Reworlding

Reworlding: Curatorial Direction

Painters practice painting. Sculptors practice sculpting. Dancers practice dancing. But what do media artists practice? Updating their software? Having to continuously learn new skills because the skills they learnt five years ago have become mysteriously useless? Migrating from one obsolete platform to another soon-to-be-obsoleted one?

The question of what it means to practice “media art” was the question I found myself asking when I returned to school in my late 30s to do a PhD, after more than a decade of working as an artist. Despite years of practice, I had never formally studied a “canon” of media art history. I had simply fallen into the medium of making, learning by doing, project by project, tool by tool, in a field where the lineages of practice are fragmented or poorly preserved.

Encountering early virtual and media works for the first time as “art history”, I expected to see obsolescence, but instead, I was surprised to find that many early VR works – such as Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) – felt neither dated nor nostalgic. They captured the universal persistence of the human spirit; many of these early artworks of virtuality by female artists paid careful attention to embodiment, presence, and balance.

I wanted to bring people to see these works with me, but many of them were difficult to publicly access. So, I began (unofficially) cloning them. With no budget, no time, no access; working only from surviving online documentation – old websites, screenshots, youtube videos, incomplete archives – I rebuilt a series of artworks from the 1990s to early 2000s in the Unity game engine, entirely from scratch, from my own limited perspective. The reconstructions were very rough, closer to a study than an artwork. The cloned worlds were hidden online as a private world on the social VR gaming platform VRChat, where I could privately take multiple players to visit the worlds together at the same time.

The cloned worlds were never meant for public exhibition, they were a way of learning through making and taking others with me into these histories. I invited fellow artists to enter these reconstructed worlds, and to respond to the original works - not to replicate the past, but to think alongside these histories.