Theo Triantafyllidis is an artist who works with digital and physical media to explore the experience of space and the mechanics of embodiment in hybrid realities

Theo Triantafyllidis (b. 1988, Athens, GR) is an artist who works with digital and physical media to explore the experience of space and the mechanics of embodiment in hybrid realities. Utilising algorithms and game engines, virtual reality headsets, and experimental performance processes, he creates interactions within immersive environments.

In Triantafyllidis’s words, awkward interactions and precarious physics mingle with uncanny, absurd, and poetic situations, inviting viewers to engage with new realities. He holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts, and a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. He is based in Los Angeles.

In the game’s microcosm and amidst its nightmare-like shimmering, mysterious, and grotesquely comic images, a search for recognition and mutual understanding follows. In order to overcome the voiceless situation, characters translate their needs into wild gestures and forms, as far as the structure of the game allows them to do so. The translation is, according to English author and poet John Berger, not a binary matter between two languages but a triangular one. “True translation demands a return to the preverbal.”4 This way, one can achieve the vision or experiences that gave rise to the word. Communication is a body, a living creature and “this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate”5. Players in the Feral Metaverse find themselves in a sort of Babylonian confusion of tongues, which appears not as divine punishment, but potential liberation. The Prologue episode proposes an online mode of communication that is primitive, nonverbal, improvisational, communal and hopefully freeing. After overcoming the urge to bury the head in the sand like an ostrich, one will need to find its way with fellow players.

The Goal of the Game is never communicated to the Players.
The Goal of the Game is for Players to achieve Togetherness.
The World responds to Players collective actions in structural ways.
If Players Fail, they are exterminated. A new set of Players is introduced.

This feralization of a Metaverse is an endeavor and artistic response to counterbalance Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an extensively monitored and highly productive virtual realm. The Feral Metaverse is a place without initial capitalist conditions, where there is no personal possession or inventory.

Text: Maja Funke