Metaverse

Metaverse is a group exhibition that considers what it means on a human-level to be shaped and governed through the advent of the Internet.

In October 2021 Facebook announced that the company would be rebranding itself, intent on making our virtual lives more seamlessly integrated with our real ones by building the ‘metaverse’. In the same month, Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen testified before the British Parliament that the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘has unilateral control over 3 billion people.’

Against this backdrop, Metaverse brings together a select number of works that foretell dystopian visions in response to our increasingly inescapable relationship to technology. Addressing issues ranging from corporate surveillance, social isolation and conspiratorial tendencies, a sense of latent violence is ever present.

When life is mediated through the ether of digital communications and computer-generated images, what do we understand as truth, reality and selfhood? Intentionally immersive and drawn towards the hand-made and outmoded, Metaverse invites its audience to think critically about the way we use technology and what technology is doing to us.

Roy Ananda’s commission, Electronic void illusion 2021-2022, has been supported by the Andreyev Foundation.

Feature Image: Giselle Stanborough, Cinopticon (2021), Adelaide, acrylic paint, ACE gallery walls. Courtesy the artist.