DIORAMA

UKI , (2016-2023)

Shu Lea Cheang

Video, Virtual Installation

UKI is conceived as a sequel to the artist's cyberpunk feature I.K.U. (2000, premiered at Sundance Film Festival). I.K.U. tells the story of GENOM Corp, an internet porn enterprise who dispatches I.K.U. coders to collect orgasm data. Made into mobilephone chip, GENOM introduces orgasm on the go and makes a huge profit. In post-netcrash UKI, the data deprived I.K.U. coders are dumped on the Etrashscape where coders, twitters, networkers crush and crashed. This expansive work, which materializes as a constructed, 3-dimensional, virtual world and feature-length film, shows how radical simulation and science fiction world-building practices can generate alternative possible futures in a striking, techno-dystopian parable.

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Can Vampires Drown to Death?, (2021)

Jeremy Couillard

Virtual Installation

Can Vampires Drown to Death? Is a six-story abandoned factory with an absurdist art installation, created for Gray Area's DIORAMA exhibition. Viewers follow a poem about a mayor trying to revitalize his city, look at sculptures that look back at you, and check out some GIFs of Long Island City in Queens as it quickly develops for a mysterious class of citizens that don't live anywhere near it. As the viewer explores the space, a voice reads a story about a journalist getting ready to record his podcast.

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STELLARIUM, (2021)

Auriea Harvey and Rodell Warner

Virtual Installation

A virtual installation environment created as a collaboration between Auriea Harvey and Rodell Warner for the DIORAMA online exhibition at Gray Area Festival 2021:Worlding Protocol. Together, the two artists fused their 3D sculpting practices to create a meditative, cosmic space in which 3D scans of organic forms float and rotate in mid-air.

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LEYMUSOOM, (2021)

Heesoo Kwon

Virtual Installation

Statement from the Artist:

"In 2017 l initiated an autobiographical feminist religion, Leymusoom, as an ever-evolving exploration of my family histories and feminist liberation. Through which, I produced 3D animated videos and interactive games of real and imagined worlds, populated by avatars of my female ancestors, living in 3D environments from actual locations or spaces from my life and family history.

Leymusoom Digital Shrine is an interactive digital archive of me and my family's memories which become portals for hyperspace travel, inviting the viewers to explore the history of Leymusoom and the utopian world that I am envisioning. It reincarnates my female ancestors' lives and Leymusoom communal spaces without constraints of time and space."

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Eclipsatrix Exuvia, (2021)

Huntrezz

Motion Capture Performance, Virtual Installation

Eclipsatrix Exuvia (2021) is a virtual performance that takes place in a virtual amphitheater, built in a custom environment created by the artist and framed by various sculptural objects. Wearing a motion capture suit, all her dance movements are screened and streamed. The audience is invited to wander and freely explore the online environment and its elements, and then the artist appears "as an avatar adorned in stylized armor" rhyming:
Unveiled biennale, holy grail eclipse golly exalted derailed leaderships post folly prevailing sailing space ships hailing from Cali inhale post-Pokalypse (...)

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Abyssal Seeker, (2021)

Joey Holder

Virtual Installation

Joey Holder's Abyssal Seeker depicts a slow, aquatic journey to a fictional brine lake at the bottom of an unnamed ocean. Protagonists float in and out of the story, semi-fictionalized versions of invertebrates, hybridized and constantly shitting.

This work initially might seem to recall Jules Verne's series of novels set under the say, which transposed themes from Homer's Odyssey to the crucible of 19th Century colonial expansion. While the colonial project of exploration employed naming and categorization to enable ownership, the beings in Holder's world attempts to evade identification, classification and subsequent commodification. Holder's brine lake represents a place beyond mapping, the deep sea as a metaphor for the limit of human knowledge, a place beyond categorization, beyond monetary value, beyond the colonial project of taxonomy.

This artwork represents an optimistic speculation of an acceleration to a dark future, an alternative metaphor for escaping surveillance and the cast of the net, and about a more positive future, an escape to a dark, safe place beyond data. For DIORAMA, Gray Area presents a recomposed landscape from the brine lake, accompanied by 3D-rendered video work by LaJuné McMillian.

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Black Movement Project, (2019-Ongoing)

LaJuné McMillian

Virtual Installation

The Black Movement Project is an online database of motion capture data from Black performers and Black character base models, currently underrepresented in available online databases. This library will be used for various extended (virtual, augmented, mixed) reality projects, performances, games, and research purposes.

BMP is a tool for activists, performers & artists to create diverse XR projects, a space to research how and why we move, and an archive of Black existence.

BMP incorporates a narrative component to be seen as both a live performance and Web VR docuseries, showing how black movement has been used as a tool for the preservation of Black culture as well as a vehicle self-evolution. During this experience, audience members will learn about the lives and movement practices of Black performers via their Motion capture data. They will also have an opportunity to explore virtual worlds built from Black movement.

