‘It’s Coming Straight For Us… where are we in the metaverse?‘

The Colony, our fictitious governmental bureaucracy, has morphed into the last global BigTech corporation. Ngarrindjeri artist, Clyde Rigney Jnr, is their new CEO and is launching a dazzling meta-metaverse, the NearNow, with a series of empowering memes aimed at artists, ‘How to be successful in the Metaverse’.

The project includes satirical ads about the psychology of marketing, supremacy thinking, surveillance capitalism, animations, poetry and DIY bunker art concepts.

During a series of community arts workshops, we co-create with community participants to experiment with surreal, immersive transmedia art experiences.

This work aims to respond to the challenges artists face through disruptive tech such as AI and mixed reality.

This CACD exploration challenges power & privilege across realities: The metaverse is coming – how will we shape its stories, rules and values?

It will include mixed-media art practices, exploring absurd ways to enter the metaverse, and ‘how-to’ spoofs to get us all AI-ready for this confused new normal, the NearNow.

Given the launch of new ‘artificial intelligence’ large learning models like Chatbot GPT4 and social media giants like Google’s Bard and Meta, and with a few companies poised to appropriating our entire collective digital knowledge, it is time to politely ask: What have these techno-feudal overlords and their artificial intelligences in store for us?