In New Art City, a virtual exhibition toolkit founded in 2020, artists experiment with cyberspace as an extension of identity and expressive consciousness through building "Worlds” and “Rooms” where artworks can be accessed publicly without the barrier of time and space. By exhibiting 3D models and interactive objects that reflect the possibilities of a fully-customized, artist-owned room, artists Henrique Fagundes, Zhao Tian-lin, and Sammie Veeler explore the idea of intertwined realities through the hyper-awareness of digital experiences.

In Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2022), Henrique Fagundes envisions the future of the metaverse while critiquing it in the context of western cyberpunk ideals. Retrieving his family’s histories and positioning themselves in a “cyberFUNK” futuristic scenario in Brazil, Fagundes questions the ownership of the human future and digitized bodies by creating a black comedy-style virtual Brazil, where poor and dissident people can be purchased as NFPs (Non-Fungible Person). While rewriting the context of his and his loved ones’ existence, Fagundes finds that imagining a sense of belonging in a future setting to be a challenge. In a world where advanced interconnectedness is marketed and supposedly assured, feelings of isolation and abandonment permeate throughout the space. Upon this realization, Fagundes dreams of a harmonic coexistence between organisms and machines, a sanctuary where all that is truly precious remains safe and unforgotten.

The antidotes for the ambiguous ownership and struggling animal-nature-machine relationship of digitized future is rooted in Zhao Tian-lin’s Transcendence Plan (2022). Like Henrique Fagundes’s hope that “mammal and computers live in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky ”(quote from a poem by Richard Brautigan), Zhao Tian-lin has a vision of reconstructing new versions of ourselves in the present and near future. Through their intimate experiences with others on spiritual hypnosis journeys, Zhao Tian-lin’s ‘Digital Sarira’(數位舍利子) presents the results of their transforming consciousness. Zhao Tian-lin liberates people from the old memories and human histories burdened within the body, while regaining the original pure essence of soul, and thus a new earth is born.

Wholeness emerges from fractals. Under an artist’s imagination of intertwined realities, an interconnected self-awareness has evolved from digital intimacy. In Sammie Veeler’s artwork Gyre(2021), viewers travel freely inside the rising gyre of gender euphoria and dysphoria, and traverse through moments of abstracted reflections. As a dedicated Worldbuilder in New Art City, Sammie Veeler experiments with cybernavigation as interactive poetry and an exploration of self. Sammie Veeler’s Gyre(2021) levitates viewers through the acts of vulnerability and introspection in a transitioning self-awareness. A human face, a bond bursts from your gaze, and so is the portrait of a machine made clearer by our every single diving into the network and cyberspace.

Don Hanson

Waley Art

Formosa Art Fair

Billy Nien