METAVERSE IS EMPTY

METAVERSE IS EMPTY (exhibition)

Date: November 11–14

Location: Isabel Bader Centre, Art and Media Lab

Participating artists: Bojana Babic, Gabriel Menotti, Jenn Norton, Sam Sunwoo, Sojung Bahng, and Magic Circles cohort (DC Spensley, Debbie Ding, Jan Berger, Hortense Boulais-Ifrêne).

A whole lot has been said about the metaverse; so much so that it became a perfect empty signifier: a capacious, seemingly multiple concept, lacking inherent meaning and substance, ever shaped by technological, cultural, and economic speculation. But is it really so? METAVERSE IS EMPTY calls this idea into question by looking past all claims about the metaverse that could be and focusing instead on metaverses that actually have been. The works this exhibition brings together propose modest relationships between virtual spaces and physical bodies (and vice-versa). In their specificity, they don’t aspire to inaugurate the next Era in Telecommunications Technology. Conversely, they demonstrate that, beyond the SiliconValleyesque spectacle, strange potentials have always been brewing within new media.

— Sojung Bahng and Gabriel Menotti

Artworks

(Old Constellations) Above Vila Itororó, 2025, Gabriel Menotti, 3D Virtual Reality

In 2011, after years of struggle, the government of São Paulo evicted the last families living at Vila Itororó. The tenement had been expropriated to become a cultural center. Down at the empty Vila, only the exotic buildings and statues remained, preserved as listed heritage. In the skies above, however, old stories survive in the form of a blazing zodiac.

(Old Constellations) Above Vila Itororó is a hybrid of virtual exhibition and interactive documentary that invites visitors to bear witness of Vila’s history and reflect upon the trauma inherent to cultural heritage. By deploying contrasting forms of digital simulation, the work seeks to materialize the violence of the archive. The first part of the experience presents official records and artifacts in a seemingly realistic museum setting; the second evokes objects of memory and oral testimonials of former residents, which, like a haunting, calls into question the legitimacy of the monolithic state narrative.

The work can be experienced via PC VR (with teleport controls) or videogame format (mouse + keyboard). Running time is variable between 5-8 minutes due to the piece's interactive aspects. Shared documentation has unfinished sound design.

I Could Talk About It for Hours, 2025, Bojana Babic, Single-channel video

I Could Talk About It for Hours is an experimental video collage built from fragments of real dating-app conversations that I had this summer. Stripped of flirtation and innuendo, the remaining snippets reveal confessions about family, faith, injuries, and quiet doubts. Everyday chatter accumulates into something tender, absurd, and strangely poetic, forming a sketch of contemporary masculinity. The work reflects on how intimacy, vulnerability, and performativity coexist in the digital spaces we inhabit.

Soul Food, 2025, Sam Sunwoo, 3D Virtual Reality, Spatial.io

This immersive VR project reimagines Jesa, the traditional Korean ancestral rite of offering food to ancestors, through personal memory, embodied perspective, and digital storytelling. Drawing from the intimate rituals of the artist’s family, the work invites participants to enter the ceremony as ancestral spirits themselves. Within this sacred virtual space, food becomes a vessel of remembrance. Participants float across a Jesa table rendered in vivid sensory detail—each dish embedded with recorded wishes, sounds, and textures that evoke family, longing, and spiritual presence. In this liminal realm, the boundary between past and present dissolves, inviting reflection on identity, memory, and what it means to be both remembered and remembering.

Arms Reach, 2015, Jennifer Norton, 35 minute animation displayed on 20 MicroTiles

Arms Reach depicts a haptic labyrinth in which pain, tactility, and thermoception must be felt to navigate through a series of obstacles. Arms Reach was created during an artist residency with Dreamwalker Dance Company, in which participants from diverse disciplines were guided through empathetic exercises that honed and strengthened proprioception —an automatic neuromuscular sense — offering the artists a new mode of experiencing their bodies’ position, movement, and force. The artist would like to acknowledge the work of Katie Ewald, whose choreography inspired many of Arms Reach's haptic elements. The score is by musician and composer, Bry Webb. 

Wired: Gosiwon, 2024, Sojung Bahng, 3D Virtual Reality Film

Wired: Gosiwon is a 3D animated VR film that portrays three characters living in Gosiwon, which are low-cost, single-room accommodations in South Korea that are often susceptible to fires. Wired figures are used to symbolize the entangled and fragile nature of individuals in contemporary life and to question the complex realities and substances emerging from emptiness.

The film integrates generative AI for textures and machine learning systems for sound and background music as assets that belong in a virtual world. By leveraging AI’s imperfections, the film reveals the contradictions and complexities of data within the physical and digital realities that we inhabit.

Magic Circles (Interview), 2025, Magic Circles cohort (DC Spensley, Debbie Ding, Jan Berger, Hortense Boulais-Ifrêne), Single-channel video, Four Episodes, Total Duration 22'40"

What does it mean to inhabit and create within a technologically constructed world of make-believe?This interview series features artists reflecting on their experiences with art and culture in virtual environments such as VRChat, Second Life, and Roblox. The video was recorded during the Magic Circles Laboratory, with the participation of DC Spensley, Jan Berger, Debbie Ding, and Hortense Boulais-Ifrène.

Learn more about the Magic Circles Laboratory: https://www.research-practice.com/single-post/magic-circles