Virtual Art House open for public June 1st 2025

For the Doppelgänger exhibition, Pompe presents a new work Hundreds of Tosses and Tumbles (2025), a looping VR performance and moving sculpture. In this new work, 3D characters continuously push a large D100 die, a nod to role-playing games where fate, chance, and agency are bound to the roll. Each character is individually sculpted, textured, and animated. Their actions loop endlessly, suggesting both effort and futility, repetition and ritual.

A goblin, an elf, a witch, a tree, seven archetypal characters endlessly take turns rolling a massive D100 die. Drawn from the aesthetics of fantasy and tabletop gaming, these figures inhabit a loop between chance and compulsion, ritual and glitch. The die becomes a symbol of uncertain agency: the characters throw it, yet its outcomes remain elusive, much like our own interactions with platforms, systems, and digital selves. Pome uses performance, motion capture, and animation to explore how identity is constructed through repetition, in games and everyday life. “We all shift between roles,” he says. “Who you are with your friends is not who you are with your family, or in a performance, or online. These aren’t deceptions, they’re versions of yourself”. So then, are our avatars not doubles, but simply other selves, caught in different loops?

Technical Information: (to be added)

Character animation made in collaboration with William Knies 

Instagram: @benjaminpompe

https://benjaminpompe.com

Benjamin Pompe is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt. 

Echoes of Dystopia reflects the decaying soul of the internet—a seductive mirror of our descent into dopamine-fueled escapism. Appearing as an angelic, biomechanical being, the sculpture moves in a hypnotic dance, blurring the line between organic life and artificial simulation. This piece is a rendered video from a real-time audio-reactive visualizer.

(Modelled with Blender, Animated in Unreal Engine as a real-time audio-reactive visualizer.)

carmillasumantry.com

”Space Aqua Utopia” 2025 is a new video series exploring futuristic, utopian landscapes where nature and technology merge. Created using 3D microscopic imagery of insects, tardigrades, and snakes captured at the Oulu Biocenter, the project imagines hybrid environments that echo the speculative world  Using the scientific software Imaris—a powerful tool for 3D and 4D visualization and analysis of microscopic data—I transformed biological structures into surreal digital terrains. These otherworldly ecosystems invite viewers to reflect on biodiversity, interspecies coexistence, and the aesthetic potential of scientific data.  

(Videos with sound)

www.christelle-mas.com

Batang Buo is a narrative about the homeland and the connection between memory and connection. In the era of technology, memory became faded and somehow artificial. 

This series utilizes hyper-reality filters and 3D sculpting of the photographs, providing a graphic testament to the prominent role technology plays in our lives, to the point where it morphs our perception of the world around us. The juxtaposition of the unaltered landscape with layers of artificiality underscores our increasing dependence on digital technology.

(Digital collage and image manipulation, Audio poetry with original narration)

www.ekosaputra.it

For Doppelgänger, Fabiana de Barros reintroduces Santa Milla, a fictional saint originally born inside Second Life as a guide for the digitally displaced., Santa Milla hovers between devotion and simulation, a saint not of miracles, but of orientation. In this new context, she appears at the threshold of the exhibition, reciting a quiet prayer for those navigating virtual terrain: “O glorious Saint Millagrossa, by the light of your holy candle, illuminate my virtual path, my memories, and my files.”

Santa Milla was first conceived as part of Fiteiro Cultural, de Barros’s long-running public project: a nomadic cultural kiosk that reinvents itself within each community it touches. For nearly two decades, the Fiteiro has traveled across geographies and disciplines, offering a space for exchange, encounter, and informal creation. Santa Milla is one of its many offspring, a figure shaped by displacement, imagination, and the need for grounding in uncertain contexts.

As the prayer card concludes: “Guide me to the sanctity of open source and data protection, to the safe haven of eternal happiness in the grace of digital sobriety.”

Technical Information: (to be added)

Instagram: @fabianadebarros

https://fabmic.ch

Fabiana de Barros is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt.

