What is it?
The Art Newspaper s XR Panel has spent the global pandemic viewing work remotely and virtually. Here we review the year and highlight some of our favourite, and least favourite, XR experiences. With works by: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sol LeWitt, bitforms galleryand others.
The XR panel was launched by
The Art Newspaper in July 2020 in response to a growing need to consider XR art as an interconnected review of the art and technology. It is produced by Louis Jebb and curated by Gretchen Andrew. All reviews in this series can be found here.
Highest rated (4.5 stars)
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.
It did not take long for a booking at Little Tokyo’s Blue Whale to become a stamp of approval among music fans with an ear for improvisatory sounds. If you could get your name on the chalkboard marquee, it was a validation from the owner and booker Joon Lee that you were doing something interesting. Probably not commercial. Maybe a little hip. But definitely new and worth pursuing.
That approval was enough to keep the club as the centerpiece of L.A.’s imaginative and expanding jazz scene for more than a decade. But amid an evaporated source of revenue and unforgiving lease obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Blue Whale has permanently closed.