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Wisdoms for Love 3.0, (2020-2021)

Keiken

Virtual Installation

Wisdoms for Love 3.0 is a web-based video game by Keiken from a larger world-building project titled Metaverse: We Are At The End Of Something. Developed in collaboration with obso1337 and rendered with Ryan Vautier, this interactive work features mocap performance by Sakeema Crook and sound design by Khidja. Rooted in a decision-making based gameplay, the player uses wisdom tokens (of which there are 100 in total) to help navigate to Love 3.0. The game explores the bubbled-up feelings, compressed consciousness, and fervent beliefs of the contemporary moment, where the desire for change and a more equitable and decentralized future is collectively being challenged. This piece asks: What wisdom do we need to get to Love 3.0 not just Web 3.0? What kind of decentralized systems do we want in our base reality (the Earth), and the metaverse? And how do we access global kin-making for the future of humanity?

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Dirigibles of Denali, (2018)

Nathan Shafer

Virtual Installation, Augmented Reality

The Dirigibles of Denali project is a culmination of several collaborative augmented reality and digital humanities projects approaching three of Alaska's planned cities of the future: Seward's Success, Denali City and Arctic City. All three cities are being virtually constructed at their original proposed locations using mobile augmented reality technology. Accompanying these augmented reality cities is ten pieces of speculative fiction by Alaskan artists imagining a world were these cities had actually been built, and an alternate history of Alaska reflecting that reality.

The printed compendium version of this project is set to be released in 2019. It is a picture book of the geolocated augments from the augmented reality reconstructions of the three proposed cities that were never built. The book includes essays and historical analysis by Nathan Shafer and Patrick Lichty; as well as illustrations by Joelle Howald.

Ten Alaskan science fiction authors were asked to write speculative fiction based on an alternate history of Alaska, had the cities been built. In the summer of 2018, five volumes from the series were released with the opening of the show at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska.

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REPLICANTS, (2021)

Peter Wu+ and EPOCH Gallery

Virtual Installation

REPLICANTS borrows its title from the fictional bioengineered beings introduced within the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner. The work of art is really an exhibition of artwork from 10 artists: Gordon Cheung, Galath3a, Hung Yu Hao, Keiken, Katja Novitskova, Jennifer West, Dr. Woo, Qianqian Ye + Tiare Ribeaux, and Konrad Black.

The exhibition's framing environment, modeled after Queen's Road Central in Hong Kong, extends a virtual reproduction of the street and surrounding buildings of Woaw Gallery, a physical space where the REPLICANTS project was featured. This digital inversion of physical space and materiality, while mirroring the malleability of the replica, more broadly considers the limitations and possibilities for techno-reproductions. For DIORAMA, Peter Wu+ offered a special portal sculpture, which linked from our exhibition into EPOCH's virtual gallery.

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Nakili, (2021)

Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye

Virtual Installation, Augmented Reality

Nakili is a collaborative augmented reality sculpture co-designed by Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye. Nakili draws inspiration from the living deity Hina 'opuhala ko'a, goddess of corals and spiny creatures in the ocean. One of the many forms of the goddess Hina, ("Hina of the Coral Stomach"), a shell from her reef was fashioned by Maui, which he used to draw together the Hawalian Islands. On Nakili's body are many coral forms found near the shores of the Hawaiian islands, which support vast amounts of marine life but are at risk and face bleaching due to ocean temperature rise, global warming, and the toxins found in many sunscreens worn by visitors to the islands. Nakili positions the corals above water, merging it with a human-like figure, to remind us of our interconnection to it and to all living creatures in the ocean, of which Kanaka Maoli are descended from (according to the Kumulipo creation chant).

Nakili is part of a larger series of augmented reality installations called "Kai-Hai" - utilizing transpacific stories, oral histories, and folklore from Hawai'i throughout Polynesia to East Asia - to explore environmental issues, Kanaka Maoli and other indigenous narratives, migratory paths, immigrant narratives, and diaspora across the ocean.

Nakili means: to glimmer through, as light through a small opening; to begin to open, as eyes of a young animal; to twinkle.

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The Projected Observer, (2021)

Sammie Veeler

Virtual Installation

Statement from the artist:
"This was a private digital refuge for 6 formative months of my life. I went for walks here before there was any art. I made some galleries and thought, perhaps I should make some art to put in them.

This space contains images, videos, sculptures, and performances spanning the last year of my transition. The theme of these works is the projected observer. In each piece, you see me seeing myself.

Until I transitioned, my practice which I undertook in private was almost exclusively sound-based.
Transition dilated my pupils and I tried in vain to express the feelings in words. The visual works flowed out the paucity of words to contain this new volume of feeling.

This is a story in song which stops, reverses, and collapses time into the illusion of space. It forms one corridor of a mutable biography which overflows and intersects itself, continually failing to satisfactorily explain its nature.

