public and can be viewed in many ways. The same on-chain artwork can be viewed and bought in a surreal game world while it hangs in a real-world gallery. The work can be accessed in whichever way suits the audience.
For exhibitors, the customization of these digital spaces is reminiscent of the early days of Web 2.0, when many learned to code for themselves customizing their own pages on sites like MySpace. Nothing at the technical level prevents this today, but a more homogenized experience has just become the cultural norm.
Speaking to Ocula, Sylvain Levy says that “the metaverse, in my dream, isn’t governed by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. It will be an island of happiness and freedom where cyber-flâneurs are free to go from one experience to another with a focus on art and humanity”.
The metaverse sees participants becoming more fluent in free game engines like Unreal and Unity. Veeler’s own work Well resembles a 1990s video game like Myst, and the open-ended nature of gaming is the language exhibitors have to learn to speak.
Bridging the gap between physical and virtual exhibition design
Most of what we talk about when we talk about “the metaverse” is yet to arrive, but the augmented reality tools already with us might provide a bridge between the traditional audience and the virtual exhibition.
Sculptor Sophie Kahn talked about how AR allows physical interaction with a virtual piece, having to crane the neck up to see a 20ft sculpture towering above you. Most new smartphones have some kind of AR capability, and the phone — or whichever AR glasses might replace them — would be a more familiar experience for audiences than dedicated gaming hardware.
In previous sessions, we’ve discussed how the screen hanging on the wall in an NFT gallery might constrain the on-chain work, rather than show it off in a space that’s suited to it.
When you can view on-chain work in any number of ways — from an interactive screen to something like Synthesis gallery’s virtual garden — what’s stopping a museum from creating a virtual space suited to each work?
In a virtual space, the curator has a near-infinite number of options for how they want to arrange the works and the whole world around them. As the visual fidelity and sense of embodiment in the metaverse become more realistic, it becomes necessary to take lessons from practices like physical exhibition design or the emotional storytelling of real-world architecture. And when just placing two video works on the same wall can see the pieces clashing with each other, the curator’s eye for spatial experience becomes more important than ever.
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WAC Weekly is part of WAC Lab, a new program unleashing the full potential of Web3 for the arts and culture produced by We Are Museums in collaboration with TZ Connect and Blockchain Art Directory, and powered by the Tezos ecosystem.
