Once upon a time, there was nothing. But even nothing cannot last forever, and from the silent and vast emptiness, a new kind of matter sprang into existence, in the form of a church inhabited by soft and delicate digital creatures called Vivs. Was it the Vivs that built the church, or was the church patiently waiting to host them? What came first remains unclear.
The shelter is comfortably warm and smells earthy and damp, and a little musky. In the candlelit space, strays of light gleam from the stained-glass oculus making the world seem to shimmer a little at its edges. Common ivy is climbing up the brittle, yet freshly painted, wooden walls of the edifice. In this realm, the virtual and the physical seems to be intimately entangled and you, the visitor, are merely a sigh here. Under these pointed arches, there is no time, but a feeling of eternity, allowing for a magnified awareness.
The Vivs invite us to lose ourselves and to practice tactility and contemplation; to begin nurturing an awareness of the true nature of virtual matter and ultimately to see through the illusion of all matter. To visit the Vivs feels somehow epic, and also dreamy, but what you witness might just be a mundane scene of everyday life in their favourite meeting place.
(Text by Lucie Gottlieb)
Many thanks to Lucie Gottlieb for crafting the stained-glass piece, and to Jonas Holmer for the sound design of the virtual church.