For Doppelgänger, Faysal Mroueh presents Salamandrine Relics, a series of four sculptural jewellery pieces arranged like archaeological fragments in a shallow display case. Part myth, part loot, part relic, the double-headed salamander becomes a speculative totem, both guardian and glitch, echoing across worlds that are no longer strictly virtual or real.

Mroueh’s practice moves between video game world-building and material storytelling. Faysal Mroueh (b. Nicosia, 1987) is a digital artist living in Amsterdam. His work explores experimental uses of game engines to rewire the spatial habits of gameplay and interface culture. He holds an MA in New Media and Digital Culture from Utrecht University and was a resident at De Ateliers. His work has been shown at transmediale (Berlin), Gossamer Fog/Alt_R (London), WORM (Rotterdam), and in collaboration with the Lower Levant Company at the Venice Biennale.

Final wall text to be updated following an interview with the artist.

Technical Information: (to be added)

Instagram: @wheretherehasbeen

Faysal Mroueh is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt.

How HI-GH is the galaxy anyway?

Can things exist physically and digitally in multiple positions of the reality spectrum at once? The answer to both is yes.

https://flyar.fi/high-af for a web and mobile AR-version. 

(Physical sculpture by multidisciplinary artist Sheikki, brought into digital life by flyAR Augmented Reality Studio. Manually modeled, textured, rigged and animated based on reference imagery and photogrammetry. Format: fbx.)

www.flyar.fi

Tri-eyed, Sun and Moon in palms, watching the three realms.

(Custom Unity based production)

keyartist.wixsite.com/keya

”HYENAZ: ENTANGLEMENT” is a VR experience that invites participants to explore their own entanglements with objects, landscapes, and extractive processes, with HYENAZ as their guide. In a fantastical environment—immersed in soundscapes and textures recorded through HYENAZ’s slow-movement research project in sites of environmental extraction—objects reveal their animacy, and participants are invited to engage in speculative storytelling to deepen their understanding of interrelationality.

(Multichannel spatial audio, series of videos, interactive elements)

www.hyenaz.com

What is the truth beyond the spectacle? “The Last Broadcast” is an interactive, text-based narrative that explores propaganda, myth-making, and the role of the metaverse in both.

(Branching narrative built on Inklewriter software.)

www.Jamie-McGhee.com

I studied design between 2007 and 2015 at various institutions and created dozens of different concepts, products, and artworks. From these school projects, I have several 3D files left, filling up my hard drives. 

By combining my old 3D files, I have created various characters called “Recycled 3D Monsters” that wander through the spaces of the Virtual Art House. Each character has been created based on the available materials, reflecting the moods of the moments they were made.

(3D illustrations)

Semiotics of spacelessness by Kathryn Carter orients us in our imaginations as we chart the synthesised terrain of the Virtual Art House. Her words, by virtue of their mortality, invite observers to expand the incubation of their own ideas and to return to the corporeality of their physical vessels as they traverse the digital realm. With poetry, we may transform the phantom of the virtual with palpable expression. 

Intrigued by the nascent semiology of intangible worlds, Carter presents thirty-three poems created as the chrysalises from which the reader’s own wings may emerge. What becomes of embodied humans who are disembodied within the simulacra of coded landscapes? There does not have to be one answer, but in alignment with your intuition your metamorphosis will be mapped by your own poetry.

(Words) 

www.kathryn-carter.com

For Doppelgänger, Kévin Bray brings his hybrid, media-fluid practice into the virtual realm, blurring the borders between cinema, illustration, sculpture, sound, and code. His work explores how language, images, and narratives are constructed, deconstructed, and reassembled across platforms and epochs. Moving between past and present techniques, Bray retools communication strategies to reveal the fiction embedded in reality and the realities embedded in our fictions.

His approach challenges the authority of tools, pushing them toward moments of crisis. By actively shifting his attitude throughout each phase of production, Bray treats making as a political gesture a resistance to dogmatic cycles that shape not only what we create, but how we perceive. “The tool,” in his work, “is never neutral.”

Bray emphasizes the act of collage rather than montage, revealing the layered anatomy of image construction. At the edge of transparency and concealment, his work stages a tension between illusion and exposure a system always in motion. Anima, animated, animal, animism, the work resists stillness, always shape-shifting, always in translation.

