Metaverse

ACE Open's group show Metaverse, curated by Patrice Sharkey, emphasises hand-drawn and hand-constructed methods in its examination of our lives on (and in) line. At once reparative, ironic, and incisive, the work of the exhibition's four artists immerses us in a dystopia of our own making.

A wryly immersive exhibition with an accompanying series of public programs, Metaverse feels and thinks its way through the experience of being in – and, increasingly, of – the internet today. The show takes as its title the new brand identity for Mark Zuckerberg’s group of social media platforms, Meta, announced to widespread derision, but also to fear and apprehension, late last year. As Sharkey puts it, the show “speaks to a moment when our lives are more and more influenced and governed by the online.” The four artists exhibiting in the program – Giselle Stanborough, Roy Ananda, Britt d’Argaville, and Harun Farocki – examine the aesthetics, affects, and erotics of our submersion within digital networks, with a humanistic remit. What becomes of our social and emotional entanglements with our selves and each other, that is, is a key concern throughout the exhibition. 

Roy Ananda presents a distinctly of-the-moment approach to self-portraiture: an installation of isometric, diagrammatic designs based on the results of 1000 online personality tests. Having focussed for some years on the intersection of pop-culture fandom and contemporary art practice, in this new work Ananda engages with ideas of social media-enhanced fanaticism.

Britt d’Argaville’s sculptural work for Metaverse is described as “a visceral, penetrative conglomeration of antiquated electrical cords and Ethernet cables.” Eerie and half-anthropomorphic, the chords are kissing (Chateau Marmont), 2022, might be disturbing or funny, as is characteristic for the Melbourne-based artist. The work stretches between the walls of ACE Open, lively and unmissable.

The late Harun Farocki’s work Parallel is a four-part cycle, focusing on the generic visual qualities of computer animation, and the worlds that are created by and within it. Farocki writes that “In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.” What ontological status, the work asks, do the worlds created by computer animations, by games, or by CGI films obtain? Farocki, who passed away in 2014, would not of course have known the Metaverse, but his work is unsettlingly prescient. 

Giselle Stanborough’s Cinopticon was originally staged at Carriageworks in 2020, and is re-presented here at ACE Open. Stanborough is at once the watcher and the watched, in this immersive installation work which re-traces and picks apart the logic and the felt experiences of surveillance capitalism, aided and abetted by social media algorithms. A searchlight roves across Stanborough’s large-scale wall-painted diagrams, placing notions of the handmade or self-created under scrutiny. Stanborough also presents a performance lecture, Wwwiderspruch, on 29 April, which examines the work of transubstantiation between abstract data and material form in which we all, as users of the internet, participate. 

Though the aesthetic, social, and political “innovations” of big data/big tech may be dubious, they’re also absolutely pervasive – stretching, as these artists show, from our ideas of sex to our ideas of selfhood. Past the point of being welcomed to the Metaverse, we’re already here. The remaining question might be who exactly this “we” is, or could become. 

EXHIBITION 
Metaverse
9 April – 14 May 2022
ACE Open, Adelaide