MUD Verse

As our interactions with machines evolve, exploring and creating new boundaries around immersive interfaces becomes critical. The Media Under Dystopia WISPer edition is a lab hands-on exhibition exploring how the internet and XR can become tools to democratize art creation, access, co-creation, and critical media expansion. With the MUD Foundation exhibition Media Under Dystopia Wisper edition, we are prototyping the future of our current program iterations with local, national, and international communities. "WISPer" is the acronym of "WISP," Wireless Internet Service Provider, and the word ‘whisper’. This exhibition is launching our WISPer program, creating a WISP network around the MUD Foundation venue (and beyond), where the local, national, and international communities can access the MUD Foundation exhibition program and community partners initiatives. At the same time, the audiences have art access and art creation tools through our metaverse XR platform: the MUD Verse.

A garden of sculptural machines and furniture for viewing a video game inspired by fusions of futuristic industrial design, pre-Columbian sculpture, architectural renderings and video game conference aesthetics. Game Viewing Gardens brings viewers into a space partially furniture showroom and partially mythological location where beings, technology and spaces are interrelated from the neo-primordial gaming universe of Castañeda’s “Levels & Bosses: Part One”. Sculpturally reinterpreting “Let’s play” scenarios where a person showcases a walk-through of a game either online or in a stage, this work imagines the scenarios as virtual performance. Game Viewing Gardens is available on the MUD verse.

Lans King has an NFC microchip implanted in his left hand. His "artist-self" is registered on the blockchain, and it is linked to all of his artworks. Using a variety of wearable devices, Lans collects physical, emotional, and cerebral biodata. His digital artworks are often derived or generated from that data. This virtual sculpture was generated by the artist using a brain-computer interface device that captures brain activity data. The data is fed into a generative algorithm and parametric software; each channel is mapped to a specific parameter. The software transforms an initial geometry (such as a sphere) into a variety of new forms that are unique and rare. Through this process, thoughts become forms. This specific work was generated by Lans's brainwave data as he focused his thoughts on the word "tomorrow." This work is a prototype for a performance/generative artworks called The Cyborg Manifesto. In 2024, Lans King will tour this series of performances during which he will generate virtual sculptures in real-time while wearing his brain-computer interface device. For this performance, he will spend 24 hours in a glass pod, connected to a computer running a generative algorithm. These digital sculptures will then be output as physical forms.

“When are you?” will transforms a physical space into dynamic soundscapes using a reverb system that reacts to the environment and audience, combined with ambisonics audio technology — ambisonics is a method of sound recording and reproduction that aims to create a three-dimensional auditory experience for the listener. The sounds will change according to a listener position creating an immersive experience. Conceptually, the title refers to the interchange of the temporal and spatial aspects of sound. Music unravels in time, yet in “When Are You?” music will unravel depending on the listener’s location.

Wild Era Art: Origin Story. This robot is the arena for on canvas battles between wild art and A.I & Algorithms. Algorithms have a normalizing force where data, people, ideas and systems that bend their shapes to fit into their acceptable inputs are rewarded with greater visibility. Have you heard of Instagram Face or Face Tuning? Face Tuning algorithms use AI to adjust the size, shape and smoothness of faces and bodies before posting them. When this adjustment occurs on a photograph it is seamless, often not fully visible. When this same adjustment is applied via this robot onto a wild (and still wet) portrait painting the result is mess, scars, tension, areas of noticeable conflict between the wild and the controlled. There is a tension between who you are and who society says you should be. I paint portraits that reveal that tension. Wild vs Controlled. Which are you?

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, MY SILENCE WOULD BE AS STONE envisions the invisible hopes and fears across the colonial history and generations of the artist’s lineage, calling upon the petition-and-response structure of the litany as both a recursive process and manifold introspection within AI conversational and image synthesis models.

The series of sculpture and paintings in this show composed under the title 'Magic Lasso', use a common photo editing tool to grapple with over-curation, censorship and skewing of perspective. The separation of space within and outside of the Magic Lasso works to censor surroundings; what must be seen and what mustn’t. It serves as an exploration of the emerging need to artificially produce and be in control of one’s image, and pushes the Magic Lasso as a utilitarian object placed in our world to streamline our perception. Displaced characters and fragments found on digital vacations on Google Street View are treated as found objects, pulled into the real world where their backgrounds disappear on a blank canvas.

A neurotransmitter rush fueled by digital tools... also digital fools. The gamification of technology and media has made us eager and willing participants in a technological Pavlovian experiment. Our biochemistry is now triggered by the highs and lows of symbols rendered in the flurry of emoji shorthand. All trading is now a real time game of watching flicker free screens that promise rewards, falls, and spirals.

