Museums Without Walls is seeking proposals for its virtual reality residency programme. Residencies will take place through April and May in different versions of the Espírito Santo Art Museum – MAES hosted in the Mozilla Hubs platform. Four participants will be selected to occupy and recreate this environment based on their artistic and/or curatorial visions. The selected proposals will receive specialised mentorship and a development fee of CAD $ 600. The residency outcomes will be presented in the Museum Without Walls programme in late May.
MAES is situated in the Southeast coast of Brazil. Museum Without Walls takes inspiration from its recent reopening, after a long reform which recuperated elements of the museum’s original architecture while making the exhibition space much more susceptible to its surroundings. Amidst the global pandemic, the project invites us to examine how art institutions operate, both within and without their physical buildings, as systems for representation and discourse.
Virtual Reality technologies provide new opportunities to reconfigure the terms of relationship between artwork and space – experience and object – public and institution. These technologies may pluralise the access to conventional artforms, cultivate digitally-native poetics, and accomplish other distributions of the sensible. MAES are looking for proposals that creatively engage with technological contingencies and exercise virtuality as a potential for reimagining the museum.
Mozilla Hubs is a multi-user virtual reality platform with a fairly low learning curve. On top of that, it is compatible with both regular browsers and latest-generation VR headsets. The choice to host this residency in Hubs is meant not only to amplify possibilities of participation, but also to emphasise the social dimensions of the museum as a public infrastructure. Proponents are encouraged to get acquainted with the platform and visit some of the exhibitions made in it before submitting their proposals.
