This Giant Spider at Frieze London Will Transport You to a Digital World

Art & Tech This Giant Spider at Frieze London Will Transport You to a Digital World Theo Triantafyllidis's climbable sculpture doubles as a portal into his tactile, awkward 'Feral Metaverse.' Theo Triantafyllidis's climbable sculpture doubles as a portal into his tactile, awkward 'Feral Metaverse.' Jo Lawson-Tancred ShareShare This Article Arachnophobes be warned: A monumental, climbable spider is coming to this year’s Frieze London. The unlikely, potentially off-putting installation will offer fairgoers an unlikely portal into the digital realm via an interactive video game, courtesy of Theo Triantafyllidis, this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner. Titled Feral Metaverse (Spider), the large-scale work is the latest chapter in Triantafyllidis’s ongoing “Feral Metaverse” project, which rejects Silicon Valley’s metaverse dreams, replacing the uncanny, frictionless simulacra once championed by tech bros with something tactile, awkward, and fun. “I wanted to propose a different direction that the metaverse could have taken,” the Greek new media artist told me in a video call. Video games, he argued, are an ideal medium for simulating situations in which certain social dynamics can be “playtested” to see “what behavioral patterns emerge.” Players are invited to clamber over the spider, searching its bristly body for game controls and screens through which they will be able to enter the “Feral Metaverse.” Triantafyllidis said that the digital environment, though sometimes bucolic, will mostly feel desolate, even hostile. A short demo on Steam reveals an arid, desertlike terrain that avatars move through with an almost primal simplicity of gesture. The artist is excited to see how players navigate their entry into, and existence within, this strange new world. Will players politely help each other climb the spider? How will the awkwardness of our real-life, fumbling motions translate into a virtual realm when the option for verbal communication is taken away? Under pressure, what kind of instincts will kick in? Will players choose collaboration or conflict? The possibility of cooperation, vulnerability, and care in the virtual realm is an idea that Triantafyllidis has been using his “Feral Universe” to explore for some time. The version he is producing for Frieze is novel, however, in its introduction of a “physical component that is very critical in breaking this barrier of entry.” The artist spoke of the spider’s “strong symbolism” throughout art history, often related to themes of creation and generative power, as well as anxieties it might push to the surface. He welcomes the idea that players may initially feel intimidated, even horrified by the spider, before realizing through play that it is, in fact, “a cuddly creature.” Born in Athens in 1988, Triantafyllidis originally trained as an architect before earning his MFA from UCLA‘s Design Media Arts program in 2016—a background that has made him comfortable experimenting with emerging technologies. For Feral Metaverse (Spider), he consulted with technologists from Google Arts and Culture, which is sponsoring the Frieze Artist Award for the first time this year. Their support helped him integrate more large language models into his process, building on his longstanding interest in using so-called “A.I. slop” as an artistic material. “I’m starting to see this A.I.-generated content as a strange, malleable material that is very much part of our age,” Triantafyllidis said. “As an artist I have to deal with it somehow. I want to be able to sculpt and transform it.” He began exploring these ideas in 2022, while preparing for a solo exhibition, “Pheromone Spa,” at Breeder Gallery in Athens. There he presented the installation “Ork Haus” using an early, unsophisticated version of the image-generation tool Midjourney to generate a sofa based on the “ork” monsters from sci-fi games like Warhammer 40,000. The resulting, nonsensical image—spat out by the machine in just a matter of seconds—was then painstakingly fabricated over several months, to produce an eccentric, otherworldly piece of furniture that visitors to the exhibition were free to use. The spider in Feral Metaverse (Spider) has been created using a more iterative process. Triantafyllidis has been feeding sketches of his own ideas into Google’s Gemini, which returned photorealistic renderings. A rough physical model of the work was photographed and returned to the A.I., which has been able to suggest different material options. Now that the sculpture’s basic form has taken shape, this same continuous “feedback loop” is being used to decide smaller details, such as textile-like patterning. “I think the most interesting part of this process is the materiality of this A.I. imagery,” the artist said, noting that the statistical pixel generation yields something that reads more textural than expected. Feral Metaverse (Spider) will be on view at Frieze London from October 14–18, where Triantafyllidis’s playful slippage between our reality and his feral one may offer a welcome if momentary escape from the complex social dynamics of an art fair.