On view through February 22, Josephine Meckseper’s exhibition Scenario for a Past Future negotiates actual and virtual reality between the walls of the Lewis Center for the Arts Hurley Gallery. Charged with electronic sound, expansive projected images, and one dynamic digital painting anchored between the two, the installation is reminiscent of Meckseper’s well-known vitrine works with an assemblage of objects inside glass walls. But this time, the vitrine is life-sized — and we’re in it.

In its 20-year evolution, Meckseper’s vitrine concept has taken a leap with this iteration in Hurley Gallery. “Conceptually, this work is interesting because, for the first time, I’m letting the viewer inside the vitrine,” said Meckseper. “They are now no longer separated by the glass but eye-to-eye with objects, and they can literally walk through them because they are outside the laws of physics.”

"For the first time, I’m letting the viewer inside the vitrine. They are now no longer separated by the glass but eye-to-eye with objects and they can literally walk through them because they are outside the laws of physics.” —Josephine Meckseper

The audience shares the space with an avatar who can be guided using a keyboard. Alongside the avatar, the viewer can investigate a sparse collection of life-sized modernist sculptures that regularly shatter and recompose, scrutinizing the reflecting chards as they pass through them or cast their gaze across the surrounding jagged Alpine backdrop.

Students who participated in the course Meckseper co-taught during her tenure as Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and A&A with Brigid Doherty in fall 2022, “Counterworlds: Innovation and Rupture in Communities of Artistic Practice,” recognized the course’s central discussion of utopia and dystopia in the work.

Though the avatar signifies virtual reality, Meckseper deliberately pulled the experience out of the headset. “I purposely decided to create a more analog installation rather than having the full VR experience because I wanted to counter the escapist properties of virtual reality,” she said. “Having this gallery installation creates a sense of de-fascination with the medium and allows for a human scale immersive experience.”

"Having this gallery installation creates a sense of de-fascination with the medium, and allows for a human scale immersive experience.” —Josephine Meckseper

The work occupies the past, future, utopia, dystopia, virtual, and less-virtual reality. Among the multitude of possible interpretations, Meckseper added, “We don’t know if the world under this crystal mountain is still inhabited.” The animated painting alludes to the future of technology in the post-human world. “It’s kind of a metaphor for the perpetual motion of automated digital information like spam emails,” she said. “It’s this echo chamber of digital information where art and robo-calls coexist. It’s showing the ruins of consumer culture in a way.”

Architect Hani Rashid and architectural historian Daniela Fabricius joined Meckseper for a virtual panel discussion that took place both in Hurley Gallery and in the metaverse on February 13. The group discussed the modernist models for immersive architecture with which she engages critically in her work, including Lilly Reich’s and Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architecture (1917), while also addressing the possibilities and limitations of contemporary digital architecture and the cultural implications of inhabiting digital environments.

“Our desire as spatialists is in provoking and inspiring strange and wondrous realities – it’s the very core of architectural thinking that we venture into these virtual realms.” —Hani Rashid

“I think virtual reality is really nothing new to architects,” said Rashid, who collaborated with Meckseper to render the virtual scene. “Our desire as spatialists is in provoking and inspiring strange and wondrous realities—it’s the very core of architectural thinking that we venture into these virtual realms.”

Meckseper’s virtual arena, with its glass container, layered architectural history, crystalline mountainscape, and ever-fracturing sculptures, had the effect of refracting ideas and perceptions among the panelists; it could just as well be considered a spiritual haven as a fraught shatterbox or evil terminus.

For Meckseper, the goal was not to create an endpoint or manifestation of the virtual but rather to offer a thought expedition. “I think it functions best as a meeting place …a social sculpture where the focus is on the exchange that happens inside of it,” she said. “People in the indefinite future can meet in there and talk to each other.” 

“I think it functions best as a meeting place…a social sculpture where the focus is on the exchange that happens inside of it. People in the indefinite future can meet in there and talk to each other.” 

As part of the panel discussion, people in the present, whose actual landscape resembled the virtual one more closely than usual if they were in the weather-sphere of Hurley Gallery on this snowy afternoon, were invited to send their avatar proxies in to experiment.

Organized by Brigid Doherty (Dept. of Art & Archaeology) and Jeff Whetstone (Program in Visual Arts) in collaboration with Meckseper with tech support from Jacqueline Sischy & Sam Hillmer of DMINTI and Joe Arnold in the Lewis Center’s Program in Visual Arts; panel discussion cosponsored by Humanities Council, Center for Digital Humanities, and Program in Media and Modernity.