An ever-increasing number of digital tools, with and without artificial intelligence, make each of us a permanent creator of digital media. Many objects, images, videos and sounds created in this way are discarded immediately after creation, without anyone really seeing or hearing them, or exist only as possibilities in generative artificial neural networks such as Generative Adversarial Networks or Stable Diffusion. In Xanadu, all these objects find a home. Xanadu is a virtual world made up entirely of unwanted and imperfect objects and ignored digital potentials. It is a community of the unloved, a place for digital orphans. An eternity of electronic nothingness, a purgatory of lonely audio landscapes and glitchy codes, a space for abandoned artworks and forgotten images that are enough unto themselves.
In the VR work, visitors themselves become a digital possibility and part of Xanadu. They are transported into an imaginary world from which they can take something away. Detached from any demands of aesthetics and interest, they enter into digital bliss.
Artificial neural networks allow digital objects to be described in mathematical spaces with many thousands of dimensions. Analogously, in Xanadu there are no fixed dimensions, no top and bottom.
The world of Xanadu exists as a first draft. During the residency, I would like to expand the world of Xanadu further and investigate interactions of moving image and sound in virtual space and develop an installation for Xanadu.
Shortlisted for the VR Artprize.
Weblinks
The concept is great, I especially like how an immersive experience is created without the ubiquitous clean look. I would love to see more!