Overview of Experience and Concept
Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll, virtual exhibition entrance and terrain for Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
The second DETAIL pilot project was Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, curated by Tina Sauerlaender, which ran from June 29 to September 27, 2023.
The virtual exhibition highlighted “artists working across diverse media to preserve nature, reveal environmental devastation, and speculate on alternate future life forms.” In rendering current environmental issues visible within a virtual reality landscape, Echoes from the Future immersed audiences in alternative post-anthropocentric futures and speculative ecologies. The virtual exhibition was a first-person, multi-platform, multi-user experience supporting voice and audio for virtual reality headsets and desktop. The design of the 3D environment followed the style of open-world video games, with all artworks contained in the same level. This level was designed to look like the Windows XP background image, Bliss, and created in Unity’s terrain editor by the developers.
When an audience member joined the space, whether through the desktop or VR version, they would enter the shared space. Simultaneous audience members would see each other as glowing spheres with flagella trailing behind in the direction they were travelling. The artworks and audience shared the same space, so visitors could see each other’s avatars as they engaged with a specific artwork. Visitors could speak to one another through the audio chat function or mute the multi-user voice chat and experience the art in silence
Participating Artists and Artworks
Curator Tina Sauerlaender specializes in virtual reality art, selecting a combination of digital and physical artworks for feature in the exhibition. The developers received the artworks as digital files, with some needing to be adapted to fit the exhibition platforms.
Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kriemes, Last Species On Earth, 2022, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
The installation of Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes’s Last Species On Earth (2022) contained 3D models and a two-channel video featuring the same 3D models. Modelled in Blender, the artist imported the works into a Unity scene and assigned the correct textures. The videos were displayed as textures on a flat plane.
Aviv Benn, Untitled series, 2023, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
Aviv Benn’s Untitled series (2023) was a series of oil paintings represented as digital photographs. The paintings were displayed as textures on 2D planes, with the image doubled on the back of the plane. It was installed in collaboration with the curator through an early version of the Digital Exhibition Builder (DEB) project, enabling the curator to experiment with the arrangement and scale of the images.
Laura Colmenares Guerra, Ríos Trilogy, Chapter N. 3 R€¥€R$€ (REVERSE), 2023, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
Laura Colmenares Guerra’s Ríos Trilogy, Chapter N. 3 R€¥€R$€ (REVERSE) (2023) was adapted from the ongoing virtual reality series by the same name. For Echoes from the Future, we included two single-channel videos and custom built an interactive 3D map infographic. Audiences entering the proximity of the work would also trigger a “dark mode” or nighttime sky in the landscape. Only affecting the active viewer, this created a higher contrast, more accessible experience of the work.
Reiner Maria Matysik, Beings (series), 2017, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
The Beings series (2017) of Reiner Maria Matysik consists of real-world ceramic objects and their representations as 3D scans. We installed the 3D models as physics-enabled rigid bodies with colliders attached, so that the audience could interact with the artwork in the virtual space. For this work alone, the object’s positions were synched over the network, so all visitors would see the same movement of the 3D models.
Sarah Oh-Mock, PHASO Project, 2022, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
Sarah Oh-Mock’s PHASO Project (2022) included textured 3D models and digital images. The mesh of the exhibition’s terrain was altered to make it appear that one of the 3D models had been unearthed from the terrain. This required the default Unity terrain editor and some custom textures to match the artist’s 3D model.
Sabrina Ratté, Floralia, 2021, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia (2021) was a series of animated 3D models. We again set it up so that a visitor’s proximity to the work would trigger a lighting change, darkening the exhibition’s sky and ground for that player. The 3D objects would also animate upon visitor proximity and would then continuously loop.
Tamiko Thiel and /p, What You Sow, 2023, as installed in Echoes From the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Image courtesy of peer to space.
What You Sow (2023) by Tamiko Thiel and /p was adapted from the original augmented reality work for cross-platform VR. Visitors entered a transparent dome where they could then interact with the work by clicking the 3D models inside the dome, which would then animate and multiply, creating a coral reef-like structure of the objects (which depicted single-use plastic items, such as utensils). Interaction was prompted by pop-up instructions triggered by proximity. Unlike the installation of Beings, here the object’s server information was not shared, requiring each visitor to interact themselves.
Back-End Structure
As a multi-user, multi-platform experience, Echoes from the Future had a more complex development process. We had initially hoped to create a browser-based experience, but after receiving the artwork we recognized that we would need to develop it as a downloadable file to properly showcase the large artworks.
We again implemented server-side artwork storage, as with THERE IS NO CENTRE. After joining, the audience’s location as they traversed the exhibition would automatically load and unload artworks stored on the server. This ensured smooth performance, rather than running all the artworks at once. Each work was installed inside a rather large invisible sphere that would trigger its loading once entered. The sphere had to be large enough that the work would load while the visitor was still relatively far away, so they could see the work and approach it in the distance, but small enough to not intersect with the spheres loading any other artworks.