Instagram: @bray_kevin 

https://kevinbray.notion.site

Technical Information: (to be added)

Kévin Bray is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt.

ANIMATOR – LIVE PERFORMANCE
Animator showcases how much life and personality is radiating even from the simplest signal of existence – a moving dot that leaves a trace. What happens when a dot meets another? 

(performance)

ANIMATOR – THE TOOL
Life is motion. You will never stop moving as long as you breathe. Animator – The Tool calls you to explore the simplest signal of existence and become the animator yourself! 

(interactive play)

https://www.instagram.com/springplay_studio/

9000 IN METAVERSE is a multidisciplinary art exhibition by photographer-filmmaker-architect Vesa Loikas & Choreographer-dancer Maria Nurmela.

9000 IN METAVERSE explores the changing meanings of humanism within a posthumanist framework.

(Three-dimensional sculptures, video with soundtrack, fine art photography and text)

https://fainomenon.net/

Maria Touloupou is a meta-architect whose work moves between spatial storytelling and immersive digital design. She recently contributed to the first pavilion of the Metaverse Architecture Biennale. Her practice navigates between high-concept design and emotional cartography, constructing speculative spaces that challenge the boundaries of architecture, identity, and belonging in the digital era.

For Doppelgänger, Touloupou designs PORTAL², the entry pavilion through which all visitors step into the exhibition. Conceived as a fluid threshold, PORTAL² is less an object than a sculpted passage, a twin-looped geometry where reflection becomes dissonance and symmetry folds into recursion. Inspired by the yin-yang symbol and principles of sacred geometry, it stages an encounter between dual forces: origin and conclusion, self and copy, stillness and transformation.

In a world of synthetic selves and manufactured realities, PORTAL² proposes architecture as mirror consciousness, a sentient space, indifferent to the difference between origin and replica. It asks: What happens when the interface knows you before you know yourself? And what remains, if the interface becomes your own reflection?

Technical Information: (to be added)

Instagram: @maria_toul. 

https://www.untltd.studio

Maria Touloupou is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt.

The Flipping Room: Micro-Stories Unfold
In this immersive virtual exhibition, Canadian artist Marie Samuel Levasseur presents over a hundred zines and small artbooks – many of their own, a hundred created through collective workshops, a zine from the Fanzinothèque collection (France) and a selection by fellow artists from Canada, the U.S., Spain, and Germany.

Each zine is revealed through a quiet, intimate gesture: the turning of its pages, one by one, for someone else to see. Inspired by the artist’s experience as a caregiver, this simple act becomes a form of care – a way to share stories gently, attentively.

Through these small books and the many hands that helped create them, The Flipping Room offers a space of connection, reflection, and quiet resistance, where micro-narratives unfold across borders and screens.

(A virtual video installation composed of multiple screens, each triggering a video of zines being flipped page by page.)

http://mariesamuel.com/en

Nature reclaims the digital world. Using their catalogue of textures and forms collected from fieldwork in temperate Celtic rainforests of Wales and tropical montane cloud forests of the Philippines, Curtis and Mica bring pockets of mossy forests and fern-laden woodlands to the VAH Building.
 
(3D objects of forest elements to be spread out in spaces within the Virtual Art House building)
 

https://sunny-loving-forest.glitch.me

For Doppelgänger, Michalis Charalambous presents two sculptures from his ongoing series We Meta Love Death, fragments from a speculative future where intimacy and mourning unfold without flesh. In these works, digital presence becomes a container for grief, memory, and desire. The avatar mourns. The interface yearns. The body is absent, but the emotion persists.

“This virtual META-universe,” Charalambous writes, “serves as a space for reassessment and deep reflection. Can avatars experience love and death in a context that negates decay and mortality? In this space, we are invited to wander and reconsider the core experiences that shape our identity.”

Working with VR and AI, Charalambous creates atmospheres. From reality to constructed echo, from touch to simulation, from self to double. “My work is not about the spectacle of technology,” he says, “but the emotional realism of virtuality.”

