CO/CREATE
15.04.23 – 13.05.23
CO/CREATE is an immersive exhibition bringing together the collaborative projects of nine emerging artists based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal: Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes, Bayleigh, Taoyu Chen, Ahmed Drebika, Jules Galbraith, Jorge Luis García González, Isaiah Iseghohi (Dayhills), Melannie Jonas-Ng, Vivian Li.
These artists explore the notion of worldbuilding through six immersive worlds that resulted from a group residency at World Creation Studio (WCS). Using virtual reality and spatialized audio, artists worked together to create distinct immersive experiences that challenge our perceptions of digital creation and reflect on what worldbuilding means in the present moment—here and now. But that here and now takes its social and political dimension, its relevance, from the present ecological moment, marked by hard evidence of climate change that coexists with a frantic desire to explore virtual and extra-planetary worlds (while large corporations co-opt terms like metaverse, billionaires invest in space exploration and consumers are invited to migrate their lives to computer-generated worlds or infinitely scroll through the void of social media). Engaging and reflecting on worldbuilding in this context seems a necessary endeavour, one that is not devoid of irony.
Yet, in the case of WCS, this process of imagining and creating synthetic worlds reflects the studio’s core interest in organizing a community art space that centres sharing resources (equipment, space, software) as well as ideas and knowledge. In short, worldbuilding to WCS is about a collective exploration into community building in the milieu of art, science, and technology in Montreal. As such, they created a unique residency model: the call invited applications from artists interested in potential collaboration through the creation of augmented, virtual and sound-based experiences; the residency consisted of intensive periods of production and learning, for example through workshops facilitated by WCS team members—a network of artists, designers and technologists with experience rooted in digital collaboration. With four months of access to WCS’ facilities, artists-in-residence participated in both formal and informal feedback sessions, getting to know each other, bouncing ideas back and forth, and familiarising themselves with each project; this process naturally led to skill-sharing and to the opportunity to work together as co-authors. This collaborative residency format had a direct impact on the conceptual and formal aspects of the six VR worlds that make up this show. Throughout the development of CO/CREATE, artists collectively imagined ways to untangle worldbuilding from the veils of colonialism and consumerism—facing the reality that in constructing a world, one must consider the histories and narratives that came before it.
Through personal interpretations and narratives of worldbuilding, the CO/CREATE exhibition invites visitors to dive into six speculative spaces. Audiences will find a diversity of life, environments, and stories that reflect the diversity of the artists themselves—their backgrounds, interests and unique perspectives on the world they live in and the worlds they envision. These VR projects invite us to reflect on interconnectedness, kinship, relationships beyond anthropocentric perspectives and the antagonism that emerges as we interact with others and navigate differences of class, race, sexual orientations, and faith. Some of the characters, soundscapes, and imaginaries presented within the exhibition connect to identities and ideas that do not yet have a space in this world, and therefore remind us of the political and technological constructs that define our experiences of the here, now, and beyond.
Exhibition text written by Erandy Vergara