In collaboration with the Hand Eye Society (Toronto) we developed multi-user tools that could be used for digital exhibition platforms, like Echoes from the Future, and based off of tools initially developed by Paolo Pedercini for his LikeLike Gallery (Pittsburgh). However, for the Echoes public release, we used the Normcore Unity plug-in from the Normal company to facilitate multi-user and voice chat. We chose this option because it already supported VR, something not yet implemented with our tools.
The exhibition could run on tethered, PC VR or standalone Meta Quest headsets. For tethered PC VR, the Windows application supported both VR and non-VR and would launch accordingly after checking to see if a headset was connected. For standalone headsets, an .APK downloadable file was created, which required audiences to install it through the third-party software SideQuest (due to Meta’s intensive approval process).
Our Approach to Challenges
Multi-user etiquette
A shared, multi-user space with voice chat brought unique challenges in the design and moderation of the exhibition. The voice chat could potentially result in audio feedback when multiple users were present and speaking at once (and using their speakers and built-in microphones rather than a headphone input system). We implemented a mute and deafen option that each visitor could toggle, which also enabled visitors to experience the exhibition removed from the social functions.
Navigation
Echoes was a large, single level virtual space with rolling hills. The artworks were installed far enough apart from one another that audiences only saw one work at a time. To make the sites of installation easier to find, we implemented a “mini map” on the user display with the names of each artist. The mini map showed the visitor’s location and was updated as they travelled, with an icon representing the visitor and their direction of travel. Artist names were displayed onscreen when a visitor would enter their work.
Protecting artists’ rights
As mentioned above, we pivoted the end platforms of the exhibition from browser-based to desktop and VR headsets early in the process. With the creation of a downloadable exhibition, we took precaution to ensure that the artists’ work could not be accessed beyond the exhibition period. Digital art has the potential to remain accessible as long as it is supported by present-day hardware/software and does not have the same issues related to scarcity as a physical object does, however, the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s contractual processes stipulate protecting artists’ rights by limiting the exhibition’s timeframe. With all of the artwork located on a server, we had the exhibition application check the date before it tried to pull the artwork from the server. It would not pull the artwork outside of the contractual exhibition dates, preventing access to the artwork beyond the scope of the exhibition. The application continues to function, however, so audiences can continue to meet and voice chat in the empty landscape—making Echoes from the Future an empty virtual space of echoes from the past!
Invited Response
by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan
The ritual of digital art demands hand-waving and optimism. We wave our hands at each other, waving away the meaty realities under our metal skin. Meanwhile, downloads fail. Computers force auto-updates. Sharks gnaw through underwater cables. We plug into backup power banks, re-download files, and brute-force these machines to carry us to that magical moment when things can finally begin.
We open our eyes and, suddenly, we are here. Echoes from the Future: Speculative Creatures & Post-Human Botanicals begins with a link. Click to enter, to slip through the skin of a machine into a new world. Our avatars are weightless here. I have tentacles and so do my companions. We have mouths on our backs, like anuses that move as we speak. “Follow me,” a mouth says, and I do.
Not new to imaginary worlds, I am immediately exploring. I’m disoriented, curious, hungry for adventure. The tiny map in the bottom corner tells me where I am. The anus mouths ask me to follow again, and I happily do. I am not really here. My body is somewhere else, a husk tethered to this experience by thin threads of data. It feels strange, this disembodied intimacy. The voices vibrate little hairs in my ear, but I can’t touch anyone. In this world, there’s no bad breath. Or good breath. Just vibrations and light.
In Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia plants are exploding from their vitrines in slow, surreal bursts of light and colour in artificial skins. The flowers don’t breathe but they hum, vibrating in an unsettling drone. This garden exists in perfect suspension. It will never truly live, so it’ll never truly die. The flowers are magnificent, the creations of an artist, and built on code built upon code built upon code.
As an artist working with code, I live my life clinging onto the smooth metal skin of this machine, looking for a crack, one nervous eye on the horizon as we barrel towards oceans just a few degrees warmer. I move my cursor to see what’s at the bottom of all the code. More code, written by acid-microdosing engineers using VPNs to work secretly as digital nomads, whose rents rely on plasma-injecting executives on ten-day meditation retreats, whose empires rely on a socio-economic order that’s one fart away from implosion. Don’t worry, the robot-dogs will protect the market from any malcontents.
Sorry, I lost the thread.
Together with my tentacled companions, I am in a gallery that is (sort-of) downloaded to my computer, sharing space over internet cables. Whose computer is all this on, anyway? We are in a place that doesn’t occupy visible space, but is material nonetheless, one point five precious gigabytes on my packed-to-the-brim computer. Together we float in this world, looking at objects that aren’t objects.
The third chapter of Laura Colmenares Guerra’s RÍOS Trilogy rises like a ghost from a faraway jungle. As data reshaped into sculpture, the once-breathing Amazon forest is now bending, melting, and twisting under the weight of human hands. The rainforest is dying, we all know it. What can any one person do? I wait for the sting of red ants on my feet, the pounding of a waterfall on my head, the rich smell of growth and decay. My virtual self hovers in the air, moving further into the world to make the digitized videos play. I have been robbed of something; we are all being robbed. The imaginary robot-dogs sniff the air, curious if this art is going to cause problems.