Technical Information: (to be added)

Instagram: @michalis_charalambous_

Michalis Charalambous is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt.

or Doppelgänger, Pelletier presents a series of ten mutated portraits, sourced from classical Renaissance compositions, serene Madonnas, idealized faces, holy arrangements. Bodies overflow. Faces blur. Breasts multiply. The sacred becomes grotesque. A visual language once used to embody divinity is now processed, replicated, and warped by digital impulse.

Mike Pelletier works in 3D animation, sculpture, and digital performance, often interrogating the relationship between control and distortion, human form and machine logic. 

These mutant icons are not born of intent but of pattern. AI doesn’t understand symbolism; it reads form as function. Compositional harmony becomes algorithmic recursion. Pelletier lets the machine push too far, lets it hallucinate until the human disappears.

Technical Information: (to be added)

Instagram: @mikepelletiernl

https://mikepelletier.net

Mike Pelletier is part of the group exhibition Doppelgänger, curated by Yev Kravt.

Nadi is a collective of generative new-media sculptures, translating movement in Yoga to a time-freeze entity.

Through the sculptures, I am investigating the rhythm of the body and the breath, the undulations in movement and the prana, which leads to an imagination of continuity. The form unfurls an intrinsic quality of calmness of a biological being with an embodiment of movement and breath, in the form’s convolutions.

The expansion and contraction of Nadi form preserves multilayered systems both in temporal and spatial characteristics, and the geometry of the body’s anatomy lends value to animalistic attributes. This emergence of the Body’s rhythm metamorphoses from a formless existence to an embodied self, revealing symmetry in the recursive patterns of the flow.

https://timeblur.io

(Artificial Intelligence, Creative Coding, Laser cutting Programmer: Mallikarjun M)

The UFÅ VAH 2025 campaign humorously proposes making Turku the UFO capital of the world. This retro-futuristic artwork blends sci-fi aesthetics with contemporary digital illustrations, reimagining a UFO visitation as a symbolic encounter with home, locality, and imagination.

(Various digital formats, workshops, AI-integrations)

Artist

In the project Concert, fragments of textures and sounds recreate the unique visual and auditory qualities of two locations. Direct observation and documentation are crucial parts of my process, and I use audio field recordings and 3D scanning to record and archive the everyday experience of specific places

In the VR installations, viewers can step into a concert capturing natural sounds and the sounds from human activity.  

Concert-Intertidal documents a section of shoreline in Boundary Bay, an important stop for migrating birds in the Pacific Northwest, BC Canada, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples. The installation Concert-Garden captures fragments of the natural textures and sounds in Padula, Vallo di Diano, Italy

(Sound field recordings on location, and 3D scans. The audio and 3D elements are brought together in Unity)

https://pmajanoart.com

HS is an interactive metaverse installation that visualizes and sonifies cultural, biological, and informational networks through AI, quantum algorithms, and real-time co-creation.

(Unity scripts and assets, 
machine learning for data processing
agents)

https://robertlisek.com

In an increasingly digital Universe, where individual identities are becoming ever more indistinguishable, what role does the individual play in his fictitious uniqueness?

This work seeks to explore the theme of the depersonalization within the virtual world through a particulate graphic component that gradually dissolves, only to reassemble into the essence of the physical body belonging to the tangible everyday dimension.

(Digital art / Live Performance)

www.simonemartinotta.com

Goldfish robot in bamboo sea is an immersive audiovisual experience that questions the ecology of life and non-life in the society of digital technology, the last nostalgia before entering the metaverse. The audience will transform into a robot goldfish, carried by the music of the Chinese harp Guzheng, and will swim in the sea of bamboo generated from ancient Chinese Shanshui drawings by AI deepth recognition. Yellow Wasabi will play Guzheng with an atypical sound treatment in MAX/Msp, distorting the timbral and rhythmic structure of the immersive sound continuum. The audience will promenade in this virtual garden and will feel the traditional esthetic of one step on view.

(Unity for computer project)

https://yellowwasabi.net