Non-Foreclosed Access Points: pluralizing virtuality

Matterport is an online platform utilised by MACBA as a tool to provide remote access to exhibitions through 3D scanning, enabling bipedal ’walking’ through a digital twin of any scanned exhibition.

Built as a tool for travel, renovation and real estate, navigating through an exhibition in this 3D environment produces an experience completely different to any other exhibition at MACBA: foreclosures of movement through the space are limited to what has been scanned and one primary way of understanding the spatial relationships is through measuring distance.

In this workshop we examined the troubles of mirroring experiences between ’real life’ and ’online spaces’ that attempt to multiply the possibilities of engaging with any content and attuning to the differences of virtual and physical presences. Further, we considered how to problematise visuality as the primary way of accessing artworks and consider what a non-foreclosure of access points could be for promoting remote access to exhibitions. Together we made an experiment of an improvisational network to consider how objects themselves are unstable and constantly in transformation and how relationships that may be constructed as foreclosed can move towards non-foreclosure. Together we sat with the decolonial and disability justice informed impulse that just because something has been a certain way, does not mean that it must remain this way. This work is informed by a disability justice perspective that honours and creates spaces for non-normative and non-physical engagements with exhibitions. How can we pluralise virtuality towards non-foreclosure? And is this possible with the ever-encroaching solidification of big tech tools?