This artwork was originally commissioned for the Taiwan Fine Art Museum as a part of Convolutions, an online exhibition curated by Nadim Samman
The utopian vision of the “Metaverse” is a single, unified digital world that people can access through the internet, or through augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets. In Metaverse Landscapes: Patchwork, Simon Denny exposes its reality: the Metaverse is not so much a unified digital universe as it is a fractured patchwork of territories, owned and issued by multiple companies with varying market structures and degrees of compatibility. To illustrate this, Metaverse Landscapes: Patchwork offers a meta-Metaverse, a map of real digital lands that were sold through various platforms, here stitched together to be explored and toggled between. The work reveals the schizophrenia of the Metaverse craze in the early 2020s, whilst simultaneously laying bare and flattening the failed dream of creating an alternative digital universe.
Simon Denny, MNZM lives and works in Berlin. He makes artworks that unpack stories about technology using painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print and video. He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale and has had large scale exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally.