What is it?
Substrata is a virtual reality art exhibition hosted by Epoch gallery, an artist-run virtual experiment. The project is shown in collaboration with the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), an artist-run space founded in 2012 by Alice Könitz, in a pavilion built by Könitz with context created by Peter Wu+ of Epoch. It includes works by: Patricia Fernández, Nikita Gale, Won Ju Lim, Gina Osterloh, Paul Pescador, Kristin Posehn, Gabie Strong, Sterling Wells, Haena Yoo.
Curator’s Note
Gretchen Andrew: I never figured much out in Myst, the 1993 computer game by Rand and Robyn Miller, but I loved virtually dwelling in its world. I’m no expert in video games, in fact Myst is probably the last video game I played . That’s why I’m so glad to have Eron Rauch lead this review. For both better and worse I found myself more interested in the snowy white trees and landscape than the work in Substrata. I had a similar experience in Hauser & Wirth’s virtual Menorca gallery
Curator’s Note
Last July, this panel released its first review of an Olafur Eliasson experience produced by Acute Art. That experience, an augmented reality smartphone app that enables you to view the first augmented reality artwork by the Icelandic artist and curator, received 3 stars. As we approach the anniversary of global lockdowns, we are considering what a year of viewing art virtually has meant to the works, the platforms and viewers. And so we decided to take another look at a new Acute experience, this one produced with Dazed Media.
They Say: London’s biggest public festival of AR art will now be available to view and interact with from inside your home
What is it:
Virtual exhibition and artist talks presented by bitforms gallery, which specialises in digital, internet, time-based and new media art forms, and curated by Zaiba Jabbar and Valerie Amend. It includes the artists Julie Béna, Vitória Cribb, Kumbirai Makumbe, LaJuné McMillian, and Alicia Mersy. Each artist has a exclusive virtual 3-D room with a digital installation
Platform:
New Art City, a multi-user online platform to experience digital art created in response to the closures of art museums and galleries during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Artists and exhibition designers upload files to New Art City, arrange their space and collaborate in real-time. No coding required.
Curator’s Note
Gretchen Andrew: It is a common complaint in the art world that those in the tech industry don’t support art at the scale of their brethren in the finance industry. With the tech industry the place to make a fortune, this is a real problem for the arts and artists.
If we think about the banking and art market shifts that occurred in the 1980s, we see a relationship where capital and culture reached frenzied alliance. Over these past three decades we have also seen instruments of financial trade divorced irrevocably from hard value. We see the rise of flash trading, subprime mortgages packaged” with supposedly better securities and abstracted from homes; Enron trading energy as if oil physically moved like money; and the pre-eminence of derivatives where the directional value isn’t as important as the size of the change. Even in Warren Buffett’s principles of investing may be to the contrary, this is still the market we operate in.