It is also a portal - a third space between my current self and my past selves where we can exist together outside time. In many moments of my life I call out to myself, saying yes it will be just fine. I want to ring a bell so loudly I can hear it across time.

The art and the landscape arose together. My first 3D modeling attempts sit with my most recent ones. The seams from my clumsy exploration are visible everywhere. I flatten myself amid my artifacts - the distortion of audio and video synthesizers, the jumbling of my tits and pearls in transparent polyhedra."

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A Slice of Skyworld, (2021)

Skawennati

Virtual Installation

A Slice of Skyworld is a recreation of a set made for Skawennati's legendary machinima, She Falls for Ages, 2017. Originally produced in Second Life, the story is a sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee Creation Story. The ancient tale begins in a "place beyond the heavens," often called Skyworld, where there is a special tree known as the Celestial Tree. In Skawennati's version, the artist reimagines Skyworld as a futuristic utopia, and Sky Woman as a brave astronaut and world-builder.

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ULTRA WET - RECAPITULATION, (2017)

Tabita Rezaire

Digital Video

The pyramid of Ultra Wet harnesses healing energy from its tip, while its four faces retell urgent stories from pre-colonial Africa', writes Rezaire. The work's imagery travels from Credo Mutwa (South African traditional healer)'s village to sandy landscape of Egypt amid computerize emanations to reclaim the legacies of feminine energies. As storytellers chant their litanies for survival towards womnhood, gender and sexuality in the age of celebrated toxic masculinities, Ultra Wet celebrates the power of the erotic as a creative and transformative force to be nurtured and cherished. The pyramid echoes the remembrance a time-space where gender was not bound to an arbitrary binary, where the ways of practicing sex did not need to be an affirmation of identity, where the feminine was praised and nature revered. Viruses then spread into our brains, lands and computers to lead us with fear and shame', says the artist.

Exploring networked sexualities, this work digs into ancient African knowledge and current cybersexual practices, searching for ways of existing as a Black sexual femme body. How can we reclaim a politic of pleasure and resistance?

How can we develop sexual autonomy outside of exploitative and oppressive structures? How can we use our sexual energy to shift consciousness?

As an answer Rezaire writes: 'We need to bring our minds and our wombs back together to fight, to heal and to create communities where consent, respect and desire coexist! Ultra Wet is an ode to the fertile ground we have been and can still be.'

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Mystery Gift: My Beautiful Fantasy #6, (2021)

Sister Lady Bianca

3D Sculpture, Non-Fundable Token Contract, JPEG Image

Sister Lady Bianca is an anonymous artist who offers the following terms of sale to serve as a description for this artwork, which appears in DIORAMA as a 3D sculpture of a balloon dog in the style of Jeff Koons:
"To be sold here, distributed between 6 NFT objects, at random:

(1) unit possession rights to (3) unit of the fertilizable gamete germ-line cells of Sister Lady Bianca licensed by a certificate of
transubstantiative birth contracting Sister Lady Bianca as one of the legal parents of any living hominid offspring of the germ-line cells.

(6) units of equity in a pre-revenue brand of probiotic jelly confections.

(6) keys of access to "Novel Breath Vocabularies", a 165-piece sound library recorded between midnight and 1 am of February 24th, 2021 EST in response to a reading of the well known "Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World (1492-1640)".

1) key of access and lectural broadcast rights to
"Kobe Pickles", a movement from "Rhapsodie for Breath and Synthesized Organ", which was composed from the "Novel Breath Vocabularies" sound library.

Explicitly Receivable as well:
(x) units Graphical Reproduction Rights, meaning,
Acquisition herein grants the acquiring party licensable right to redistribute and manipulate the graphical digital assets associated with this nonfungible token.

And

(x) units Asynchronous Display and Lectural

Broadcast Rights

Acquisition herein grants the acquiring party licensable right to display the full resolution graphical digital asset associated with this nonfungible token. As well, this acquisition grants herein the acquiring party licensable right to lecture or otherwise performatively orate the textual contents of the graphical digital asset associated with this nonfungible token.
Acquisition herein grants licensable and discursive right to redistribute or manipulate any associated record of performative oration of the graphical digital asset associated with this nonfungible token.

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Suga', (2021)

Valencia James

Volumetric Performance, Virtual Installation

Suga' is a collective immersive experience that features live dance performance as volumetric video in social virtual reality space. The journey transports us through the historical reality of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade and the establishment of the sugar industry, which has had a lasting legacy on our world today. Suga' weaves together movement, family stories and cultural heritage to imagine virtual environments as a site for healing and reclamation of spaces that were historically filled with pain and injustice. The performance takes place in Mozilla Hubs where audiences navigate through the virtual world. Suga' utilizes low-cost hardware and open-source software that allows artists to perform from their own living spaces.

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