The metaverse at present remains constrained to and bearing the imprint of conditions familiar to physical reality. Our proposal rethinks the museum typology in the virtual realm by doing away with real-world gravity, in favor of a non-standard source of gravity, and exploring spatial experiences and relationships enabled by traversable topologies.

The field of game design provides ample precedent for navigating and experiencing the metaverse with gravity relative to the surface the player is walking upon. Video games such as Super Mario Galaxy have perfected the mechanics. By assigning gravitational pull to individual objects, the game challenges the player to solve puzzles in an unfamiliar navigational paradigm. However, the game does not focus on developing new spatial experiences, rather merely challenges the player with puzzles reliant on the new mechanic.

On the other hand, various spaces of impossible gravity have been a product of artistic imagination, such as the works of M.C. Escher, or the dream world in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. These explore spatial experiences based upon a premise of traversable topologies, which, however, remain in the realm of the paradox, and do not offer complete architectures: instead they only explore the phenomenon of relative gravity.

Within the field of architecture, topology has been a topic of interest for many projects of the past. However, constrained to the conditions of physical gravity, geometries of continuity have remained mostly an aesthetic obsession for many architects. The virtual realm, where the limitation of standard gravity is not relevant, offers a new playground for architectural experimentation with topologies of navigable surfaces and the possibility for new museum experiences to emerge. Employing the mechanics of movement governed by gravity relative to the walking surface, we reimagine the Salon D’Art in the virtual realm by warping the museum organization around a central space and hence, providing two modes of experiencing the artworks - as ambiance formed by the juxtaposition of all pieces within the central space through the careful use of apertures, and as an individual artwork viewed in isolation from the rest of the collection.

The central space not only gives glimpses of all artworks, but serves to replace the wayfinding role of the map common in both gaming environments and traditional physical museums, by providing an overview of the collection.

The individual exhibition spaces offer four different modes of experiencing the artworks depending on the spatial relationship between the viewer and the artwork - environment or object art, and for each of those, the presence or lack of a single orientation of the artwork relative to the viewer, taking advantage of the new conditions of gravity.

The new Salon D’Art is thus working at the intersection of different areas of expertise innate to the disciplines of game design, architecture, and the visual arts to bring a new museum typology to life in the virtual realm.

Submission number: 938895