The Toledo Museum of Art has gone meta with its current exhibition Doppelganger.
The cultural repository claims to be the first museum in North America to build a presence on the metaverse program Decentraland. And it's a big deal. Not because Toledo is once again No. 1 in something, but because this appears the way the future is headed — the metaverse, a term so new it doesn't come up if you do an online search at Merriam-Webster dictionary.
The term “metaverse” was first used in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, which accurately described it as a “computer generated universe.” World of Warcraft is a metaverse. When you play Grand Theft Auto in live mode, that's a metaverse. It's a computer-generated imaginary world with which you and others can interact.
The museum has established a metaverse presence on the platform Decentraland, focusing on its current exhibition Doppelganger, a film installation from Stan Douglas. Doppelganger tells the space adventure of a cosmonaut named Alice and her clone who experiences something mysterious in space and then come back to Earth to dual realities — one where she’s welcomed as a hero, one where she’s perceived as a threat. With Decentraland, you can visit and interact with the exhibit via the magic of computer.
Looking at a computerized version of Doppelganger might make you feel like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, or Case from the novel Neuromancer. It's a whole new way to consume art. Logging into Decentraland you’ll see a lot of pixelated avatars roaming about; those are other users you can interact with.
You move your avatar around and there it is — the giant sun from Doppelganger. Move your avatar closer and you can visit the set from the film — the control room, Alice’s quarters, the spaceship.
Decentraland is just the beginning of the museum’s foray into the digital realm.
“We at the Toledo Museum of Art believe it is important to engage emerging experiential opportunities in the digital realm, responding to the shifting currents of contemporary art, culture and technology,” TMA director Adam Levine said in a statement. “With multiple points of entry and diverse approaches to storytelling, Stan Douglas’s work ideally lent itself to expand the definitions of materiality and experimentation with this bold new frontier for art making and participation.”
“We hope that visitors to Doppelganger on Decentraland will come away with an enhanced understanding of the film and its relevance, before or after viewing the film installation at TMA, but the virtual offering is also designed to be a stand-alone experience for broader audiences,” said Jessica Hong, TMA’s curator of modern and contemporary art.
The metaverse and Decentraland allow people all over the world to visit and interact with TMA’s Doppelganger exhibit, according to TMA director of brand strategy Gary Gonya.
“It’s part of a larger strategy that we’re undertaking. We want to have TMA be relevant. The metaverse allows us to connect with a much broader community that can be anywhere on the globe. So it’s speaking towards people who wouldn’t typically interact with us at the museum. This might be their first interaction with us. This is aimed more at a global audience than an American one,” said Gonya.
Museums around the world have begun offering new and cutting-edge technologies ranging from exhibits based in virtual reality to selling artwork as Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs. Locally, the Detroit Institute of Arts offers a smartphone-based augmented reality app called Lumin, while museums such as the Smithsonian and the Louvre have been experimenting with virtual reality exhibits for years.
Digital exhibits like Doppelganger in Decentraland are the way of the future as far as museums go, at least in the eyes of Megan Pellegrino, director of museum studies at Walsh College in northeast Ohio.
“I don’t see any reason why (metaverse) and digital interactive exhibits shouldn’t be the new trend in museums,” said Pellegrino. “Art is art in whatever form it’s created. Digital media is by definition art. Art has changed over time but it’s all valuable to human society. Digital art should absolutely be a part of museum collections.”
But does digital art threaten museums? TMA’s Gonya says no.
“This doesn’t replace anything, it just expands our offering,” he said. “The metaverse allows us to reach an audience that may not be in this country and this gives them a chance to engage with us. We want this to be an expectation of what people can expect from us in the future.”
First Published January 9, 2022, 4:00 p.m.