“Archetypes #1” and “Archetypes #2” are generative moving image pieces that explore the realms of duration, digital artifacts, repetition, and variation. These artworks are born from the unique synergy between creative vision and the digital medium. The genesis of these works can be traced back to the computer environment, where the artist harnessed the limitless potential of technology to create a sensory experience. These pieces seek to enchant the retinal expectation, inviting viewers to explore the ever-evolving interplay between art and technology through the language of pixels and algorithms, and the profound reflection on the digital environment. Richard Garet explores the evolution and experience of art integrated into digital files through NFTs. He seeks to bridge the medium's inherent constructs with virtual experiential conditions. This condition creates an aesthetic realm that celebrates the luminous emission of the screen, the evolving technologies that shape our visual encounters, and the ethereal surface of the screen that unifies various artistic mediums.

"Naked Link Pilgrim 4.0" visualizes 3D Google satellite maps to show internet traffic of Cuban IP addresses from 2015 to 2022, focusing on the connection between Cuba and the United States. This version extends the digital twinning concept, creating a virtual replica of key cities central to this internet linkage. It integrates historical data with real-time information in an XR lab setting, offering an immersive metaverse experience and highlighting Miami's role in this network.

The Loop residence program consists of XR online studios with the artists David Sainté, Inbar Hagai, Match Zimmerman, Joelle McTigue, Zhou Peng, Ryan Seslow, AdrienneRose Gionta, Angie Amaro, BBraio, Ibuki Kuramochi, cha, Wenjun Chen, and Denis Rovinskiy.

The new edition of Media Under Dystopia 3.0: WASD displays artworks created by visual artists using the internet as a creative medium. Presenting tech-centered pieces that deconstruct our digital environment and culture and at the same time exploring the open metaverse as a place for creation within artistic practices.

Microverse delves into the vibrational essence of the natural world. The instrument sounds without being touched, and the waves it emits are seen in space. Visitors can navigate this otherwise imperceptible reality thanks to a virtual reality experience.

In this artwork, the intersection of digital and cultural histories is explored through the research and reimagining of “card stunts” used in various historical contexts where individuals become only a pixel and are surrogates to the collective inertia.

New Extractivism explores the concept of a new form of extractivism in the stack behind contemporary technological systems creating a blueprint of a machine-like superstructure: a super allegory.

By utilizing religious iconography from the artist’s upbringing and fusing it with contemporary queer imagery, viewers will witness an apparition that will protect and unite all who experience it.

Interfacing Actuality has taken the notion of interfaces as a point of entry for enacting a shift currently taking place in our reality, which is demonstrated by the phenomenon of the metaverse. This shift I have termed the prototyping of actuality. Interfacing actuality refers to the metaverse as the technical system by which the actual becomes an interface.

A virtual twin of XRhub, the MUD Foundation XR Lab, and gallery space based in Little Haiti, Miami, Florida, US.

In a virtual environment, a set of drone-like beings analyze and manipulate an organic mass-like entity. Testing modes of interaction through varying intensities of light and touch, the drones train to interact with a section of a sentient world whose material properties are uncertain, shifting between liquid, solid, and gas states. Drawings relating to the process and environment accompany a wallpaper that serves as a simulated U.I. for future or alternate world technology where landscapes, living beings and machines are interchangeable and interconnected. Images of perhaps an inventory or interface around or inside the entities. A micro-scene from the expanded video-game experience Levels & Bosses.

We Are Being Watched is a computer-generated work comprising 4 screens and a live feed projection. Each screen displays one word of the aforementioned title, moving vertically on the screen, glitching like damaged VHS tapes or old TV reception. The projection shows a glitched live feed of the audience over the glass doors of the exhibition space, enabling people outside to see what is happening inside. The work interrogates the classic surveillance slogan We Are Being Watched by reframing the YOU as WE. This semantic alteration places the awareness in the people who are being watched while diminishing the power of the invisible watcher, the Orwellian Big Brother, the all-seeing eye of a totalitarian police state. In the 'we' there is a communal experience that empowers the surveilled targets, providing a sense of inclusion rather than fear and paranoia.

A music composition takes place in a virtual reality space, where the spectator - user - will be able to move around it, altering the music depending on where they are within the space. The work features video as well, this being part of the musical 'narrative'.

Pilgram: Naked Link 3.0 is the continuous process of a conceptual work that explores the boundaries between data visualization and art made from data collection, creating a link between scientific InfoVis & data sublimation. Pilgram 1.0, the first iteration, was made in 2015 and opened a hotspot in Havana. The 2.0 iteration showed the invisible structures that tie the U.S. (Miami) and Cuba, monitoring and analyzing the packet data traffic. The 3.0 naked links iteration will be a search for the possible changes (or not) of communication infrastructure since the 2.0 research. For the 3.0 iteration, we will display (in real-time) how the flow of communication between the two cities and the two countries is taking place nowadays. Pilgram: Naked Link 3.0 will visualize on real-time XR interfaces (extended realities) the links and infrastructure between the two countries that, in other cases, wouldn't be visible to the naked eye.