‘It’s Coming Straight For Us… where are we in the metaverse?‘
The Colony, our fictitious governmental bureaucracy, has morphed into the last global BigTech corporation. Ngarrindjeri artist, Clyde Rigney Jnr, is their new CEO and is launching the NearNow, a dazzling meta-metaverse, the NearNow, with a series of empowering memes aimed at artists, ‘How to be successful in the Metaverse’.
This work aims to respond to the challenges artists face through disruptive tech such as AI and mixed reality. During a series of community arts workshops, we co-create with diverse community participants to experiment with surreal, immersive transmedia art experiences. This CACD exploration challenges power & privilege across realities: The metaverse is coming – how will we shape its stories, rules and values?
This experimental work will include mixed-media art practices, exploring absurd ways to enter the metaverse, and ‘how-to’ spoofs to get us all AI-ready for this confused new normal, the NearNow. Other ideas include satirical ads about the psychology of marketing, supremacy thinking, surveillance capitalism, animations and DIY bunker art concepts.
Given the launch of new ‘artificial intelligence’ large learning models like Chatbot GPT4 and social media giants like Google’s Bard and Meta, and with a few companies poised to appropriating our entire collective digital knowledge, it is time to politely ask: What have these techno-feudal overlords and their artificial intelligences in store for us?
What happens to human exchange and relationships when we are constantly manipulated and prompted to market at each other 24/7?
What role will artists have in this branded new world?
Stay tuned for updates - new work coming soon.