In May 2021, while the Espírito Santo Art Museum – MAES – was closed in between exhibitions, we held an arts and curatorial residency in a replica of the museum hosted in the Mozilla Hubs platform.
Compatible with WebXR standards, Hubs is a virtual reality system more directly integrated to the internet infrastructure and which does not require any equipment more sophisticated than a browser to be used.
During the residency, Hubs was a means for the participants to occupy the MAES’ architecture as a porous simulacrum, open to the most diverse flows of information – media libraries, archive materials, personal memories, and collaborations with the public.
The experience resulted in the versioning of the museum into four different instances, fabricated by AFAAB (Catalina Alvarez, Liz Flyntz, Ty Clapsaddle), Commonolithic, Para Terra Volta Toda Corpa em Matéria (Garu, Pedra Silva, Rodrigo Lopes), and Renato Pera.
The preliminary replica of MAES remains accessible and open to remixes.