Oscillating between dystopia and non-human perspectives
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Meta.space is an interdisciplinary academic anthology complementing a 2022-23 exhibition of the same name at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria.
‘Art and culture in the metaverse’ seeks to contextualise art and culture inside the metaverse. The text engenders cultural and political theory; aesthetics of the digital image and virtual spaces; and posthumanist philosophies which address the materiality of non-human actants to overcome ontological binaries. It engages the contemporary networked image; computer-generated imagery (CGI) and artificial intelligence (AI) creative processes; and virtual reality (VR) and digital environments as provisional of space for agency, intervention, and a post-humanist approach to the materiality of the world.
The cultural convergence of art, science, and technology has provided ample opportunity to re-contextualise the production of art, its themes and mediums, and its function in society. Artists and theorists alike have in recent years probed the intersection of these disciplines for the potential of radical cultural innovation. Extended reality,1 facial recognition filters, automated photographic tools, and synthetic media2 are presently dominating social processes with unprecedented speeds. But by becoming the norm, an escape from reality threatens to turn into all there is – simulacra subsumed by capitalist bodies boasting increasingly sophisticated strategies for surveillance and control enabled by images. Conversely, embodied perception of virtual environments may provide opportunities to consider environments and other-than-human entities in a more ecological manner.