Onassis ONX is pleased to announce Group Hug, a landmark exhibition of large-scale, site-specific video game installations. Presented with Water Street Projects in collaboration with curators Julia Kaganskiy, Serpentine Arts Technologies, and Rhizome, the exhibition invites visitors to play together and lose themselves in the sensorial worlds of each game through sight, sound, and touch.

Across each game, players must learn to communicate and cooperate in order to discover and survive unfamiliar worlds. Group Hug is inspired by the idea of radical collaboration, with each work elevating group play over traditional individualistic game logic. The exhibition also activates our model for collaborative curation, uniting unique creative perspectives from artists in one space.

Featuring:

“Feral Metaverse” by Theo Triantafyllidis

“THE LACK: I KNEW YOUR VOICE BEFORE YOU SPOKE” by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

“The Endless Forest” by Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn)

Feral Metaverse by Theo Triantafyllidis

Greek artist Theo Triantafyllidis is an astute observer of internet culture, particularly the kind of extremely online gaming communities that tend to assemble around MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy. His practice encompasses live simulations created with game engine software, multimedia installation, and performance. The work reflects a particular structure of feeling that arises from existing within hybrid realities, straddling virtual and physical worlds, in a time of social anomie and climate collapse. Works like Radicalization Pipeline (2021), a live simulation in which two violent hordes clash in an endless fight scene, explore the connection between gamification, fantasy, and political radicalization. Earlier works like Pastoral (2019), a kind of anti-game in which a muscular, gender-fluid Ork wanders through a field of wheat, defy traditional videogame mechanics by depicting a serene, bucolic scene in place of the violent quests we’ve come to expect. Taken together, Triantafyllidis’s body of work sketches a portrait of modern day masculinity as seen through the funhouse mirror of videogame subcultures—magnifying, distorting and subverting the toxic elements that can often be found festering there. 

Feral Metaverse is Triantafyllidis’s first multiplayer videogame, presented at “Group Hug” as an 8-player installation with a site-specific gaming rig modeled after a medieval catapult. The work serves as a critical reflection on the kinds of social behaviors enabled by existing virtual platforms, as well as a provocation for how these spaces, and the ways we inhabit them, could be imagined otherwise. Players emerge into an arid, earthy terrain under a blazing, orange sky. The landscape is vast, endless and barren, littered with skeletal remains, assorted debris, and derelict structures from some unknown civilization long since disappeared. Deranged-looking humanoids wander this wasteland naked, sometimes walking upright, sometimes galloping on all fours, sometimes banding together into a heap of flesh and moving en masse across the sandy dunes. These pre-verbal creatures possess only the most basic forms of gestural communication yet must find ways of coordinating and collaborating to ensure their mutual survival. Occasionally, they’ll emit a primal scream (of joy? pain? catharsis?) to punctuate the scene and break through the deafening muteness.

The world of Feral Metaverse feels hostile, but also wild and free, reveling in the ambiguous creative potential of anarchy. This stands in stark contrast to the sanitized, tightly controlled corporate virtual spaces we tend to occupy online—so-called “metaverses” like Fortnite and Roblox—which have become the preferred social spaces for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. An entire generation’s social norms and values are forged in these environments, which are increasingly organized around micro-transactions and cultures of ownership and competition, seeking to extract as much value as possible out of the mostly teenaged players. Triantafyllidis’s world emulates these spaces but turns them on their head, stripping them down to their most basic, primal essence and injecting a healthy dose of unbridled weirdness. The exaggerated abjectness of his world is belied by the hopeful, utopian spirit of the game’s core mechanic, which orients players around conviviality and mutual support. In navigating the tensions between these two extremes we glimpse society at its best and its worst, caught between self-interest and collective good. The work serves as a reminder that these conflicting urges are always present in all of us, and in the spaces, virtual and physical, that we create together.

“Feral Metaverse” is curated for Group Hug by Julia Kaganskiy.

Feral Metaverse, 2024

By Theo Triantafyllidis

Game Development:

Writer & Concept Artist: Connor Willumsen

Environmental Concept Art: Sam Balfus

Original Score & Sound Design: Diego Navarro

Technical Animator: Kevin Edzenga

Character Animator: Barnaby Abrahams

3D Artists: Tokisato Mitsuru, Christos Fousekis

Installation:

Catapult Fabrication: Chateau Brooklyn, Pietro Pagliaro

Textiles: Katerina Nakou, Christos Fousekis

Opening Performance: 

Choreographer: Monica Mirabile

Performers: Valentina Bache, Neva Guido, Maxi Canion, Æirrinn Ricks

Costumes: Vinyl Face

Game Movement Session:

Choreographer: Marios Stamatis

Performers: Sofia Pouchtou, Thanos Ragousis, Efthimios Moschopoulos

Feral Metaverse is presented at Group Hug in WSA NY with the generous support of Onassis ONX and curated by Julia Kaganskiy. Very Special Thanks to Jazia Hammoudi & Matthew Niederhauser.

Feral Metaverse: Prologue, the first game and installation prototype was exhibited at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, 2023.