The FiDi Arsenale opened on Friday, February 28th 2020. By mid-march, we had to make the decision to shut down the exhibition, unable to perform the programming and finissage as we had planned. Luckily, we were already hard at work on the virtual 3d walkthrough, which we conceived before Covid as a permanent space to extend the run of the exhibition infinitely. We now invite you to explore the online version on this website. You can toggle between a traditional scrolling format, which allows you to access text and installation shots, and a 3d experience, which allows you to walk around in a digital scan of the space itself.

The show includes installations, found objects, and artifacts derived from the byproducts of commercialism and the transformation of retail territory. Alongside these physical works, a series of videos, software, and research-based artworks give glimpses of new worlds where people are carving out and enacting their own visions and communities. New alternatives to traditional institutions are found both in virtual territories and in precarious IRL spaces. The repurposing of tools and networks provided by game engines allow artists to create new places to perform identities and power dynamics through custom avatars or characters. In parallel, the securing of abandoned retail and unused residential space in the physical world allows artists to experiment with ways of displaying work untethered from market viability

The FiDi Arsenale inhabits a strange space between economic production and collapse. The exhibition responds to this context, leveraging the idiosyncrasy of the space to guide its content and design. In response to the architecture of the space, subtle interventions leave the bar’s qualities intact. Videos and flags are placed where they might be in any given sports bar, calling into question what elements of the space had been added, and what remained from before. By letting the decaying interior design and the failing electrical wiring of the space dictate the exhibition layout, sculptures occupy available pools of light, and normally functional areas are repurposed, including a full desktop computer in the temporary entrance vestibule. The opportunistic nature of the exhibition setting is mirrored in the process of each of the pieces; from mining digital space for new performative tools and settings, to the repurposing and scavenging of the physical world.

Sam Rolfes

An animated YouTube host curates a clipshow of experimental 3D animation, creating an online space of art display outside of a traditional gallery

Leah Wulfman

A rich architectural environment created with game engines, this VR spa hosts psychic readings using vistor’s personal Google search history

Jason Isolini

Lenticular material salvaged from the artist’s day job at a commercial printing agency is vacuum-formed with an assemblage of domestic materials

Damjan Jovanovic

An ode to Superstudio’s anticipation of virtual space, the video takes the viewer through a game-like environment along the support system of the gridded superstructure

Filip Kostic

Jerrysaltz the undead warlock and friends create a new narrative in a factitious art world in World of Warcraft

Keiron De Nobriga

A landscape of hand carved stones, sourced from shedding architecture and commercial run-off. 'They should each reflect an exactness stimulating a quarrel of boundary i.e they should counter pose each other. These two points: the sensuous and familiar; the unknown and broken.' - De Nobriga

Claire Hentschker

Photogrammetry derived from YouTube footage of American shopping malls that were eventually demolished

Joshua Citarella

Real ideological flags gathered from young political spaces online and produced via Etsy, including Libertarian Neo-Monarchism, Eco-Minarchist Distributism, Primitivist Caliphatism

Pierce Myers

An eco-political future compass is a production document for speculative worldbuilding, using game engines and experimental filmmaking

Rachel Rosheger

As a nod to retail and commercial activity, LED matrixes typically used in commercial signage are placed atop lighting rods and embedded with video

Tea Strazicic

Two non-player characters, (NPC’s) embark on a mission to contact their long lost grandmother after they ran away to live in the woods and create a new life there

Theo Triantafyllidis

An orc character performs a painting in a virtual studio, inviting us into a 3d world where the avatar acts as a mask to ask tough discursive questions

Bika Rebek

Photogrammetry closeups of the former bar, which shown within the space is a virtual dissociative trip

Daesup Song

Objects and materials collected or scavenged from the streets and building sites compose the sculptures. Reflecting on the taboo of inviting these objects into our space and homes, a video collage gently hums the ritual of Korean shamanism.

Stock-a-Studio

A low-budget, off-the-rack assembly system optimized to be customized, reused, and shipped, this work turns restrictions and parameters into an easily deployable system

Mark Fingerhut

A benevolent virus that takes over your computer, using your files and applications to tell a narrative about love and remembering