And then, the skeleton. In Sarah Oh-Mock’s PHASO Project, a creature is caught between worlds, its bones part-bird, part-airplane, a fever dream of metal and feather. It feels like a future archaeology, the remnants dug up and reassembled into grotesque hybrids. I float past a ribcage, brushing against the outline of wings that might have once flown in an imaginary sky. What will we leave behind when this is all over? How will our machines, our waste, fuse with the earth and become something new, something that carries our shadow?
And then, Tamiko Thiel and /p’s What You Sow: plastic forks bloom, bottles twist into underwater shapes. I’m sinking into it, each step further embedding me in a world made of discarded things. Here, garbage is beautiful, growing into ecosystems that never should have existed. This ocean is too quiet, too still. I plant a plastic seed.
I drift onward, until I find Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes’s Last Species On Earth. We are inside a dome. It is like a zoo, but one where animals have never lived. The creatures are held in glass, cradled in biotopes designed to preserve their memory. I am a visitor in a museum of extinction, staring at the remnants of a future we’ve already forgotten. Something lingers in the sparkle here, a glitch. Could it be a crack in the machine?
The world of this exhibition isn’t just a collection of works. It’s a stitched-together hallucination. These creations were made in isolation but here the visions overlap, bleed into one another, creating a patchwork universe that is both communal and solitary. I wander through colliders; I am close to these creations but so distant from their makers. We are together in this space, but no one else is really here. What does it mean to see in a virtual gallery? The machines offer us new ways of understanding, new ways of touching. There’s always a thin layer of pixels between us, a latency that keeps us apart. I touch the art and my mind tries to fill in the gaps, to create the sensation of contact.
In these virtual worlds, anyone can be neighbours. We are no longer bound by the physical, by the weight of our bodies or the limitations of space. Here we can drift, float, trip back and forth across boundaries, laughing as we break the laws of physics. Are we becoming something more? Or are we further removed from ourselves, from our messy bodies and waving hands.
As I wander through the final pieces, my digital tentacles floating, I feel closure. Not an ending, but a folding in on itself, a recognition that these worlds, these speculative creatures, these post-human botanicals are not separate from us. They are echoes of who we are and who we might become, reflections caught in the glass walls of a virtual gallery. And as I step back, close the program, and return to my body, I wave my hand goodbye.
Additional Programming
Live events
Virtual exhibition opening
A virtual vernissage on the exhibition server was the main event for Echoes. It included a tour by the curator, with many of the artists in attendance. The developers attended the event as avatars on the server and livestreamed their perspectives for a broader audience on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. This was important for the developers as we knew many people would want to participate in the opening of the exhibition without having had time to download and launch the exhibition software, as it only became available the day of the launch.
The livestream faced unique challenges regarding audio feedback. It was requested that we use the spatialized audio from the live virtual exhibit, to give the virtual vernissage a very “live” feeling, as each avatar’s voice strength correlated with their proximity to the developer’s avatar. This strategy created a dynamic feel for the livestream event, but the developers had less control over any specific audio input from individual participants. This created issues with feedback that carried over to the livestream. In reflection, we recommend always collecting livestream audio through an external software like Discord, Zoom, or OBS Ninja, which gives you control over each participant’s mic, and then directing that audio through OBS or similar livestreaming software.
IRL access hub
The MacKenzie Art Gallery installed an “IRL access hub” in their Orientation space during the summer months of the virtual exhibition’s duration. Initially, we had planned to have the VR version fully accessible on the headset. However, limited staff and volunteer availability made it so that a pre-recorded 360-degree video recording was more practical to display. Similar to previous installations using a VR headset at the Gallery, we set it up so that the video would automatically start from the beginning when placed on the audience’s head.
For the access hub, we provided a chair, a screen that displayed what was being viewed on the headset, and instructions written in Plain English. While we set the Guardian of the headset to a limited physical area for safety, we re-created this Guardian IRL with an astroturf carpet cut to the same size. If an audience member stepped outside the Guardian, the video would not only pause but they would also feel a haptic difference in the texture under their feet. We used strong, double-sided tape to affix the astroturf to the Gallery’s existing carpeting.
Asynchronous programs
Prerecorded interviews
The curator created a digital interview series to complement the exhibition. This better suited the participating artists’ schedule, rather than another synchronous virtual event, which was challenging to arrange between time zones. These interviews were compiled by the curator and further edited and transcribed by the developers for the Gallery’s website.
Other Pilot Projects
THERE IS NO CENTRE
In this exhibition the visual language of gaming is adapted to explore how the presentation of an artwork in a digital environment shifts the viewer’s role as a player and challenges traditional exhibition-making norms.
Learn More
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour
Rather than using the standard video game-style keyboard controls, WASD, to navigate 2D or 3D space, the exhibition introduced a text-based navigation system that increased accessibility for audiences without gaming experience.
Learn MoreResources
Collaborator Biographies
The artists, designers, and technologists who contributed to DETAIL’s digital art exhibitions.
Acknowledgements
The individuals, organizations, and partners who supported and contributed to the DETAIL digital art exhibitions.