DiMoDA 4.0 Dis/Location: Banz & Bowinkel, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga, and Tamiko Thiel

DiMoDA is a pioneering virtual institution, dedicated to commissioning, preserving, and exhibiting cutting edge VR artworks. Conceived in 2013 by Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William Robertson, DiMoDA has so far released three exhibitions, featuring 15 unique, artist-designed, VR experiences. In 2015 DiMoDA 1.0 launched with Transfer Gallery in New York, and has traveled the world since. Thousands of virtual exhibitions have been downloaded worldwide, and IRL Exhibitions have taken place in cities like New York, Miami, Chicago, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dubai, and Bangkok among others.

DiMoDA 4.0, curated by Christiane Paul, comprises three artworks focused on the theme of Dis/Location. The feeling of displacement from or disturbance of a proper, original, or usual place or state has become a defining experience of our time in various contexts, from gentrification and evolution to perceptions of space afforded by technologies and racial trauma. The three projects — by artists Banz & Bowinkel, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga, and Tamiko Thiel — engage with these contexts from different perspectives. They explore issues such as displacement from neighborhoods; the shifts occurring in the evolution of the earth from its creation to the Anthropocene; and the disarticulation in our communication with the binary operations of computers. As the architecture of DiMoDA 4.0 itself, the VR works dislocate viewers by creating ruptures and distances from which structures can be questioned.

As in every release of DiMoDA, the space of the virtual museum is custom-designed for the experience of the commissioned works. The architecture of DiMoDA 4.0 consists of a structure that disrupts a city block of derelict New York townhouses, infiltrating and dislocating their architecture from the basement to the roof. Having returned to an uncultivated, rewilded state, the street scene suggests both decay and the potential for reimagining. 

The artworks encountered by visitors in the DiMoDA 4.0 museum architecture entail experiences from the concrete to the abstract and the natural or urban environment to the spiritual. In Ricardo Miranda Zuniga's Desplazados viewers can navigate a virtual reality version of New York City's Lower East Side, where they encounter, in the form of audio interviews, the personal accounts of inhabitants affected by gentrification in a maze of alleyways. Zooming out to a global level, Tamiko Thiel's Atmos Sphaerae takes viewers on an abstracted visual voyage through the evolution of the earth and creation myths, from the big bang andcosmic egg (as the soul of the primeval waters out of which creation arose) to protoplanetary gases and the earliest life forms. The evolution culminates in scenery of oil rigs and flare towers burning off methane and an atmosphere of water vapor and greenhouse gas, a warning of the potential outcome of global warming and extinction of most life forms. Banz & Bowinkel's work The Grid transports viewers into the consciousness of a computer where electricity flows through transistors and creates a world of binary operations. Humanoid figures with oily skins, wearing masks made out of 3D geometries based on Internet images, wander through the space under gigantic transmitters suspended from the ceiling, engaging visitors in a series of interactions that reflect on the distortions of perception in a machinic world.