Gabriel Menotti

Gabriel Menotti is Associate Professor at the Film and Media Department of Queen’s University. He holds a PhD in Media and Communication from Goldsmiths, University of London, and another in Communication and Semiotics from the Catholic University of São Paulo. He also works as an independent curator and artist-researcher in the broad field of moving images. His work on media technology has been published and presented worldwide. He is the author of “Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology” (AUP, 2019), and co-editor of “Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies” (OUP, 2020), among other anthologies. He is also one of the coordinators of the Besides the Screen research network and festival, and convenes Museums Without Walls, a curatorial survey on media infrastructures and cultural institutions.

Here is an interview with Gabriel Menotti, where he shares his insights on the metaverse and his perspectives on virtual worlds.

"The metaverse has been promoted lately as the next stage of the internet, just like Web 2.0 was the next stage of the web. The metaverse would be the immersive internet, superseding all other forms of communication. (...) But it’s also important to understand the metaverse as an empty signifier or buzzword, something that many tech industries use simply to attract venture capital. (...) People never really define what the metaverse is, and suddenly, it becomes this kind of word salad—Metaverse, XR, AI, Blockchain, blah blah blah. It just shows that there’s no, let's say, underlying tech, just a bloated concept designed to sell you whatever you need to buy."

"The pandemic was a moment of accelerated expectations about the end of the world. I think it was the first global shock where people collectively realized that the future is unpredictable—and for many, the end of the world had already arrived multiple times before. I guess it triggered this urgent need for solutions, and many technologies emerged at that moment as promises to save us. The metaverse was certainly central to this because it kind of promised us another world—as if we had already destroyed this one, but we could still be free in this virtual, weightless, boundless world that computers create for us. (...) There is already this quasi-religious aspiration for, let's say, techno-transcendence. So, I think the pandemic really intensified our need for salvation, so to speak."

"I was not very excited about reactionary uses of metaverse technologies—again, just repeating reality, inviting people to colonize land in the same way they do in the physical world. But what interests me the most about these promises is the promise of abundance. If we’re creating a world disconnected from the limits of materiality, why don’t we fully explore that? Why do we have to own virtual land in the metaverse? You know, that’s kind of silly."

"Going back to the project I worked on, Museum Without Walls (the virtual museum), I think these platforms can be very effective ways to communicate aspirations and imaginations about what new institutions could be, how we could recreate society in a completely different way. They can be tools for connection, allowing people to work together in new ways. (...) One thing we did was create a replica of the museum we were working with in Mozilla Hubs and invite people to not just occupy it but to completely transform it—reshape it, destroy it, whatever they wanted to do. And they did. It’s fascinating to look at the versions of the museum they created and think, yeah, a museum could be a museum, but it doesn’t have to be. (...) Maybe this can be a way to bring these imaginations into reality, or at least to make us question the reality we have and see that there are other possible ways forward, other possible worlds to live in."

— Gabriel Menotti

Check out more details about Museum Without Walls, the virtual museum project curated by Menotti: www.museusemparedes.com

This panel discussion explores virtual worlds as an artistic platform, with Gabriel Menotti in conversation with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Liam Karry.